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Opinion
The Gratuitous Barbarity of Trump's So-Called 'Board of Peace'
In the fantasy being pushed by Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Jared Kushner, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.
Jan 23, 2026
At the opening ceremony for Donald Trump’s so-called Board of Peace in Davos, Jared Kushner unveiled glossy images of his vision for a “new Gaza”: shining apartment towers, luxury developments, and sweeping views of the Mediterranean. There were no Palestinians at the ceremony—and none on the Board of Peace itself. In Kushner’s fantasy, Palestinians appear only as an absence, buried beneath the rubble of the real Gaza.
But how, exactly, are Palestinians to be “demilitarized” and pacified to make way for this Riviera of the Middle East? The assassination of Gaza’s Khan Younis police chief in a drive-by shooting this January offers a chilling clue. It was not an isolated act of lawlessness, but an ominous signal of what lies ahead. As Israeli-backed Palestinian militias openly take credit for targeted killings, the United States is reviving a familiar, deadly—and thoroughly discredited—playbook from Iraq and Afghanistan, in which death squads, night raids, and “kill or capture” missions are cynically repackaged as stabilization and peace.
Gaza is now being positioned as the next laboratory for this model, under the banner of Donald Trump’s so-called “peace plan,” with consequences that history has already shown to be catastrophic.
That strategy was laid bare on January 12th, 2026, when Lieutenant-Colonel Mahmoud al-Astal, the police chief of Khan Younis in Gaza, was assassinated by a death squad based in the Israeli-occupied part of Gaza beyond the “yellow line.” A militia leader known as Abu Safin immediately took credit for the killing, which he said was ordered by Shin Beit, Israel’s anti-Palestinian spy agency.
Another Israeli-backed militia, reputedly linked to ISIS, killed a well-known Gaza journalist, Saleh Al-Jafarawi, in October. That militia’s leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, was disowned by his family for running a pro-Israel death squad and was killed on November 4th, reportedly by one of his own gang.
These Israeli-run death squad operations follow a similar pattern to the targeted killings of Iraqi civil society leaders as resistance grew to the hostile US military occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004. But as they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, these targeted killings are likely to grow into a much more systematic and widespread use of death squads and military “kill or capture” night raids in the next phase of Trump’s “peace” plan.
President Trump has announced that the so-called “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) in Gaza will be under the command of US Major General Jasper Jeffers, who was, until recently, the head of US Special Operations Command. Jeffers is a veteran of “special operations” in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the US occupation responded to widespread armed resistance with death squad operations, thousands of airstrikes, and night raids by special operations forces that peaked at over a thousand night raids per month in Afghanistan by 2011.
But like Israel’s Palestinian death squads during the first stage of Trump’s “peace” plan, the US mass killing machines in Afghanistan and Iraq began on a smaller scale.
For an article in the New Statesman, published on March 15, 2004, British journalist Stephen Grey investigated the assassination of Abdul-Latif al-Mayah, the director of the Baghdad Centre for Human Rights and the fourth professor from al-Mustansariya University to be killed. Professor al-Mayah was dragged out of his car on his way to work, shot 20 times and left dead in the street. A senior US military spokesman blamed his death on “the guerrillas,” and told Grey, “Silencing urban professionals… works against everything we’re trying to do here.”
On further investigation, Grey discovered that it was forces within the occupation government, not the resistance, that killed Professor Al-Mayah. An Iraqi police officer eventually told him, “Dr. Abdul-Latif was becoming more and more popular because he spoke for people on the street here… There are political parties in this city who are systematically killing people. They are politicians that are backed by the Americans and who arrived in Iraq from exile with a list of their enemies. I’ve seen these lists. They are killing people one by one.”
A few months later, retired Colonel James Steele, a veteran of the Phoenix program in Vietnam, the US war in El Salvador and the Iran-Contra scandal, arrived in Iraq to oversee the recruitment and training of new Special Police Commandos (SPC), who were then unleashed as death squads in Mosul, Baghdad and other cities, under command of the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
Steven Casteel, who ran the Iraqi Interior Ministry after the US invasion, was the former intelligence chief for the US Drug Enforcement Agency in Latin America, where it worked with the Los Pepes death squad to hunt down and kill Pepe Escobar, the leader of the Medellin drug cartel.
In Iraq, Steele and Casteel both reported directly to US Ambassador John Negroponte, another veteran of US covert operations in Vietnam and Latin America.
Just as John Negroponte, James Steele and Steven Casteel brought the methods they learned and used in Vietnam and Latin America to Iraq, Jasper Jeffers brings his training and experience from Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza, and will clearly bring other special operations and CIA officers with similar backgrounds into the leadership of the so-called International Stabilization Force (ISF).
The ISF, as described in Trump’s “Peace Plan,” is supposed to be an international force that would provide security, support a new Palestinian police force, and oversee the demilitarization and redevelopment of the Gaza Strip. But the Arab and Muslim countries that originally showed an interest in contributing forces to the ISF all changed their minds once they understood that this would not be a peacekeeping mission, but a force to hunt down and “disarm” Hamas and impose a new form of foreign occupation in Gaza.
Turkey wants to send troops, but so far, Israel has objected, and the other countries that have expressed interest, such as Indonesia, say there is no clear mandate or rules of engagement. And what Muslim country will send forces to Gaza while Israel controls over half of the territory and moves the “Yellow Line” even deeper into Gaza?
Even if some Arab and Muslim countries are persuaded to join the ISF, the most difficult and politically explosive job of actually destroying Hamas will most likely be in the hands of the US and Israeli Special Ops commanders, the mercenaries they bring in and the death squads they recruit.
We can expect to see General Jeffers and his team provide more training and direction to Palestinians already collaborating with Israel in death squad operations, and try to recruit more militia members from current and former Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank and from the Palestinian diaspora.
CIA and JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) officers with experience in death squad operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to oversee these operations from the shadows, using the same “disguised, quiet, media-free approach” that senior US military officers hailed as a success in Central America as they adapted it to the “war on terror” and the “war on drugs.”
For political reasons, Jeffers will probably use JSOC officers mainly for training and planning, and employ private military contractors to conduct night raids and other combat operations. Along with the huge expansion of US and allied special operations forces in recent US wars, there has been a proliferation of for-profit military contractors that employ former special operations officers from US and allied countries as unaccountable mercenaries.
These privatized forces have already been deployed in Gaza, notably by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Its food distribution sites became death traps for desperate, hungry people forced to risk their lives just to try to feed their families. Israeli forces and mercenaries killed at least a thousand people at and around these sites.
The tens of thousands of Americans and others who took part in night raids in Iraq or Afghanistan and special operations in other US wars have created a huge pool of experienced assassins and shock troops that Jeffers can draw on, with for-profit military and “security” firms serving as cut-outs to shield decision-makers from accountability. More routine functions, such as manning checkpoints, can be delegated to other ISF forces, military police veterans and less specialized mercenaries.
The appointment of General Jeffers to command Trump’s ISF, and Israel’s formation and deployment of Palestinian death squads during the first phase of Trump’s phony peace plan, should be all the red flags the world needs to see what is coming—and to categorically reject Trump’s obscene plan before it goes any farther.
Like Bush and Blair planning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Trump is planning to systematically violate the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, and especially the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which guarantees protection for civilians in war zones or under military occupation.
Tony Blair’s role in Trump’s plan is further evidence that the plan has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with the Western imperialism that keeps rearing its ugly head around the world, and which has bedevilled Palestine for more than a century.
Appointing Blair to any role in governing Gaza ignores not only his role in US and British aggression against Iraq, but also his lead role in the U.K. and EU’s decision, in 2003, to abandon earlier efforts to bring Palestinian factions together in the interest of Palestinian unity. Instead, they adopted a militarized, “counterinsurgency” strategy toward Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups. Blair’s failed policy helped pave the way for Hamas’s election victory in 2006, and for the endless, US-backed Israeli violence against Gaza ever since.
It is perhaps no wonder that Trump and Blair see eye to eye on Palestine, as they share the same ignorance, egotism and inhumanity, and the same disdain for international law. But the savage methods used by US special operations forces and US-trained death squads to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq only fueled broader resistance, which ultimately drove U.S occupation forces out of both countries.
The same tactics will lead to the same failure in Gaza. But unleashing such horrific violence on the already desperate, starving, unhoused, captive people of Gaza is a policy of such gratuitous barbarity and injustice that it should compel the whole world to come together to put a stop to it.
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We Are All Minnesota
Trump thought Minnesotans would be pushovers and great “performance fodder” as televised victims of his version of macho violence. He was wrong.
Jan 23, 2026
President Donald Trump stepped into a major political landmine by picking Minnesota as the Democratic state he opted to savage with his Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this time around. No one, anywhere, has ever regarded Minnesota as any kind of threat to any nation. Writer and former “Prairie Home Companion” radio personality Garrison Keillor often talked about the rock-steady courtesy and careful reticence of the hard-working and (once) stoic Minnesotans. “We Minnesotans believe in low key,” he quipped about himself and the other residents of his home state. Hardly the rampaging “paid political agitators” Donald Trump conjures up.
Minnesota consistently tallies among the lowest per capita crime stats in the nation. Yet there Trump’s jack-booted thugs are in repeated scenes on TV across the nation, hurling Minnesotans to the ground, kneeling on their backs, wrapping their beefy arms around their necks and squeezing, shooting them. This, despite the fact that Democratic California, along with the Republican states of Texas and Florida, have the highest number—millions—of undocumented immigrants in the nation. Yet Trump is focusing on the Midwestern state.
Nearby residents across the Minnesota’s border identify with their out-of-state neighbors. I grew up in Wisconsin, and considered Minnesota part of us, as I did Michigan, Iowa, and much of Illinois. If Trump thinks he carefully sidestepped red Iowa and Michigan, and purple Wisconsin (which went for Trump in 2024) in his targeted violence, he’s hugely mistaken. What happens in Minnesota is felt by all Midwesterners. Like me, other Wisconsinites have relatives over the border, they shop in Minnesota, and some have farms and businesses there. Minnesotans talk like us. We have the same accents, and some of us call drinking fountains “bubblers.” That kind of identification is something Trump, born and raised in Queens, will never get.
Even more problematic for Trump is that the great swath of middle Americans view Midwesterners as one of them. The country often dismisses the complaints and actions of the New York metropolitan area and the West (i.e. “left”) Coast. But they don’t take that attitude when it comes to Minnesotans, widely considered the salt of the earth by their fellow Americans.
It’s not so easy (or a genius political move) to remain popular as a vengeful president scapegoats a steady state from heartland America with combat-outfitted thugs.
Nevertheless, Minnesotans are being brutalized on the streets of Minneapolis: their “papers” demanded by ICE agents (which citizens are not required to carry), their car windows smashed and their bodies dragged over shattered glass, slugged when they dare lift their cell phones to record the violence. Yet the Minnesotans, a huge percentage of whom are hunters and own guns, remain nonviolent protesters against the brutality, steadfast and indomitable in their opposition, relying on whistles to alert one another to ICE violence, relentlessly recording the federal agents’ assault on the law despite threats from angry, threatening officers. Minnesotans have staged protest sit-ins in churches, at Hilton Hotels, where agents sleep, and at Target stores where masked men have kidnapped teenage US citizens working there. Protesters last month staged an all-night raucous anti-ICE “concert” to keep the agents awake as they tried to sleep in their Hilton Hotel beds.
It’s a lose-lose situation for Trump. Early poll results already hint that the president’s support in the wake of the violence in the Midwest—and nationally—is tanking. It’s not so easy (or a genius political move) to remain popular as a vengeful president scapegoats a steady state from heartland America with combat-outfitted thugs.
Even before news spread that ICE agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Minneapolis mom and US citizen Renee Nicole Good in the face on January 7, a number of polls found increasing anger over Trump’s Minneapolis thugfest.
A national YouGov poll taken the same day of the shooting before word of the killing had been widely shared found that 52% of those surveyed already either somewhat or strongly disapproved of how ICE was doing its job (39% somewhat approved or strongly approved). Just 27% thought the agency's tactics were "about right," compared to 51% who labeled them"too forceful.”
Six out of ten of those surveyed said they believed a “war” or “conflict” is erupting in the streets of America.
A Reuters/Ipsos survey January 15 found Americans’ approval of Trump’s immigration approach was at its lowest point in his second administration. An AP-NORC poll found that just 38% of Americans approved of Trump’s immigration enforcement, down from a 49% high this spring. In addition, a majority of voters (51%) in a recent CNN/SSRS poll said ICE’s actions are making US cities less safe.
Trump’s net job approval rating slid to -14, YouGov pollsters reported Jan. 20 after the president’s immigration crackdown, the lowest of his second administration. The American Research Group reported Wednesday that Trump’s approval rating had cratered to -28.
“What’s happening in Minnesota right now defies belief,” Democratic Gov. Tim Walz said in a televised address last week. “News reports simply don’t do justice to the level of chaos and disruption and trauma the federal government is raining down upon our communities,” he added, characterizing the ICE attacks as a “campaign of organized brutality against the people of Minnesota by our own federal government.”
Trump thought Minnesotans would be pushovers and great “performance fodder” as televised victims of his version of macho violence. They may be quietly hard-working, and sometimes excruciatingly reserved, but they have spines of steel and they know what’s right.
We are all Minnesota.
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The Nazi Political Theory That Explains ICE's Impunity
Trump's Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become the violent face of the country’s transformation into a new 21st-century dual state.
Jan 23, 2026
Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, will not be brought to justice. Let that sink in. Ross is going to skate, because in Donald Trump’s America, his agency operates above the law. As Vice President JD Vance put it at a White House press conference the day after the shooting, Ross has “absolute immunity for doing his job.”
Vance’s comments shed light upon the larger legal design behind ICE’s newfound power. In Trump’s second term, the United States is rapidly devolving into what the late German émigré legal and political scientist Ernst Fraenkel called a “dual state,” in which acts of violence perpetrated against designated enemies of the regime are not only tolerated, but often celebrated as acts of valor and redemption.
A socialist attorney who practiced labor law in Berlin, Fraenkel fled Nazi Germany in 1938, eventually settling in Chicago. There he would write his most famous work, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, a study of the legal system implemented by the Third Reich in the 1930s.
Fraenkel’s central thesis is that the Nazis did not dismantle the legal structure of the Weimar Republic all at once or entirely, but replaced it with a bifurcated system in which state functions were divided between a “normative” sphere—which operated according to set rules and regulations—and a “prerogative” sphere, where violence was permitted and traditional legal restraints did not apply.
The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point.
To keep capitalism up and running, Hitler’s government had to maintain the façade of a stable “normative” legal system that permitted businesses and Christian Germans to engage in commerce and settle contract cases, employment disputes, landlord-tenant matters, and other civil issues in court. As University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq noted in a March 2025 Atlantic magazine essay, this duality allowed capitalism to “jog nicely alongside the brutal suppression of democracy, and even genocide.”
But as the judiciary surrendered its independence through a combination of cooptation and intimidation, the “prerogative” system came to dominate. “On any given day,” Huq explained:
… people or cases could be jerked out of the normative state and into the prerogative one. In July 1936, for example, Fraenkel won a case for employees of an association taken over by the Nazis. A few days later, he learned that the Gestapo had seized the money owed to his clients and deposited it in the government’s coffers.
The case was closed with no further appeals.
Fraenkel largely attributed the theoretical underpinnings of the dual Nazi state to the work of the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt. Often referred to as the “Crown Jurist of National Socialism,” Schmitt joined the party in 1933 and went on to serve as president of the National Socialist Association of Legal Professionals.
Schmitt was an unrelenting critic of liberalism, decrying its weaknesses for embracing universal human rights and what he deemed its hypocritical and indecisive fixations on discussion, debate, negotiation, and compromise. As a counter to universalism, he promoted a “friend-enemy” concept of politics, insisting that all states necessarily distinguish between those whom it embraces as friends worthy of protection and those who are forever considered enemies, outsiders and invaders deserving of its wrath, retribution, and punishment.
As a complement to the friend-enemy concept, Schmitt promoted the idea of the “state of exception,” arguing that the sovereign in a well-functioning state must be vested with emergency powers to suspend the rule of law to maintain public order and ensure the survival of the nation. Soon after joining the party, he declared that the Enabling Act, which effectively made Hitler a dictator, had become the provisional constitution of Germany. He would go on to enthusiastically support the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping Jews and other “enemies” of citizenship, and to defend Hitler’s right as sovereign to define the enemy as he saw fit.
All of this will sound eerily familiar to anyone who has been paying attention to the news. Since retaking the presidency, Trump has declared nine states of emergency on a range of issues stretching from the imposition of bloated tariffs on foreign goods to designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and proclaiming a national emergency at the southern border. The border proclamation, issued on January 20, his first day back in office, cited the now-familiar charge of an “alien invasion” of “criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers,” and laid the groundwork for both his mass-deportation program and for giving ICE the largest budget of any police agency in the country.
ICE is now a formidable paramilitary force, having hired 12,000 new agents in the past year, more than doubling its size, and ramping up to hire more. It has been deployed into American cities on orders from Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to root out the invaders. It has become the violent face of the country’s transformation into a new 21st-century dual state.
Undocumented immigrants remain ICE’s primary target, but citizens like Good are also in jeopardy. Good’s case stands out because she was white, and her killing was caught on video. But she is not alone. While there are no official figures that specifically track how many citizens have been victimized by immigration agents, ProPublica reported last October that it had found more than 170 cases where citizens were detained during raids and protests. According to the report:
Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.
To date, not a single federal agent has been prosecuted for these incidents. Nor are any prosecutions likely.
In “normal” times, we could at least expect Agent Ross to face a rigorous Justice Department investigation. It is not true, to return to JD Vance’s comments, that Ross enjoys absolute immunity under existing law. It has always been difficult to prosecute federal law enforcement officials, but no such immunity exists.
But these are not normal times.
Trump, who now openly directs the Department of Justice and the FBI, has precluded the possibility of any serious federal investigation. Nor can we count on a state investigation conducted in concert with federal law enforcement. The FBI has announced it will exclude Minnesota authorities from participating in any fake pro-forma probe of Good’s death.
Perhaps most regrettably, we cannot count on the Supreme Court to hold Ross and other offending agents to account. The Supreme Court has endowed Trump with the powers of the unitary executive, holding in Trump v. United States that the president may exercise his pardon power however he pleases to excuse anyone from any federal prosecution.
The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point. We can be heartened by the fact that the United States is not Germany in 1933, and Trump, for all his bluster and megalomania, is not Hitler. The country’s fate remains open, and dependent on the nonviolent and lawful collective action that we—all of us—take in the coming weeks, months, and years.
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We're All on One Planet; Let's Act Like It
What recognizing “one planet” really means is showing a wide-open reverence for everything and everybody on it, including everything we don’t understand.
Jan 23, 2026
Let’s put Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, indeed, war itself—the smugly violent certainty of militarism—into the largest perspective possible. I suggest this as the only way to maintain my sanity: to believe that we, that our children, actually have a future.
This is one planet. Every living being, every pulse of life, every molecule of existence, is intertwined. I’m not in any way suggesting I understand what this means. I simply see it as our starting point, as we acknowledge and embrace the Anthropocene: the current global era, basically as old as I am, in which natural and human forces are intertwined. The fate of one determines the fate of the other.
If that’s really true, we have to start thinking beyond the mindset that brought us here. We are truly creating the future by what we do. Our lives are no longer about simply exploiting the present for our limited self-interests or perpetrating us-vs.-them violence on what amounts to ourselves.
I began by mentioning ICE because it’s so blatantly in the news these days, exemplifying the minimalist thinking of US (and global) leaders, as they claim exclusive ownership of bits and pieces of the planet.
The Trump administration is in a weird way proclaiming its belief in “one planet,” but this planet includes only them: basically white, politically obedient Americans.
As Julia Norman writes, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security is in the process of accumulating industrial warehouses around the country “...in an effort to expand the administration’s capacity to execute its mass deportation agenda—a system Secretary Noem recently aptly described as ‘one of the most consequential periods of action and reform in American history.’"
“After the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ allocated an additional $45 billion specifically to ICE for building new immigration detention centers through 2029—a budget 62% larger than the entire federal prison system—DHS gained unprecedented financial capacity to expand its system of terror on a massive scale.”
She adds: “Private contractors such as GEO Group continue to operate facilities housing the vast majority of ICE detainees, positioning themselves to make substantial profit as the administration moves to double detention capacity to 100,000 beds with tens of billions in federal spending. GEO Group and CoreCivic have already reported soaring revenues under Trump’s second term, with executives describing the expansion as ‘pivotal’ and ‘an unprecedented growth opportunity.’ In this system, human confinement has been transformed into an investment strategy.”
There’s an enormous irony here. The Trump administration is in a weird way proclaiming its belief in “one planet,” but this planet includes only them: basically white, politically obedient Americans. What recognizing “one planet” really means is showing a wide-open reverence for everything and everybody on it, including everything we don’t understand.
As I wrote in a column nearly a decade ago, the Anthropocene has come about by a combination of extraordinary technological breakthroughs and cold indifference to their consequences: human evolution, you might say, outside the circle of life. But here we are nonetheless.
The primary causes of the geological shift, according to the Guardian, are the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, along with such things as plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chickens.
“None of this is good news,” I wrote. “Short-sighted human behavior, from nuclear insanity to agribusiness to the proliferation of plastic trash, has produced utterly unforeseen consequences, including disruption of the stable climate that has nurtured our growth and becoming over the last dozen millennia. This is called recklessness. And mostly the Anthropocene is described with dystopian bleakness: a time of mass extinctions. A time of dying.”
But dystopian bleakness is not the spiritual endpoint here. As Our Planet tells us: “The habitats that make up our planet are connected and reliant upon each other. The astonishing diversity of life on earth depends on these global connections."
“This is a critical moment for our planet. We have changed it so much we have brought on a new geological age—the Anthropocene. The age of humans. For the first time in our history, the global connections that all living things rely upon are breaking. But if we act quickly, we have the knowledge and the solutions to make our planet thrive again.”
There is, in the collective human soul, a deep love for the planet. I understand how naïve it will sound if I just cry: "C’mon, world! No more war!"So I’ll hold off on that and simply address, well, the media, the antiwar protesters, whoever might be reading this. Yes, we should abolish ICE, defund and think beyond militarism, question the sanctity of the imaginary lines (aka, borders) all across our planet. But we should not do so merely out of fear. Let’s do so, rather, in the deep (dare I say religious?) awareness that humanity and Planet Earth are evolving together. And we’re hovering at a moment of extraordinary change.
Let me know what you think: What should we do next? What are we already doing right?
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