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…
