The resolution passed by the UN security council on Tuesday evening, aimed at turning the precarious Gaza ceasefire into a real peace plan, is one of the oddest in United Nations history.
It puts Donald Trump in supreme control of Gaza, perhaps with Tony Blair as his immediate subordinate in a “board of peace”, which will oversee multinational peacekeeping troops, a committee of Palestinian technocrats and a local police force, for a period of two years.
No one knows who else will be on the “board of peace” – only that it will, as Trump declared on social media, “be chaired by me, and include the most powerful and respected Leaders throughout the World”.
The board will report to the security council but will not be subordinate to the UN, or subject to past UN resolutions. It will supervise an International Stabilisation Force (ISF), whose membership is also undetermined, but which the US wants to deploy by January. The countries who the US has approached – including Egypt, Indonesia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates – are tentative. The resolution says the ISF will “ensure the process of demilitarising” Gaza – suggesting it will have to take weapons away from Hamas, which insisted immediately after the UN vote it will not disarm.
There is little appetite among the would-be troop contributors for a direct confrontation with its battle-hardened fighters. The ISF would meanwhile be supposed to take over security in territory now occupied by Israeli forces, but that too could 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 will be tasked with the day-to-day running of the Gaza Strip, under the guidance of Trump and his fellow leaders. It will 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.
The fact 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 over 70,000 dead, some 70% of the buildings on the coastal territory razed to the ground, and a finding by a UN commission that Israel has committed genocide.
After the vote, the US envoy, 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 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 in recent days to at least mention a future Palestine. It did so however, 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”.
Mealy mouthed 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 towards 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 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 hard right. In the view of the European and the Islamic states the passage of the resolution will keep Trump engaged, hopefully increasing the flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza in the immediate future, 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 countries take part in the ISF, so the optimists in these capitals argue, the harder it will 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 American president’s ego, in the hope of eventually steering him in their desired direction.
