Conference and Film Screening on News Deserts and Lack of Civic Engagement

While children are gutted by Jewish-American missiles

by Paul Haeder / March 4th, 2026

Below is a commentary for the newspaper I have been publishing my “long-form” commentaries in on a monthly basis, and that newspaper, the Newport News Times, now the Lincoln County Leader, is on the proverbial chopping block.

Here, these people who are buying up what they call “struggling newspapers,” including the Leader:

 

Country Media, Inc., an Oregon-based company, has acquired numerous, often struggling, local newspapers, resulting in some closures and mergers. The firm, led by Steve and Carol Hungerford, has merged publications like The Chronicle and The Chief, while reducing print frequency for others, such as The World in Coos Bay, due to financial pressures.

Key Actions and Closures

• The Umpqua Post: Ceased operations in June 2020 following its acquisition by Country Media.
• Bandon Western World: Printed its final issue in July 2020.
• The World (Coos Bay): Reduced print days from five to two in 2020.
• Mergers: The Chronicle (St. Helens) and The Chief (Clatskanie) merged into The Columbia County Chronicle & Chief. The Lincoln City News Guard and Newport News-Times merged in January 2024.

I had a difficult time getting up the energy to go to this listening session and then the following film screening of the flick:

There were eight student journalists there to assist the listening session, students from the U of Oregon journalism program. I just can’t understand why their faculty mentor, Andrew DeVigal, could not start any session off with a moment of silence for fellow truth seekers:

“Israel has now killed more journalists than any other government since CPJ began collecting records in 1992,” it said in a statement.

It cautioned that the true number of journalists targeted and killed by Israel could be much higher because some of the killings could be potentially concealed by press restrictions and humanitarian difficulties that complicate conducting investigations during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

“With much contemporaneous evidence now destroyed, the true number of Palestinian journalists in Gaza who were deliberately targeted by Israel may never be known,” the CPJ said.

Here’s a small talk in Washington State around local journalism:

Local journalists and supporters of local news gathered at the Edmonds Theater in Edmonds, Wash., on Oct. 25, 2025, for a panel discussion and audience Q&A following the screening of the documentary “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink.” The screening was co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters Snohomish County and the My Neighborhood News Network, which includes My Edmonds News, MLTnews, and Lynnwood Today.

*****

You know, when it comes to “educated” people, those people in the League of Women Voters, and there were mostly retired folk at this Newport, Oregon event, and there were a few “city/county” officials, it’s if there is a bipolar collective psychosis going on. It was noon, Saturday, and I was the only fucker talking about the murdering spree by the Jews of Israel and the Jewish Kosher Nostra in the USA.

Mohammed Shariatmadar stood outside the wreckage of the Shajareh Tayyiba girls’ elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran on Saturday morning, unable to process what he was seeing. His six-year-old daughter, Sara, a second-grade student, was among dozens of girls killed when the school was bombed in the first few hours of the war launched by the U.S. and Israel against Iran.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, he remained standing in the shade of a cracked wall, staring at the ground and ignoring the commotion around him. He didn’t approach the building, which had been sealed off, but he didn’t move away either. His hands knotted together, then separated, then knotted again, in a repeated motion. Every time a paramedic emerged or an ambulance moved, he quickly raised his head, then returned to staring at the ground. He asked no one a direct question. He was only waiting for his daughter’s name to be called.

When families were finally directed to a gathering point to receive the bodies of their children, he slowly moved forward. When asked if he needed help, he shook his head silently and waited for his daughter’s body to be brought out.

“I cannot understand how a place where innocent children learn can be bombed like this,” Shariatmadar told Drop Site. “We are talking about small children who knew nothing of politics or wars. And yet they are the ones paying the highest price.”

Some 170 students were inside the building, attending morning classes when the missile struck. At least 108 people were killed, according to the public prosecutor’s office in Minab, many of them schoolgirls between seven and 12 years old.

It was unclear if it was a U.S. or Israeli strike. On Saturday, CENTCOM’s spokesperson said they were “looking into” the reports.

*****

The students, college ones, mind you, were given a quick rundown of alternative (sic) sources of news:

Drop Site News, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Monthly Review, Intercept, Palestine Chronicle, Electronic Intifada, Lowkey, Covert Action Magazine, Consortium News, Empire Files, Break Through News, and a few dozen more suggestions to get these J students out of the morass of legacy media, and the manure pile of traditional news gathering and reporting.

Never heard of Truthout, In These Times, The Nation, The Progressive, Mother Jones?

*****

They hadn’t been exposed to the Hulk Hogan-Peter Thiel-Adelson documentary:

It was diheartening, man, being around the middling crowd, the Democrats, man, so quick to attack Trump, but then, what about . . . ?

There currently exists one legislative vehicle in each chamber through which members can express their position. This month, six new Democratic House members have signed onto a War Powers Resolution aimed at constraining President Trump’s ability to deploy U.S. forces without congressional approval, bringing the total to 82. The legislation, led by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), was first introduced prior to the Trump administration’s unauthorized strikes against Iranian nuclear targets last June. The GOP appears to be largely unified behind a possible war, with Massie being the only Republican House member signed on to the House legislation. Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) have introduced a similar effort in the Senate.

Yet despite the resolution’s growing support, Democratic leadership has not clearly rallied behind it. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has issued public concerns about Trump’s rush to war, but has not said whether or not he supports the Khanna-Massie bill.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y) statement did not oppose a war, but instead noted the “risks” involved and called for confronting Iran’s “ruthless campaign of terror, nuclear ambitions, regional aggression, and horrific oppression” with “strength, resolve, regional coordination, and strategic clarity” and urged the administration “to consult with Congress and explain to the American people the objectives and exactly why he is risking more American lives.” Following the Trump administration’s Tuesday briefing to the Gang of 8, Schumer added, “This is serious. The administration has to make its case to the American people,” fueling criticism that he was prepared to accept the president’s justifications.

“Leader Schumer’s statements are insufficient. Democratic voters want leadership that’s willing to take a clear stand and oppose the president on major issues like this,” Dylan Williams, Vice President for Government Affairs at the Center for International Policy, told RS.

Two recent reports suggest that this lack of pushback could be intentional. A Tuesday story from journalist Aida Chavez’s substack Capital and Empire says top Democrats have worked to block consideration of legislation that would force members to go on record regarding potential military action against Iran.

“The evidence, so far, is that leadership is trying to discourage that vote,” one activist and former congressional staffer familiar with dynamics on the Hill told RS. “And the primary people that serve are the few dozen Democrats whose donors are hawks, but whose voters don’t want regime change war. That’s who the party is trying to protect from having to take a vote, because it’s painful for those members to vote against their donors.”

Drop Site News reported last week that some Democrats on the Hill might support pursuing a military intervention in Iran but, understanding a war would likely be politically catastrophic, would rather not go on the record and instead let Trump and the Republicans bear the responsibility and the costs.

“Cynically, Schumer may also have the midterms in mind,” the Drop Site report says. “If Trump manages to topple the Iranian government, the ensuing chaos could prove a drag on Trump as the country heads into the November elections.”

As a result, party leaders may choose to stand by or tepidly oppose military action as opposed to forcefully weighing in one way or the other. (The Schumer aide who laid out this calculus in the Drop Site story said that the minority leader himself does not subscribe to that logic.)

Alternatives to the dying newspapers?

I’ll be interviewing John Washington on my radio show, and his pieces in Luminaria, well, way beyond what the U of O students are being exposed to:

This three-part series chronicles a Tucson family’s harrowing journey from Venezuela through the heart of the anti-immigrant policies of México and the U.S. The first chapter traces Yesenia’s journey with her kids from Venezuela to the United States and then back to México. The second chapter focuses on her husband Mariano’s escape from authorities. The third chapter focuses on the family’s desperate search for safety in México after being deported from Tucson.

The stories are based on more than a dozen hours of interviews by Arizona Luminaria and La Silla Rota reporters with Yesenia and Mariano in a town outside Mexico City, as well as interviews with their family and friends, public records, audio files and messages exchanged between Yesenia and Mariano over seven months.

 

*****

Here, the thousand-word commentary, a monthly far-from-rant from Haeder, the ranter: More specifically, Spiel, Catharsis, Vomitus, Spitting up the Phlegm of Capitalism, Hyperbole… tirade, diatribe, harangue, invective . . . screed, philippic, fulmination?

Everyone Likes to Complain about the Weather and the News

This could be a requiem for this dwindling newspaper, owned now by Country Media. But the real big boys are called vulture capitalists, and at the end of February, eight U of O journalism students and their mentor, Andrew DeVigal, director of Agora Journalism Center, came to Newport to inculcate a listening and talking session at the Atonement Lutheran Church.

There were about 25 Lincoln County residents engaging in a mini-town hall on the future of local journalism, and the power of printed or digital news to embrace a community’s trust and envelop a deep understanding of the issues that make a city or county work or not work.

The famous Bill Moyers puts us at the 35,000-foot perspective:

“It’s up to you to tell the truth about what’s happening to this country we love. It’s up to you to tell the truth about the struggle of ordinary people. It’s up to you to remind us that democracy only works when citizens claim it as their own. It’s up to you to write the story of America that leaves no one out.”

DeVigal has had 30 years in the trenches at various newspapers like the Contra Costa Times, New York Times, and with the Poynter Institute. He’s now working with aspiring journalists, and these students, representing half his current class, Engaged Journalism, helped participants in facilitated conversations on just what makes a good and vibrant informed citizenry “engage” with news.

We are at a crisis point, that is, crises, in terms of education, participation in governance, political literacy, and finding the news that a community needs to become better citizens.

Andrew’s classes have learned the power of Generative Dialogue Framework – a tool that could “help reimagine the future of engaged journalism.”

We know about food deserts and healthcare deserts, but who reading this knows about news deserts? Go to the website, usnewsdeserts.com, and you will find more than 350 interactive maps allowing the user to drill down to the county level to understand the state of local media in communities throughout the United States.

 

The number of news desert counties rose to 213 in 2025. Research shows that 1,524 counties have one remaining news source. That’s more than 50 million Americans having limited to no access to local news. The rise in news deserts was accompanied by an increase in newspaper closures, which ticked up to 136 this past year, a rate of more than two per week.

Here’s a pivotal point Andrew made in a recent editorial:

“To do better, we must first understand journalism not simply as an industry, but as a form of civic infrastructure that helps communities navigate crises of misinformation, disinformation and democratic instability.”

This listening session stressed the need for businesses to up the ante to strengthen civic health. Holding institutions accountable is one pathway that an engaged citizenry can build trust in news and information ecosystems.

There are four pillars to assessing a community’s civic health, according to the Press Forward organization:

• News and Information: Availability and accessibility of local news outlets.

• Civic Participation Ecosystem: Metrics like volunteer rates and voter turnout.

• Equity and Justice: Structural determinants, including historical racial and economic discrimination.

• Health and Opportunity: Social determinants such as medical debt, housing insecurity, and health insurance coverage.

Andrew stresses that more actors in the business and non-profit communities “can co-invest in community information hubs, local media collaboratives, libraries, nonprofits and cultural organizations that gather, share and contextualize trusted news and expert resources for their communities. They can also sponsor coverage that meets public needs and partner with universities to grow a diverse pipeline of civic media makers and journalists.”

The three-hour event in the early afternoon was centered around a survey that went out to Lincoln County, the same survey that has been conducted in other Oregon communities: Harriston, Salem, Oakridge, La Pine, Rogue Valley and Florence.

The second part of Saturday’s civic engagement was a showing of a 2024 documentary, “Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink.”

The film lays bare the crimes of hedge funds, those so-called vulture capitalists buying up newspapers for the real estate they encompass. There have been billions of dollars stripped from some of the more well-known newspapers. Alden is the second-largest newspaper owner in the United States, controlling approximately 200 newspapers through its subsidiaries, MediaNews Group (also known as Digital First Media) and Tribune Publishing.

Imagine 75 percent staff reductions, taking us into a new phase of the “ghost newspaper” – no regular beat reports, just papers running syndicated “news.”

 

• Staffing Levels: An estimated 1,000 to 1,500 of the 7,200 newspapers in the U.S. have lost more than half of their newsroom staff since 2004.
• Content Shift: A 2024 study of 500 papers owned by the largest chains found that over one-third of front-page content originated from non-local sources.
• Ownership Trends: Many ghost papers are owned by large newspaper chains or hedge funds that implement aggressive cost-cutting measures to maintain profit margins.
• Impact on Democracy: The loss of local “watchdog” reporting is linked to diminished voter engagement and higher local government costs due to a lack of oversight.

A third of the 1,800 papers – 600 – that were lost over the past decade slowly faded away. Most were suburban weeklies. Like the frog in slowly boiling water, few people in the community noticed anything different at first. There was no abrupt closure that grabbed headlines. Often, there was merely an announcement that the paper had been purchased by the owner of a nearby, larger daily.

Initially, the paper continued to be published under the same name, and the reporters who worked for the paper continued to aggressively cover local government. However, as circulation declined, the once stand-alone paper became a zoned edition of the larger paper. Over time, the building where the paper had been published for decades – often a landmark in the community – was sold and staffing was dramatically reduced. Increasingly, news coverage focused on noncontroversial topics – lifestyle features on people and events in the community. In the final stage, management at the larger daily paper announced that the zoned edition would become a weekly specialty publication, advertising supplement in the main paper or a TMC (total market coverage) product or shopper, distributed free to all residents in the community.

[Despite being published 20 miles apart, the front pages of Gannett’s papers in Scituate and Plymouth, Mass., are identical. These pages from Dec. 5 carry no stories local to the communities they serve.]

RE: Haunted By Ghost Papers — Can Massachusetts hyperlocal startups reconnect communities to the news–and each other?

In 2024, Alden closed eight weekly newspapers in Minnesota, including the Shakopee Valley News (160 years old) and the Jordan Independent (140 years old).

 

When I started in the newspaper arena, first in college 1974-79, the writing was on the wall: “Don’t expect to get a full-time job with a daily that has a Sunday edition. You’ll have to go to small towns and work for a daily, twice-a-week, or weekly newspaper.” The loss of over 2,100 newspapers between 2004 and 2020 is one reason we have such an uninformed public.

The digital landscape is still evolving. We have the Lincoln Chronicle, a non-profit on-line news outlet. But my contention is we have to support as many hardcopy newspapers in a mid-to-large city. Newport needs at least two newspapers, and this once-a-week Leader just doesn’t cut it.

Cutting jobs, gutting newsrooms, and believing in this so-called creative destruction are the death knell of America.

“Whatever they say about us, they can’t control us. We’re out to serve the public. That’s a red-blooded, virile statement, and by God, it’s true,” Harry Grant, Milwaukee Journal, quoted in a September 25, 1950, TIME Magazine article titled “The Press: No. I.”

More wise proof from 238 years ago why newspapers count? “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1787

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Paul Haeder has been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

Trump Kabuki Theater In Ukraine: Nothing Of Substance Gets Resolved – OpEd

February 16, 2026 
By Alastair Crooke

It is not a glitch (that nothing gets resolved). It’s a feature. For it opens rather, a path for ‘Business’ to be done – for ‘stakeholder’ deals to be cut, and for billions to be shared out in payoffs. This is Trump’s geo-political transactional model: Business displaces traditional negotiation (at least while the money flows); Money is the politics.

Trump, Witkoff and Kushner are said to be confident that they can construct a financial reward system for western debt-holders, investors and politicians (and the Zelensky entourage, in the case of Ukraine) that succeeds in “retaining the financial rewards of war – without the ancillary ingredient of bloodshed”.

Once payments are apportioned – from the Trump-Witkoff perspective – the “territorial issues, security guarantees, EU membership status and the position of NATO are downstream details once the larger payment system is organized. Put another way, they are down to the stuff that really matters, the money”.

With this worldview, negotiations between the U.S. and Russia are being pursued by two New York real-estate ‘gurus’ (Witkoff and Kushner), together with Josh Gruenbaum, who has also been appointed as secretary to Trump’s ‘Gaza Peace Board’. Gruenbaum’s previous work experience has been with the KKR fund, which, although not strictly a ‘vulture fund’, is specialist in aggressive distressed-debt investing.

Where are the experienced professionals from Russia’s foreign service in these talks? They are notably absent. Foreign Minister Lavrov does not attend.

Why? Because the Trump-Witkoff hypothesis is that the Ukraine conflict can be “solved by a system where the opportunity for financial benefit continues. That is – that those who have had a financial benefit in the Ukraine war – the ‘stakeholders’ – continue to enjoy financial benefit. Put more cynically, ‘The Prosperity Agenda to Support Ukraine’s Reconstruction’ is codespeak for the U.S. Senate and EU to retain a financial mechanism to exploit for personal benefit”.

Essentially, this is the Trump-New York real-estate experience transferred to a real-life conflict – in which ‘blood’ usually represents the true currency invested in a conflict. This approach underlines the West’s degradation into a nihilism that views sacrifices made by men and women in support of their country as a trifle to be bought out.

Look at the Witkoff team — on the one hand, there is Blackrock and its CEO Larry Fink, who are commissioned by Witkoff to raise the reconstruction funds for Ukraine. Larry Fink also liaises closely with the Witkoff team on divvying out the potential re-construction ‘opportunities’ (but is not directly involved in the Moscow talks with President Putin).

Then there are the Rothschilds who are the principal advisers to Kiev’s Ministry of Finance and who are responsible for managing the huge Ukrainian bond debt of more than $216 billion – that is to say, the Rothschilds are responsible for negotiating with bond creditors and managing their claims on Kiev. There are also sovereign creditors who have guaranteed loans to Ukraine from financial institutions, such as the IMF and World Bank. The EU alone has guaranteed €193 bn.

These ‘stakeholders’ in the Witkoff framework — the creditors of Ukraine, the interests of Blackrock and possibly KKR — stand to do well out of a reconstruction package, in the case of a political settlement agreed between the U.S. and Moscow. “As of February 2026, Ukraine’s sovereign dollar bonds are trading in the 60 to 76 cents on the dollar range, reflecting intense market sensitivity to potential peace proposals. Prices have rallied significantly from lows in the 19–20 cent range seen in late 2024 and early 2025 as diplomatic momentum builds”.

Rothschilds may, or may not, have a direct interest in the Ukraine debt package, but as a ‘firm’ they have a bitter history in their dealings with President Putin over what happened to Yukos. The latter was the largest oil and gas enterprise in Russia in the 1990s.

In 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, then head of the Russian oil giant Yukos, appointed Lord Jacob Rothschild as the “guarantor” or “protector” of his controlling stake in the company. The transfer of control of Yukos (which consisted of much of Russia’s oil and gas resources) to Lord Rothschild was triggered automatically in 2003 by Khodorkovsky’s arrest by Russian authorities. The intent was to put these resources beyond President Putin’s reach. However, Yukos subsequently was nationalised and wiped out by tax impositions which effectively voided its assets of any value.

On the new ‘money-in’ side to the Witkoff ‘balance sheet’, the EU and the U.S. are pitching for an $800 billion post-settlement rebuilding fund for Ukraine war damage. All of Witkoff’s identified stakeholders have an interest in getting a slice of this cake — Zelensky needs a slice to share around his ‘stakeholders’ and the EU is lining up its defence contractors to claim their portion of the $800 billion action, too.

And on the Russian side, there is Kirill Dmitriev, the Wall Street-trained Head of Russia’s National Wealth Fund, who initiated efforts to offer investment opportunities to the United States as part of the stakeholder strategy to restore economic ties and foster negotiations. These included joint projects on rare earth minerals and Arctic development.

From Moscow’s perspective – and with Moscow’s clear understanding of the Trump’s mercantilist and transactional psyche — perhaps having Washington pulled by ‘deal’ opportunities into talking with Russia (after a long period of severed communications) and when the U.S. leadership is inconstant and capricious – engagement with Witkoff and Kushner may have been seen as the better side to valour.

However, this ‘business first’ methodology has a major flaw: The ‘negotiations’ with the Witkoff team are not working. Matters are moving in the wrong direction, as Foreign Minister Lavrov has underlined in frank language in two recent interviews (last week with Rick Sanchez on Russia Today, and on Tuesday with Russia’s NTV television channel).

FM Lavrov emphasised that the understandings reached at Anchorage are stuck – and in fact are being rowed back, “moving in the wrong direction”, Lavrov warned. Not only are relations cooling; asymmetrical actions are increasing and the risk of escalation growing, Lavrov suggested.

So what is going on?

Firstly, underlying Trump’s approach to his ‘business strategy’ are several distinct parameters — the principal one being the deal-making culture centred on a ‘financial rewards system’. This approach ignores reality. The issue of Russia’s relations with Ukraine (and the U.S.) are not centred on the notional cutting up of a billion dollar re-construction cake.

The crux rather, is the imperative to reach an agreement on where exactly the boundary to NATO’s sphere of interest should be limited. And by extension, to where Russia and Central Asia’s boundary extends.

But matters are moving in the opposite direction: Lavrov’s frustration is very evident in these interviews. Trump is becoming more and more focussed on American domination (driven in no small part by the U.S.’ dollar and debt crisis).

Trump’s debt-driven focus on domination lies in diametric contradiction to a multi-polarity of powers based on respect for each other’s national security interests.

This leads to the second parameter — it is simply that conflicts and wars are not all susceptible to monetary buy-offs. There is ‘history’ and lives sacrificed. Only a resolution that encompasses an understanding of the full context which brought the conflict into being in the first place is likely to succeed.

And it is the root causes to the dispute that are precisely what is excluded under the Witkoff framing.

Separately, the legacy culture of European and U.S. banking and financial interests provides the predisposition to preserving the Ukrainian status quo as parcel to their historic stance.

The ‘taking care of stakeholders’ approach then automatically devolves into seeking a continuation of existing structures of power and authority in Kiev, without which the monetary worth of Ukrainian bonds — many of which are held by European governments – will fall to zero.

Market analyst Alex Krainer has stated that “European nations, including the UK, are in a catastrophic fiscal position, partly because they have lent (or guaranteed) hundreds of billions to Ukraine that are likely to become “bad debts””.

Moscow has been very clear that there must be a transformation made to the leadership culture in Ukraine for any stable coexistence between Russia and Kiev to be viable. For Moscow, the continuation of the Zelensky regime culture of radical hostility would be viewed as setting up Russia to face a future of regular bouts of repeated conflict as Ukraine is periodically rearmed and re-grouped by European states.

Any mooted change of Ukrainian leadership style however, would pull the rug from under Witkoff’s carefully arranged ‘financial reward system’. An outcome to the conflict brought about by military facts on the ground leading to a transformed culture in Kiev would be anathema to the stakeholder benefit scheme.

The ‘stakeholders’ are united in opposing such eventuality. The Witkoff plan effectively fuels their opposition to any change in the status quo.

It is not surprising then that Foreign Minister Lavrov is signalling a backing off from the Witkoff negotiation enterprise. It is not working. It is distancing Russia from its security imperatives. Rather, it paves the path for a continuation of war against Russia.

Alastair Crooke is a former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

Trump’s Board of Peace: billionaires, cronies and genocidaires

Ali Abunimah 

The Electronic Intifada 

21 January 2026

US President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace repackages genocide with “humanitarian” branding. Daniel TorokAvalon

Donald Trump is hard-selling a new brand, his so-called Board of Peace, as if this Orwellian name can hide the reality of the ongoing US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza – and the chaos and conflict the American president is spreading globally from Venezuela to Greenland to Iran.

The White House is pitching this monster as a mechanism for “mobilizing international resources and ensuring accountability as Gaza transitions from conflict to peace and development.”

But it is just another vulgar pay-to-play scam with Trump claiming the role of chairman for life.

The invitation letter and draft charter say member states get three-year terms, unless they hand over $1 billion for permanent membership.

Board of predators

The White House says a “founding executive board” has already been assembled, stacked with Trump cronies, billionaire financiers and ultra-Zionists, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, envoy Steve Witkoff, real estate developer and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, globally reviled former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, World Bank President Ajay Banga and Marc Rowan, CEO of the vulture capitalist hedge fund Apollo.

Rowan has labeled recently inaugurated New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani an “enemy” of Jews for criticizing Israel.

That’s a good indicator of how much fairness Palestinians can expect.

There is also a separate Gaza “executive board” and a “high representative” – blatantly colonial structures harkening back to the days of League of Nations mandates.
The White House also states that American General Jasper Jeffers has been appointed commander of the so-called International Stabilization Force to “establish security, preserve peace and establish a durable terror-free environment.”



“Terror,” of course, is a reference to Palestinian resistance, not to Israeli genocide.

This unaccountable force, whose makeup remains a mystery, will, according to the White House, “lead security operations” and “support comprehensive demilitarization.”

The only Palestinian participation in all this is a handpicked “technocratic” committee led by Ali Shaath, a former official in the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority. It is supposed to manage Gaza’s affairs under external colonial supervision.
This looks like an even more degraded version of the 1993 Oslo accords, which established the Palestinian Authority as a body to collaborate with Israel against any Palestinian resistance to its deepening occupation and apartheid.

Concentration camps within concentration camps

Meanwhile, there are troubling signs that Israel – undoubtedly with full American backing – is preparing to create concentration camps for Palestinians in Gaza.

Or more accurately, concentration camps within a concentration camp.

The publication Drop Site and investigative group Forensic Architecture reported this week that “Israel is razing a strategic area of Rafah in southern Gaza, compacting the ground, and clearing rubble in a way that suggests the land is being prepared for the construction of new residential infrastructure.”



“The location lies on the northern edge of what Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz first announced in July would be a planned ‘humanitarian city’ that would eventually house the entire population of the Gaza Strip,” the report states.



Arab regimes provide cover

So how many countries have joined Trump’s Board of Peace? It is reported that Trump invited about 50 countries to join.

The White House claims that 30 are expected to do so, but it has provided no details.

One leader who has accepted the invitation is none other than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a fugitive from the International Criminal Court charged with crimes against humanity.

He ordered and has presided over the slaughter of at least tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza in the ongoing genocide, launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, continues to occupy and bomb Syria and Lebanon.



Netanyahu also murdered the prime minister and senior ministers in Yemen.

This genocidaire’s government just seized and demolished the headquarters of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, in occupied East Jerusalem.
In a joint statement on Wednesday, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan and Indonesia announced they were all accepting the invitation to join the Board of Peace and reaffirmed their support for what they described as the “peace efforts led by President Trump.”



They will now presumably take their seats at the table with the fugitive Netanyahu.
Other countries that have reportedly accepted Trump’s invitation include Armenia, Morocco, Vietnam, Belarus, Hungary, Kazakhstan and Argentina.



But there has also been limited pushback. France has declined, warning the board could replace the United Nations – although it is an open question how much of a loss that would be given how ineffective the world body has become.

Trump has threatened to retaliate with 200 percent tariffs on French wines.

Norway and Sweden have also refused or said they won’t sign up as things currently stand.

Others, including Canada, have been hedging, perhaps in hopes of avoiding the wrath of the mad king in Washington.

What is clear, as is so often the case, is that what starts in Palestine never stays there: Israel’s bestial experiments in human cruelty may begin in Gaza or the occupied West Bank, but quickly become models for the whole world.

So it is with this Board of Peace, which Trump and his accomplices apparently hope will be used to impose their will elsewhere across the planet.

What makes this all even more alarming is the complicity or at best negligence of perhaps the only powers that could effectively stand up to Washington.

Russia and China, which both routinely claim to defend the international system against US-engineered chaos, declined to veto UN Security Council resolution 2803, the framework that allowed Trump’s Board of Peace to move forward under a thin veil of international legitimacy.

By choosing abstention, they effectively handed Washington the cover it craved.

Their inaction, framed as diplomatic pragmatism and a response to the pleas of regional US puppets, has helped launder a genocidal apparatus as a collective international response.

At this point, the best hope to stop this madness is that Trump’s increasing aggression and threats against US vassals and allies will alienate enough countries to bring the whole project down.

The question then is whether the rest of the so-called international community – countries that still claim to uphold international law but which have cowered before the US – are ready to fulfill their binding legal obligation under the Genocide Convention to stop the US-fueled Israeli killing machine.

Nothing we’ve seen since the genocide started gives much hope that this will happen.

Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.