Good morning. Donald Trump wants to be the supreme leader of the world.
That may sound hyperbolic, but it is difficult to read the latest plans for his so-called “Board of Peace” as anything else. What was initially framed as a narrow mechanism to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction has quietly shifted into something far larger. In Trump’s most recent announcement, Gaza barely features at all.
Instead, the board is being positioned as a standing global body, chaired by Trump himself, operating in parallel to the United Nations. The chair sets the agenda, calls meetings at will and can issue resolutions unilaterally. More than 60 world leaders have reportedly been invited to participate. Those interested in doing so would have to cough up $1bn if they want their membership to last more than three years.
During a marathon speech at Davos, European leaders were relieved to hear Trump rule out using force against Greenland or imposing crippling tariffs. He later announced a “framework for a future deal” to settle the issue, a move met with profound scepticism in the Arctic territory.
While Trump continues to consume much of the world’s oxygen, it’s worth not losing sight of his plans for Gaza. I speak to Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi about what this moment means, and where it leaves the Palestinian national movement.
Five big stories
Davos | Donald Trump dropped his threat to impose tariffs on eight European countries, claiming he had agreed with Nato “the framework of a future deal” on Greenland. Danish, Greenlandic and other European officials pushed back on Trump’s claim, pointing out Nato has no authority to make such a deal.
New Zealand | Emergency services in New Zealand are searching for several people, including a child, believed missing after a landslide hit a campsite during storms that have caused widespread damage across the North Island.
Media | Prince Harry has accused the publisher of the Daily Mail of wanting to drive him “to drugs and drinking” by placing his life under surveillance, as he told the high court that it continued to “come after” him and his wife.
Reform UK | Nigel Farage apologised for 17 breaches of the MPs’ code after failing to declare £380,000 on time, describing himself as an “oddball” who does not do computers.
South Korea | Former PM Han Duck-soo has been sentenced to 23 years in prison for his role in an insurrection stemming from former president Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed martial law declaration.
In depth: ‘We are going back to a pre-first world war era of naked imperialism’
The “board of peace” is part of Trump’s 20-point plan to end the war in Gaza. But it’s worth noting that despite a ceasefire announced in October, Israel has killed 464 Palestinians since then.
The board now taking shape bears little resemblance to what many diplomats believed they were signing up to last autumn. Resolution 2803, passed by the UN security council in November, was sold as a way of lending UN legitimacy to a Trump-brokered ceasefire in Gaza. The negotiations and the text itself were focused squarely on the war.
Though the idea of placing Gaza under the authority of a Trump-run board for two years raised alarm, European and Arab diplomats believed it was a price worth paying to keep Trump focused on Gaza, and to prevent a return to full-scale war.
But what was presented as a temporary mechanism now looks like an experiment in executive control, with Gaza as its first testing ground.
When I asked Rashid Khalidi if we’re shifting to a new era of corporate colonial control, he pushed back on my use of the word new. “I don’t think we’re shifting at all. I think the masks are being dropped. If you go back to 19th-century South Africa, you had the mining magnates dictating British policy. The money, the gold, and the diamonds drove it. Today, it’s the investments in oil and the billionaires who are driving it,” he says.
While he doesn’t see a huge difference in terms of the broader picture, there is something notable about what Trump is doing. “We are going back to a pre-first world war era of naked imperialism with a lot of what Trump is up to; not just in Palestine, but in Venezuela, Canada, and Mexico.”
Israeli and American domination
The charter for the Board of Peace that has been circulated among global leaders recasts the body as a permanent, global institution charged with promoting peace and “good governance” worldwide.
Under the new structure, the board would sit atop an executive body, alongside a Gaza-specific executive board. The White House announced last week that the executive group would include US secretary of state Marco Rubio; former British prime minister Tony Blair; Trump’s special envoy, the property developer Steve Witkoff; World Bank president Ajay Banga; and the president’s son-in-law and long-time adviser, Jared Kushner.
Below that would be a “national committee for the administration of Gaza” (more on that below), the highest rung at which Palestinians are allowed a role. Security would be handled by an international stabilisation force under the command of a US major general.
But what does this mean for Palestinians on the ground? “Previously, Palestinians were subject to Israeli control. Now, there’s a sort of joint ‘condominium’ between the American government and the Israeli government. There’s going to be an interesting struggle between them as to who makes the final decisions. As of this moment, it seems to be the Israelis, but that could change depending on the whims of how Trump wakes up tomorrow morning,” Khalidi says.
The Israeli government has firmly opposed any element of the second phase of the ceasefire that would bring Palestinian governance back to Gaza, or one that gives any other nation a stake or a role in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Nethanyhu, had publicly objected to the participation of certain countries, including Turkey and Qatar – though he did go on to accept a position on the board.
For Khalidi, Trump’s so-called peace plan is the clearest iteration yet of the US being a partner in Israel’s war on Palestine. He argues the US has abandoned the pretence of being an honest broker. He tells me they now openly flaunt being an administrator.
Khalidi served as an official adviser to the joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, and then the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) delegation during the Middle East peace conference in Madrid and the ensuing Israeli-Palestinian-American negotiations in Washington in 1991 and 1993.
“The United States, as one of the diplomats involved described it, was Israel’s lawyer. That goes back for decades. The beauty of it is now that it’s completely transparent. The idea that the United States stands in a different position to Israel as far as the basics are concerned has been blown away,” he says.
He continues: “Now, while there are some important tactical differences between them, Israel cannot do what it does without the United States. Every single Israeli warplane is American. Every single Israeli combat helicopter is American. The United States refilled Israel’s arsenal to the tune of over $20bn during the two years of genocidal war. Without that, Israel stops.”
Entry, denied
Last October, the main Palestinian factions said they had agreed that an independent committee of technocrats would be in charge of the day to day running of the Gaza Strip.
The committee met in Egypt last week. Could their formation mark the first tentative steps towards Palestinian self governance?
Khalidi pointed to a report in Haaretz that said the Israelis had barred the committee from entering Gaza as the answer to that question. “The people who make the decisions are not a bunch of technocrats chosen by outside powers. They’re the outside power – the United States and Israel – who have the power of life and death over Gaza.”
He adds that despite the huge fanfare over the ceasefire, “Palestinians are being killed every day, children starving to death or killed by hypothermia”.
Khalidi described the technocrats as “administrators of an externally controlled regime – if they are allowed into Gaza by Israel.”
He wasn’t even shocked that the technocrats who sit on the board in which Israel was given veto powers when the original choices were being made were not allowed into Gaza. He points out that Israel has complete economic, military and political control across Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories – with the founding charter of the Likud Party Program stating “Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
“Israel just bulldozed the Unrwa headquarters in Jerusalem yesterday,” Khalidi says. Earlier this month, Israel moved to start construction on a vast illegal settlement in the heart of the West Bank, in a bid to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
Does he feel frustrated that for years in the western media, there appeared to be a greater focus on protesters chanting “from the river to the sea”, than what many human rights organisations and figures now describe as an entrenched one-state reality where Israel controls the lives of millions of Palestinians, without equal rights or equal representation?
“No, I think that increasing numbers of people are now seeing reality and are not taken in by the nonsense being promoted by the mainstream media and by the politicians,” he says. And while he admits there is an enormous backlash trying to clamp down on the movement for Palestinian rights across the western world, he believes it will make little difference.
“People have changed. They’ve seen what cannot be unseen.”
Where next for the Palestinian national movement?
A significant sticking point on moving on to the next phase of the ceasefire agreement is whether Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza agree to disarm. Israeli media has reported on an apparent offer by Hamas to decommission its heavier weapons, specifically missiles and rockets, which mediators are trying to sell to the United States. But Khalidi doesn’t believe the strip will ever be demilitarised.
“The complete disarmament of the Gaza Strip has never been achieved. Israel couldn’t do it in 1956 or 1967,” he says. If the Americans take Hamas’s offer, Khalidi adds, the Israelis are going to be unsatisfied because Hamas would retain huge capabilities even if it does hand over or decommission its rocket missile arsenal. However, he believes this scenario is unlikely.
“The other alternative is that Israel resumes the war. This also seems to me somewhat unlikely because it would go against the wishes of the US president. He doesn’t want the war to restart,” Khalidi says. “But that could change. He could wake up the day after tomorrow and unleash the Israelis once again. That would not lead to the disarmament of Hamas. It would just lead to the killing of many, many Palestinians.”
And what of the Palestine Authority (PA) whose president, Mahmoud Abbas, has declared 2026 as the year of Palestinian democracy. “The PA are behaving as what they are: toadies of the people who control and pay them, which is the Americans, the Israelis, and various Gulf and European countries. They represent no one but themselves and their private interests. They don’t represent Palestinians. They are acting as subcontractors for the Israeli occupation. The Israeli army is extremely happy with their performance in handing over information,” Khalidi says, pointing to a Haaretz article in which Israeli military officials praise increased cooperation with the PA.
He describes this era as “one of the worst periods in Palestinian history” but adds: “If you travel around Palestine, you see villages not moving, people refusing to move and sticking to their land despite enormous harassment and sometimes attacks by Israeli settlers and the military.”
In Gaza, where Israel has killed more than 70,000 people, people are also not going anywhere, Khalidi says. “In an interview in Egypt, I was asked: ‘Is it cruel to not allow Palestinians to leave Gaza?’ And I said if there were a mass demand for Palestinians to leave Gaza, then yes that’s absolutely cruel.
“But you don’t have such demands. They know they would be even more miserable as refugees in Egypt or in exile elsewhere than they are today, living under the rain, without proper tents, suffering hypothermia and hunger. And that is a fact that Israel can’t change.”
What else we’ve been reading
I genuinely will never ever tire of hearing my colleague Robyn Vinter tell of the time she went out to do a bit of reporting and got snowed in at a pub for four days. Martin
Davos is an irrelevance in today’s world, Larry Davies writes, so it was apt that Trump was there to deliver the “coup de grace” to the international rules-based order. Aamna
Paula Cocozza correctly identifies Minecraft – where I first encountered them – as a factor in the axolotl craze sweeping the globe. So, so cute. Martin
Jacket potatoes were once an uninspiring lunch option. But as Sammy Gecsoyler notes in his amusing feature, their moment has arrived. Aamna
For The Face, Phin Jennings profiles Jack Anderton, the 25-year-old behind Nigel Farage’s social media efforts to reach young voters as a “straight-talking, cigs-and-pints aficionado uncle”. Martin
Sport
Football | Mohamed Salah went straight back into Liverpool’s team in a 3-0 win in Marseille that boosts their hopes of automatic qualification for the Champions League last 16. Newcastle, pictured, took early control against PSV but Bruno Guimarães went off injured early in the second half of their 3-0 win. Moisés Caicedo’s late header ensured a 1-0 victory for Chelsea against Pafos despite the Cypriot side causing plenty of frustration for their hosts. Full Champions League coverage
Australian Open | Novak Djokovic has eased into the third round with a clinical win over Francesco Maestrelli 6-3 6-2 6-2. Emma Raducanu refused to be too critical of herself after crashing out in the second round.
Women’s sport | A survey has found widespread sexual misconduct in elite UK sport, with 88% of women saying they were targeted in the past five years.
The front pages
“Trump claims that ‘framework future deal’ on Greenland agreed” is how the Guardian headlines its top story of the day. The Times has “Trump hails Greenland deal ‘for all Nato nations’” and the Mail runs with “Trump: I’ve struck a deal for my big, beautiful piece of ice”. The Telegraph says, incorrectly, “Trump strikes Greenland deal”. The Financial Times’ take is “Trump rules out seizing Greenland by force but demands negotiations”.
The Mirror focuses instead on the “Delusional president’s rant” at Davos, dubbing him “Daddy fool”. “Trump’s boy saves my life with 999 call during attack” – rather strange Metro story about Barron Trump supposedly saving a woman he was FaceTiming in the UK from her violent Russian boyfriend. The Express alights on “Our struggling pubs will face years of tax”.
Today in Focus
Will Trump’s board of peace replace the UN?
Trump’s board of peace includes Putin, Netanyahu and Tony Blair. What on earth will it do? Julian Borger reports
Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
A chance encounter at a protest in southern Russia revealed the quiet reach of Ored Recordings, a label preserving endangered Circassian music. Its co-founder Bulat Khalilov documents chants, laments and family songs recorded in kitchens and at gatherings – a practice he calls “punk ethnography”.
“As kids, we carried a kind of internalised self-doubt, shaped by Soviet and post-Soviet attitudes that framed local culture as backward,” Khalilov explains. The label releases music each year in May on the Day of Mourning, linking history to the present.
Now based in Germany, the label continues to connect diaspora communities, showing how music can carry memory, identity and hope across borders. “Over time, we realised that it’s not trauma or a victim narrative that gives value to the music – it’s the stories behind it. If we want anything to change, we must speak about it.”
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Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
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Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
