On Wednesday, January 14, Steve Witkoff announced on X the transition to the second phase of Trump’s colonial plan for Gaza, moving “from a ceasefire to demilitarization, technocratic governance, and reconstruction.” This phase will be based on a puppet Palestinian National Committee, formed in Cairo that same day. The committee will be under the chairmanship of Ali Shaath and the authority of a Peace Council, which Trump is forming and will also chair.
The next phase will also include the withdrawal of Israeli troops. Israeli troops will be replaced by an “International Stabilization Force” composed of troops from several regimes in the region, such as Egypt and Turkey, which are fiercely competing to secure the $70 billion reconstruction contract for the Gaza Strip.
The Trump administration has invited several heads of state and political figures to participate in this council, to which Washington seems intent on granting powers that far exceed the implementation of Trump’s ultra-colonial plan for Gaza. The Peace Council is thus envisioned as a “new international organization” aimed at “promoting stability, restoring reliable and legitimate governance, and ensuring lasting peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” The entry fee for a permanent seat has been set at one billion dollars.
On Friday, the administration released an initial list of people invited to serve on the council: a series of ultra-reactionary figures, most of them proponents of the colonial Zionist state and supporters of the genocide in Gaza. Several members of the Trump administration and close associates of the president will sit on it. This includes Steve Witkoff, the White House special envoy for Middle East peace, owner of a real estate fortune estimated at one billion dollars, who promoted the Riviera Plan to Tucker Carlson. Also on the list is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a fervent supporter of genocide or imperialist aggression in Venezuela, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, whose real estate activities finance the Israeli colonial effort. Kushner also participated in drafting the “deal of the century,” which aimed to confine Palestinians to a series of concentration camp-like enclaves during Trump’s first term.
The presence of Tony Blair, already announced as one of the central figures in this project, has also been confirmed. Guilty of war crimes, Blair helped fabricate evidence to support the imperialist invasion of Iraq. Since the beginning of the genocide, he has placed his institute, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, at the service of Israel, actively participating in the development of Trump’s plans and the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the organization responsible for the countless massacres of hunger at concentration camps for distributing food aid.
Throughout the weekend, Trump expanded the list of invitees to the council. Argentine President Javier Milei was quick to demonstrate his enthusiasm by accepting the invitation. An unconditional supporter of the Zionist project, he recently benefited from Trump’s financial assistance in winning Argentina’s midterm elections. A fanatical libertarian, he is the architect of a series of anti-worker counter-reforms in Argentina, designed to completely subjugate the country to U.S. imperialism and the IMF.
Alongside him, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán also accepted Trump’s proposal. A leading figure in Europe’s authoritarian crackdown, he has pursued brutal policies against migrants, prohibiting NGOs from assisting them, while also adopting repressive measures against the LGBTQ+ community. This close ally of Netanyahu is known for his antisemitic tirades, particularly against billionaire George Soros and his local supporters.
But the worst is yet to come: Trump has invited Vladimir Putin, Giorgia Meloni, Narendra Modi, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to sit on the council. Modi’s case alone is terrifying: the Indian president is at the forefront of global Islamophobia and India is pursuing a policy of settler colonialism in Kashmir. This unconditional ally of Zionism, who aspires to draw inspiration from the genocide in Gaza to advance the colonial project of Hindu supremacism, raises fears of an acceleration of the genocide of the Palestinian people. By forming a peace council that brings together the leaders of the most reactionary states on the planet, Trump is providing an institutional framework for the reactionary international order he aspires to lead, of which Gaza will be the full-scale laboratory and the Palestinians the first victims.
The details of the plan are not yet known and its implementation faces formidable contradictions, particularly for the Arab regimes that could lose what little legitimacy they still have in the eyes of their populations who are overwhelmingly in solidarity with Palestine. The entry into the second phase raises fears of an acceleration of genocide and ethnic cleansing, or even the transformation of Gaza into a giant concentration camp where Palestinians would serve as slaves for the projects of investors and members of this “Peace Council.” With Trump having just attacked Venezuela and threatening to attack Iran, there is an urgent need to unite the various anti-imperialist mobilizations and build a broad internationalist movement, in the wake of the general strikes initiated by the Italian working class, to put an end to the colonial delusions of a rotting U.S. imperialism.
Originally published in French on January 19 in Révolution Permanente.
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