WeeklyWorker

29.01.2026
Promise is of another Dubai ... without Palestinians

Dreamscapes and nightmares

While Trump acolytes present glitzy AI images at Davos, Israel continues to kill, imprison and dispossess the Palestinian population. Eddie Ford looks at the new form of colonialism

Ran Gvili’s remains - the last of the 251 ‘hostages’ taken on October 7 2023 - were returned to Israel on January 26. Of course, ‘hostage’ is a complete misnomer, if not a straightforwardly propagandist lie. He was a former member of the IDF’s Golani Brigade and served as a staff-sergeant-major in the police’s special patrol unit, and was actually killed on that day.1 Quite how a dead person can be taken hostage is never really explained. Many thousands of Palestinians are held in Israeli jails, including children under “administrative detention”, but they are never referred to as ‘hostages’ by the mainstream media. Many have been imprisoned indefinitely, without charge or evidence, and have undergone horrible torture. But such selective misreporting is what we have come to expect.

In theory, the handover of his body marks the completion of a key initial demand of Donald Trump’s so-called ceasefire plan that went into effect on October 10 2025, though at least 442 Palestinians have been killed since then. However, as soon as Gvili’s body was returned, Benjamin Netanyahu said that the next step for Gaza would not be the promised reconstruction or anything like that, but instead “the disarmament of Hamas and the demilitarisation of the Gaza Strip”. Donald Trump had made such demands on January 21 at Davos, stating that Hamas must disarm or be “blown away very quickly”.

This ultimatum was issued a day before the formal signing ceremony for the so-called Board of Peace - a Trump-chaired body that was welcomed by the UN on November 17, when it adopted resolution 2803 that authorises the board to deploy an International Stabilisation Force to Gaza - the US Congress, of course, having no say. A naked power grab and ego exercise by Trump, many view it as a sort of potential ‘alternative’ to the UN, and Trump himself has said that the board “might” replace the UN, even if he wants it to continue in some shape or form.2 In this way, we see a recalibration of US foreign policy as it seeks to reboot its global hegemony.

As many critics have pointed out, his BoP bears little resemblance to what was originally envisioned under resolution 2803 - more a grotesque body where only he has veto power and operates more as a ‘pay-to-play club’, centred on the personality of Trump, who gets to play king. So far, only 19 of the 62 invited states have signed up to the board’s charter (all non-European, like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Mongolia, which are more easily bought and bribed). Countries that wish to be permanent members of the BoP must pay $1 billion into a fund controlled by Trump; otherwise each country will serve a three-year term which may be renewed at his discretion.

Horribly, both the BoP executive and the Gaza Executive Board - announced on January 17 - include Tony Blair (of the dodgy dossiers and war crimes in Iraq), despite his involvement in an institute that supported the Gaza genocide. Repellent individuals like Jared Kushner, the son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, US special envoy, are also members, naturally. The GEB is essentially there to support the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. Under Trump’s proposed 20-point peace plan in late September 2025 - accepted to one degree or another by both Hamas and Israel - Gaza will be supposedly administered under the “temporary transitional governance of a technocratic and apolitical” Palestinian committee, responsible for delivering “the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities” for Gazan people. In other words, the 20-point plan is little more than colonialism, albeit of a new type.

Imagined future

At Davos forum, Jared Kushner gave a jazzy slideshow that imagined a futuristic dreamscape of gleaming apartment blocks and office towers, with neat industrial parks and residential districts - even an airport. This sick real-estate dream will never happen, of course, but it represents the further disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people.

This was highly reminiscent of what we read about last year in the Financial Times about the Boston Consultancy Group plan, with the active involvement of the Tony Blair Institute, for a ‘post-war’ Gaza that imagined kick-starting the strip with a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone” - led by Israeli companies under a redevelopment programme called the ‘Great Trust’.3

This time round, the territory had a slice taken off it to create a buffer zone along the Israeli border, and was treated as a blank slate - ignoring the rights of Palestinians, who become even more invisible. The plan also laid out more goals or ‘promises’ for the next 100 days, telling us that it was achievable. This included the restoration of basic infrastructure - such as water, sewage and electric systems, hospitals and bakeries - together with a significant increase in the flow of goods entering Gaza.

Breezily, Kushner, in typical Trumpian fashion, said the US administration was brilliantly achieving its short-term goals. He went on to declare that in the next 100 days “we’re going to continue to just be heads down” and “focused on making sure this is implemented”. In what will be news to the desperate and suffering Palestinians, Kushner further expounded on how the US will be concentrating on “humanitarian” aid and shelter, “creating the conditions to move forward”.

Apparently, the BoP will be represented in Gaza by a “high representative” - a veteran Bulgarian UN diplomat, Nickolay Mladenov. But the plan, at least as spelled out in Davos, puts most of the onus for implementation on the NCAG - its chair being the “chief commissioner”, Ali Shaath. He is a former deputy transport minister in the Palestinian Authority, which is hated, of course, by the masses for its complicity with Israel. Addressing the assembled world leaders in Davos by video link from Cairo, he promised them that “step by step with discipline and determination … we will rebuild a capable Gaza” that is based upon “self-reliance”. He claimed that the NCAG’s mission was “to restore order, to rebuild institutions and to recreate a future” for the people “under the principle of one authority, one law and one weapon”.

According to documents supplied at Davos, we discover that “one weapon” actually means that all weapons in Gaza will be “authorised by one authority only” - that is, the NCAG. This is because US and Israeli officials are insistent that any further withdrawals by the Israeli army - still occupying more than half of Gaza - cannot happen until Hamas comprehensively disarms.

Though it is not yet fully clear, Hamas has reportedly agreed “in principle” to hand over its heavy weapons, such as rockets and artillery, to a Palestinian administration, and is prepared to accept the NCAG - though the real test is whether Shaath and co will be allowed to enter Gaza with a Palestinian police force that has been trained in Jordan and Egypt over the past months. Interestingly, the plan presented in Davos made no mention of the ISF, which was a key part of Trump’s ‘peace plan’ last year and endorsed in the UN security council resolution.

Israel, though invited, has not yet fully endorsed the BoP. The extreme right in Netanyahu’s coalition are unhappy with Trump’s proposals. They, of course, seek to uproot the bulk of Gaza’s population and building of Israeli colonial settlements - therefore the very idea of a Palestinian interim government, however notional, is anathema to them. No, the plan does not say a future Gaza would be constituent part of a sovereign Palestinian state - which is only to be expected, given Trump’s worldview. But it does not exclude a unified Palestine either, and it is unlikely the NCAG will be able to recruit Palestinians of any credibility.

Impunity

Steve Witkoff announced with great fanfare the “second phase” of the so-called peace plan on January 14, which is supposed to shift the focus onto “long-term governance” and marks the beginning - to use the special envoy’s words - of “the full demilitarisation and reconstruction of Gaza, primarily the disarmament of all unauthorised personnel”.

But, as Shockat Adam - one of Your Party’s remaining MPs - writes Palestinians are fully entitled to say: “Ceasefire in Palestine? What ceasefire?”4 Israel has violated the ceasefire agreement at least 1,193 times from October 10 to January 9 with near-daily attacks, killing hundreds of people - attacking Gaza on 82 out of the 97 days of ‘ceasefire’ up to January 14. Meanwhile, the occupied West Bank has endured the highest number of settler attacks ever recorded. Some 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced - the biggest act of ethnic cleaning since the 1967 war.

So while the so-called ‘international community’ condemns violence in principle it grants Israel total impunity in practice.

  1. jpost.com/israel-news/article-884597.↩︎

  2. timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-says-board-of-peace-might-replace-united-nations-but-wants-un-to-continue.↩︎

  3. See ‘Tony Blair and the banality of evil’ Weekly Worker July 10 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1546/tony-blair-and-the-banality-of-evil.↩︎

  4. aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/17/ceasefire-in-palestine-what-ceasefire.↩︎