The "board for peace": Too Orwellian for Orwell

Meanwhile Francesca Albanese notes the Gaza death toll could be as high as 680,000

21 January 2026

Trump’s governance plan for Gaza was always going to help Jared Kushner turn the strip's genocidal killing fields into a luxury resort, provide the US with a base from which it could extract gas reserves off the coast of Gaza, and reward Miriam Adelman for her unstinting support of the US billionaire president by allowing Israel to maintain its current control of 58% of Gaza and get away with perpetrating a live-streamed genocide.



The leaders appointed by Trump to Gaza’s “board of peace”--a turn of phrase that even Orwell might have considered too Orwellian--were never going to be people who wanted to bring about humane conditions for the Palestinians, never mind clear the Israelis out of yet another stretch of stolen land seized from the vantage point of stolen land promised to them more than a hundred years ago by a soon-to-implode British empire that had no claim to the land in the first place (making Israel the ultimate colonial project).



The executive board is predictably made up of Trump enforcers and supporters: hardcore Zionist Marco Rubio, hardcore Zionist Steve Witcoff, hardcore Zionist/son-in-law Jared Kushner, hardcore billionaire Zionist Marc Rowan, hardcore Zionist and war criminal Tony Blair. Occupying the bottom of the hierarchy, the National Committee is comprised of Palestinians who will have no decision-making power. They will simply have to bury the dead as the executive board tells them, with their bare hands if necessary, given that the rubble-shifting equipment will be needed first in the seaside resort.



To describe this as a revival of the worst excesses of nineteenth century colonialism would be an understatement. There are maybe parallels with the colonial destruction and takeover of Gaza and King Leopold II’s move to create a rubber empire on the ashes of his genocide of the Congolese, although ultimately the king was required to submit to the demands of Belgium's colonial parliament whereas Congress shows no sign of wanting to reign in Trump’s regal joyride through the fires of hell.

News has been coming through of other appointments to the board of peace, including leaders from the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Belarus, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Vietnam, all of them staunch supporters of mafia boss Trump. Word spread that Trump had also invited Keir Starmer. It's weird that Starmer hasn’t yet accepted as the only discernible purpose of his tenure has been to lick the boots of anyone who might be able to offer him a lucrative job as soon as he’s been ousted for licking the boots anyone who might be able to offer him a lucrative job. Putin has been offered a place too—he has the right tough guy demeanour but is surely too intelligent to agree to work alongside Trump.

Yet none of this—and not even the kidnapping of Maduro, the threat to seize Greenland, the fascistic work of ICE—prepared me for this morning’s development, which saw Trump invite Netanyahu to join the "board of peace". In other words, the leader of the US, which has funded Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to the tune of more than $40 billion while providing it with every aspect of diplomatic cover and support it could have wished for, has appointed the prime minister who perpetrated the genocide, someone the International Criminal Court wants to try for war crimes, to be an integral member of the “board of peace”.

George Orwell observed Hitler and Stalin before authoring 1984. I doubt he could have imagined such a dystopian development ever coming about.

Meanwhile Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, reports that according to scholars and scientists the Gaza death toll could be as high as 680,000. If so that would mean that one in three of Gaza’s population have died/been murdered during the genocide. The UK equivalent would be 23,100,000, the US equivalent 114,000,000, and, what the heck, the German equivalent 27,859,000.

Francesca adds that if confirmed--and this will be difficult given that Israel of course won't allow outside observers into Gaza to assess the genocide it has perpetrated--380,000 of the 680,000 will be infants aged under five.

But as we keep on hearing, day in, day out, (i) it's Jews who are the real victims here, (ii) we must never forget that antizionism, sorry, I mean antisemitism, is rising, and (iii) the only genocide that matters is Germany's genocide of the Jews.

(Naturally I take antisemitism seriously, being Jewish, and I take the Nazi genocide of the Jews seriously, my dad having narrowly escaped Germany on the kindertransport a month before the start of World War Two, but to be critical of Israel or to aspire for one secular democratic state where everyone lives in peace is not antisemitic.)

It’s easy to feel helpless in the face of the official genocide death toll, never mind numbers that approach 700,000. It's easy to feel helpless in the face of the lawless rampage of the US, supported just about every step of the way by the UK, Germany, France and Canada, whose pathetic leaders applauded Trump in Venezuela only to get a bit concerned when they realised they'd given him the Greenlight in Greenland. However as the prominent Palestinian politician, activist and medical doctor Mustafa Barghouti argued on a recent edition of the always excellent Makdisi Street podcast, for all of Israel’s crimes it has failed to clear the Palestinians out of their historic homeland, it has failed to eradicate Palestiniain resistance to injustice and has failed to impose capitulation on Palestinians. The Palestinians are devastated but they are also steadfast. Meanwhile, he added, the second most important power the Palestinians can draw on is the international solidarity movement.

We have no choice but to continue, double our efforts and defeat the undiluted barbarity of Israeli, US and British sadistic, militaristic colonialism. BDS is working, civil disobedience is working, the international pressure on Israel is working!

The next national solidarity demonstration in the UK takes place in London on Saturday 31 January, meeting in Central London, 12 noon.

Free, free Palestine!