in Palestine by Junaid S Ahmad*
Jan 23, 2026
What has been christened the “Board of Peace” is not diplomacy; it is the administrative sequel to genocide. It exists to launder mass murder into procedure, to convert annihilation into governance, and to pacify the inexhaustible Palestinian resistance after Israel has finished reducing Gaza to dust.
Peace, in this lexicon, is not the end of killing. It is the efficient management of its aftermath. Rubble, but regulated. Starvation, but coordinated. Ethnic cleansing, but with minutes and memos.
At the center of this architecture stands Israel, not defensive, not confused, and certainly not restrained. Israel has not drifted into genocide; it has executed it with method, confidence, and a sense of entitlement earned through decades of impunity. Gaza has been systematically destroyed — neighborhoods erased, hospitals turned into execution sites, hunger weaponized, displacement normalized. This has not been a war. It is colonial liquidation.
Zionism in its contemporary, bureaucratic form is not about security; it is about finality. The objective is not coexistence but elimination — of Palestinian presence as a political fact. Violence is not a breakdown of order; it is the mechanism through which order is imposed. Israeli society has largely internalized this logic. The language of extermination has been normalized, moral horror replaced with administrative calm. The only remaining problem is resistance — and resistance cannot always be bombed out of existence.
That is where the Board of Peace enters. Its purpose is not to save Palestinians but to neutralize them politically: to disarm resistance, identify compliant intermediaries, and install a governance structure that ensures Israeli domination can continue with fewer reputational costs. This is counterinsurgency in humanitarian costume. After the bombs comes management. After mass death comes “stabilization.” Gaza is to be governed not as a living society but as a security problem that survived its own attempted erasure.
Pakistan’s rulers have volunteered eagerly for this role, and their enthusiasm is itself an indictment. Their decision to join the board — taken without parliamentary debate, public consent, or even the theater of democratic deliberation — reveals the contempt with which they govern. Ninety-nine percent of Pakistanis vehemently condemn Israel’s genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupation. That is precisely why the decision was made in silence.
The establishment will claim, as it always does, that being “inside the room” allows Pakistan to influence outcomes. This is a ritual lie. Influence requires leverage, and leverage requires a willingness to impose cost. There is no evidence — none — that Pakistan’s rulers have ever imposed any cost on Washington or Tel Aviv. Their record is one of anticipatory obedience. They do not pressure power; they accommodate it.
This is not pragmatism. It is collusion. Pakistan need not recognize Israel to serve Israeli objectives. Recognition is unnecessary when alignment is functional. By joining the board, Islamabad signals that it understands the modern imperial grammar: oppose genocide rhetorically, enable it administratively. Speak of peace while helping manage its opposite.
The structure Pakistan has joined makes the fraud explicit. The Board of Peace is a colonial enterprise designed to bypass the United Nations and hollow out international law. Its charter boasts of “departing” from institutions that have “failed” — translation: institutions that occasionally obstruct imperial violence. In their place comes a nimble club where legality is replaced by discretion and money substitutes for legitimacy.
At its apex sits Donald Trump, endowed with czarist authority. He appoints members, removes them at will, decides when the board meets, what it discusses, and wields an absolute veto. There are no safeguards, no constraints, no pretense of collective governance. Add the one-billion-dollar price tag for permanent seats, and the picture clarifies: this is a rich man’s cartel for managing other people’s ruins.
Trump’s contribution is not innovation but vulgar honesty. He strips empire of euphemism and sells domination as deal-making. The Board of Peace is governance as reality television: loyalty rewarded, dissent eliminated, catastrophe monetized. Genocide is not denied; it is reorganized.
This project cannot be separated from the broader Zionist–neocon obsession with regional discipline, particularly regime change in Iran. Gaza is not an endpoint; it is a rehearsal. Crushing Palestinian resistance is inseparable from the effort to demonstrate that defiance is futile. Iran’s continued survival as an autonomous power is intolerable precisely because it proves the opposite. The same ideology that seeks to pacify Gaza dreams of Tehran as the unfinished conquest.
Hovering nearby is the United Arab Emirates, the velvet glove of normalization. The UAE has perfected the art of making complicity look like sophistication. It does not shout; it invests. It does not threaten; it incentivizes. Gaza becomes a logistics problem, a reconstruction market built on bones. Pressure arrives not as coercion but as opportunity: align, and capital flows. Collaborate, and doors open.
Other Gulf and West Asian autocracies follow the same script. Monarchies do not fear public opinion; they fear displeasing patrons. They issue statements of concern while ensuring nothing interrupts the machinery of mass death. Palestine is invoked as sentiment, never as obligation.
Across this landscape, the function of the Board of Peace is singular: to finish politically what bombs failed to do militarily. Resistance must be delegitimized, collaborators identified, and Palestinian life reduced to an administrable remainder. “Reconstruction” after annihilation. “Stability” after ethnic cleansing. “Peace” after extermination. These words are not neutral. They are weapons.
Israel kills. Pakistan’s rulers manage. Trump brands. The UAE finances. The autocracies normalize. Together they have constructed an architecture in which genocide is not an emergency but a phase.
History will not be confused by this choreography. It will not be impressed by charters or committees. It will note that when the attempted obliteration of Gaza stared us in the face, some pulled the trigger, some paid, some organized — and some volunteered to help govern the ruins.
Peace does not come from boards chaired by imperial vandals or staffed by collaborators fluent in euphemism. It comes when genocide is named, resisted, and stopped — and every regime that helped launder it is dragged out from behind its paperwork and judged not by its language, but by the bodies it chose to administrate.
*Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Law, Religion, and Global Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decolonization (CSID), Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a member of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST – https://just-international.org/), Movement for Liberation from Nakba (MLN – https://nakbaliberation.com/), and Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE – https://www.theshapeproject.com/).
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