Earlier this week, Tony Blair admonished the UN Security Council for dragging its heels in approving Donald Trump’s Gaza ceasefire plan under his “Board of Peace.” Blair trumpeted it as a “strategically coherent framework” that heroically “succeeded in bringing the war in Gaza to an end.” But Trump’s plan for Gaza was a terrible idea from day one. The idea that the country that enabled and financed Israel’s genocide should steer the ship of peace never made sense, especially given Donald Trum’s unhinged statements about building luxury condos on top of the toxic rubble created by US-supplied aircraft and bombs.

No doubt the UN agreed to this awful concept because it may have seemed like the only way to get short-term aid to the people injured, starved, and made homeless by Israel’s ruthless attacks on Gaza. If Trump could get the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia on board, at least there might be some funds available for food, shelter, and resettlement. But the residents displaced from Gaza would of course not be consulted about where they would be resettled, or whether they would ever be able to return to their homes that were destroyed in the US-backed Israeli genocide.

Beware Gulf states bearing reconstruction funds. In Yemen, the funds Saudi Arabia and the UAE offered were to repair the damage done by their own brutal war on Yemen, which included indiscriminate bombings of civilian infrastructure, hospitals, marketplaces, funerals, and even a children’s school bus. In Sudan, the UAE, which has provided humanitarian aid to victims of the war there, is also supplying arms to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a group that has committed war crimes on a regular basis. The UAE is also financing an Ethiopian-run training camp for RSF fighters.

Board of Peace representatives recently held preliminary talks with UAE logistics giant DP World about a possible role in managing the supply chains for Gaza’s reconstruction. The talks are in keeping with the Board of Peace vision for a “New Gaza” in which much of the territory’s services and infrastructure is privatized. One proposal floated during discussions was creating a free-trade zone amid the territory’s ruins and rubble. Rebuilding under Board of Peace auspices is not about the construction of public goods through multilateral institutions — it is about creating a framework in which recovery is routed through commercial logistics infrastructure.

Conspicuously absent from Trump’s Board of Peace are any representatives of Gaza’s former Palestinian residents. If this board is about peace, it is about the peace of the profiteer and the peace of the graveyard. Given his role in enabling the Benjamin Netanyahu government’s genocide in Gaza and his threat to end a civilization in his illegal war against Iran, Donald Trump belongs at the dock at The Hague, on trial for war crimes. By rights he should not be at the helm of an Orwellian “Board of Peace.” But war crimes prosecutions remain, so far at least, the prerogative of cases involving weaker nations — those least able to deter such prosecutions.

Thus far, the Board of Peace has done little to nothing to rebuild Gaza. Instead, it is waiting for Hamas to disarm, disclose the location of its tunnels, and essentially render itself defenseless against a nation that has already killed well over seventy thousand people in the territory it once controlled. Including indirect deaths and injuries, the total number of casualties likely exceeds two hundred thousand. Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023, was criminal, but so was Israel’s disproportionate response. And the “brilliant” military strategists who suggested that Hamas could be defeated by brute force have yet to explain why it survives after the horrendous genocidal attacks of the past two and a half years.

The deal, supposedly, is that Israel will withdraw from all or most of Gaza once Hamas disarms. But can Tel Aviv be trusted? Israel has routinely violated the Gaza ceasefire and supported increased settler violence in the West Bank. They have also embarked on a campaign of ethnic cleansing and military occupation in southern Lebanon that has so far displaced one million people. Until there is a scintilla of evidence that the current Israeli government is willing to live up to its word or cease committing serial war crimes in violation of international law, why would any organization grant it trust?

Yet as one Palestinian refugee told the New York Times, if Hamas needs to disarm to get reconstruction aid flowing, it should do so, regardless of the risk. Hamas has signaled a willingness to hand over thousands of weapons but will not disband its battalions. This concession falls short of the disarmament and demilitarization required by Trump’s peace plan. There appear to be no good options in the short term.

Over the longer term, we need to build a strong enough movement to hold Trump, Netanyahu, and their band of grifters, profiteers, and genocide enablers accountable. This will require building institutions in which the victims of structural violence have a say in building a new, better world. In such a world, unaccountable bodies like the Board of Peace would have no place.