The resolution passed by the UN Security Council (UNSC) on Tuesday, aimed at turning the precarious Gaza ceasefire into a real peace plan, is one of the oddest in UN history.
It puts US President Donald Trump in supreme control of Gaza, perhaps with former British prime minister Tony Blair as his immediate subordinate in a “board of peace,” which is to oversee multinational peacekeeping troops, a committee of Palestinian technocrats and a local police force for two years.
No one knows who else would be on the “board of peace” — only that it would, as Trump declared on social media, “be chaired by me, and include the most powerful and respected” leaders throughout the world.
The board is to report to the UN Security Council, but would not be subordinate to the UN, or subject to past UN resolutions. It is to supervise an International Stabilization Force (ISF), whose membership is also undetermined, but which the US wants to deploy by January next year. The countries the US has approached — including Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates — are tentative. The resolution says the ISF would ensure the process of demilitarizing Gaza — suggesting that it would have to take weapons away from Hamas, which insisted immediately after the UN vote that it would not disarm.
There is little appetite among the would-be troop contributors for a direct confrontation with its battle-hardened fighters.
The ISF would take over security in territory now occupied by Israeli forces, but that could also be a recipe for clashes, especially if the Israelis are reluctant to leave.
There is no greater clarity over the Palestinian committee of technocrats who are to be tasked with the day-to-day running of the Gaza Strip, under the guidance of Trump and his fellow leaders. It would be hard, to say the least, to find any such technocrats, prepared to work for Trump, who would hold any sway with the 2.2 million surviving Palestinians in Gaza. The same goes for the putative police force.
Despite the miasma of vagueness, UN Security Council Resolution 2803 invested all these aspirational bodies with the force of international law, in an effort to turn Trump’s 20-point peace proposal into some sort of plan and solidify last month’s shaky US-brokered ceasefire into an enduring peace.
That the resolution passed 13-0 with Russia and China abstaining is testament to its calculated haziness, as well as the global exhaustion and desperation over Gaza after two years of Israeli bombardment, which has left more than 70,000 dead, some 70 percent of the buildings in the coastal territory razed to the ground, and a finding by a UN commission that Israel has committed genocide.
After the vote, US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz described the resolution as transformative — “a new course in the Middle East, for Israelis and Palestinians, and all the people of the region alike.”
When it was the turn for the other UN Security Council members to speak, they were altogether more cautious, framing their support or acquiescence more in terms of what might follow from the resolution, rather than what was actually in the text.
This was especially true when it came to Palestinian statehood. On the insistence of the Arab and Islamic states, the resolution had been revised to at least mention a future Palestine, but it did so not by referring to the fundamental right of Palestinians to self-determination and the international commitment to a two-state commitment, but in the language of a distant, conditional and elusive offer. If the Palestinian Authority reformed itself satisfactorily and Gaza’s rebuilding advances, it said “conditions may be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
Mealymouthed as it sounds, European diplomats saw a significant victory in getting a Trump administration envoy to say the words “Palestinian self-determination and statehood” out loud, whatever the caveats.
The veteran US negotiator and Middle East expert, Aaron David Miller, also saw the resolution as a step toward a future Palestine.
“Whether the UNSC resolution can be implemented is unclear, but it reflects two new realities — Trump has internationalized the Gaza component of Palestinian issue and supported a two state solution as an end state,” Miller wrote on social media.
The wording of Resolution 2803 was certainly too much for the extreme right end of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, who reacted with fury, forcing the prime minister to restate his own visceral objections to any suggestion of Palestinian sovereignty.
Those governments who held their noses and supported the resolution have drawn some solace from the discomfort of the Israeli far-right. In the view of the European and the Islamic states the passage of the resolution would keep Trump engaged, hopefully increasing the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza, while holding a door wedged ajar to the prospects of lasting peace and Palestinian statehood.
The more the international community is represented on the “board of peace,” and the more Arab and Islamic nations take part in the ISF, so the optimists in these capitals argue, the harder it would be for Israel to maintain its exclusive, US-approved control over the occupied territory.
In going along with the “Trump plan,” they hope to emulate and ultimately outdo Israel at its own game, riding the tiger of the US president’s ego in the hope of eventually steering him in their desired direction.
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