Call it Anything but Peace

Kushner, Trump and Netanyahu “hand craft” income, power and vanity into a product they call “peace.” Most of us call it greed and murder.

There is very little to celebrate when we talk about the end of what’s being called the Palestinian-Israeli war, though I bristle at that term. War implies combatants. War suggests some rough parity of forces. What we witnessed over the past two years was something else entirely—a crime that began with Hamas’s inexcusable violence against close to 2,000 Israeli citizens, followed by a calculated slaughter that three dangerous men transformed into opportunity while the world watched on the screens in our pockets.

Benjamin Netanyahu needed it to stay out of prison. Donald Trump needed it for a Nobel Prize. Jared Kushner saw waterfront property. And 67,000 Palestinians—seventy percent of them women and children—paid the price for these men’s ambitions.

If Netanyahu, Trump, and Kushner were consumer products, they would require the sort of warning labels we place on toxic substances. Instead, they are world leaders, and that dissonance should alarm us far more than it apparently does.

Netanyahu stands as the first sitting prime minister in Israeli history to be criminally charged—three corruption cases involving bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. The details read like a particularly tawdry season of a political thriller: expensive cigars and champagne worth $195,000, regulatory favors traded for positive press coverage, meetings with newspaper publishers to discuss limiting rival circulation in exchange for favorable coverage. His trial won’t conclude until 2026. If convicted on bribery charges, he faces up to ten years in prison.

His family’s declared assets total $14.5 million, though there are persistent allegations of undisclosed properties purchased by his sons in cash—a €500,000 property near London, another in New Haven, Connecticut. His wife Sara was convicted of misusing state funds for catered meals, ordered to pay back over $15,000. She’s now under investigation for harassing trial witnesses. Netanyahu himself sought permission for wealthy associates to donate $2.9 million toward his legal defense—a request that was declined.

This is a man whose freedom depends on remaining in power. The incentive structure could hardly be more perverse.

Then came the International Criminal Court—the first arrest warrant ever issued against the leader of a Western-backed democratic country for war crimes. The charges are grimly specific: starvation as a method of warfare, crimes against humanity including murder and persecution, creating conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of part of Gaza’s civilian population. Children dying from malnutrition and dehydration because humanitarian aid was deliberately blocked. The warrant means Netanyahu cannot travel to 125 ICC member states without risking arrest. He is, quite literally, a wanted man.

Yet Netanyahu has done something more insidious than mere self-preservation. He has weaponized Jewish trauma itself, wrapped himself in the cloth of Holocaust victimhood as if he personally survived the camps—which he did not—and used that sacred, legitimate horror as a shield while ordering what UN investigators have determined constitutes genocide. It is a staggering act of historical appropriation and moral bankruptcy.

His opposition to Palestinian statehood isn’t subtle. In 2019, he declared flatly that a Palestinian state would never exist while he was in office. In September 2025, signing an agreement to expand settlements that would effectively bisect the West Bank, he stated: “We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us.” The international community calls these settlements flagrant violations of international law. Netanyahu calls them policy priorities.

Multiple reports confirm what observers have long suspected: his governments treated the division between Hamas-controlled Gaza and the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank as strategically useful for preventing Palestinian statehood. Not conflict resolution but conflict management—permanent occupation with a rotating cast of manufactured crises to justify it. He even made statements suggesting those opposing a Palestinian state should support financial transfers to Gaza to maintain that division. It’s almost impressively cynical.

Trump, ever the opportunist, finally saw which way the wind was blowing. But let’s be clear about the timing and the choices made. Trump has been president since January 20, 2025. He possessed every tool necessary to pressure Israel into ceasing its campaign of destruction. He could have sanctioned Israel. He could have removed or conditioned foreign aid. He could have provided meaningful humanitarian assistance to Palestinians. He had the power, the leverage, the authority to act.

Instead, through the spring and summer and into fall, as the death toll climbed and famine spread and children starved, Trump largely allowed the status quo to continue. Only in October, when the world’s tolerance for watching genocide in real time finally reached some ineffable limit and supporting Netanyahu’s Israel became politically untenable even for someone as impervious to shame as Trump, did he finally engage substantively in ceasefire negotiations through his son-in-law Kushner. The timing was also conveniently problematic for Trump’s obsessive pursuit of a Nobel Peace Prize—acting too early, when the suffering was less documented and the world less outraged, wouldn’t have generated the dramatic peacemaker narrative he craves. He needed the crisis to reach peak horror before swooping in as savior. The dead children weren’t just collateral damage in Netanyahu’s war; they were props in Trump’s vanity project.

This isn’t heroism. This is calculation. Trump delayed action not because he couldn’t intervene, but because the political calculus hadn’t yet shifted in favor of doing so—hadn’t shifted until Israel had exhausted its usefulness to him, until there were no more political advantages to extract from the relationship, until the optics became impossible to sustain, and until the stage was properly set for his Nobel Prize campaign.

This is the same man who described Gaza as potentially “better than Monaco,” who proposed the United States take control of the territory and transform it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” When Trump discusses Gaza’s “potential,” he’s not considering the 2.3 million displaced, traumatized Palestinians. He’s envisioning luxury beachfront once you clear away the inconvenient human beings.

Now he wants a Nobel Prize for doing what he could have done months and tens of thousands of deaths ago. The vanity is breathtaking. The cynicism is complete.

But it’s Jared Kushner who may be most chilling, because he doesn’t even bother with euphemism. He speaks the language of ethnic cleansing in the vocabulary of MBA-speak and somehow expects us to find it more palatable than honest brutality.

In February 2024, speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Kushner discussed Gaza’s “valuable” waterfront property with the casual assessment of a real estate developer evaluating a distressed asset. “I would just bulldoze something in the Negev,” he said, discussing where to relocate Gaza’s population, “I would try to move people in there. I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job.”

Finish the job. Let that phrase settle. This is the former president’s son-in-law, a man whose private equity firm has received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, casually discussing the forced displacement of an entire population as if it were a zoning issue. The Kushner family’s relationship with Netanyahu is so intimate that the Israeli prime minister once slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom during visits to the family’s New Jersey home.

Then came the GREAT Trust plan—and one must admire the audacity of the acronym: Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation. Thirty-eight pages envisioning US oversight of Gaza for at least a decade, proposing six to eight AI-powered smart cities, luxury resorts, industrial centers. A “Trump Riviera.” An “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.” Artificial islands. A deep-water port connecting Gaza to international trade corridors.

And the Palestinians? Temporary relocation, of course. Those leaving would receive $5,000 cash grants, four years of rent subsidies, one year of food assistance. Landowners would get digital tokens—digital tokens!—in exchange for their property rights, which they could either use to finance new lives elsewhere or redeem for apartments in the planned smart cities built atop the rubble of their destroyed homes.

This is ethnic cleansing with a pitch deck. Genocide with financial modeling from Boston Consulting Group. Kushner presented it to the White House in August 2025 alongside Tony Blair, because apparently the former UK prime minister’s legacy wasn’t sufficiently tarnished. Critics called it precisely what it is: a glossy presentation for ethnic cleansing that places zero responsibility on Israel for meaningful political solutions or Palestinian self-determination.

Of course Kushner can’t wait to get his building hands on land he doesn’t own. But that’s the thing about the Kushners—they’ve never needed permission. They take. They’ve always taken. It’s the family business model, perfected over generations: identify an opportunity, exploit the vulnerable, extract maximum value, move on. The fact that this particular opportunity involves the forced displacement of millions and the transformation of a genocide’s aftermath into luxury real estate is, for Kushner, merely a matter of scale.

When men like Kushner discuss “economic development” and “transformation,” listen for what’s unsaid. They’re not talking about the people who live there. They’re talking about the people they wish would simply disappear so the valuable real estate can be properly exploited. And they’re not asking for permission because men like Kushner don’t ask. They simply take what they want and dare anyone to stop them.

Here’s the inconvenient truth that polite society prefers to avoid: many Palestinians are owed homes, land, freedom, and reparations from Israel. Not as political rhetoric but as historical fact, as documented reality, as the foundation of a conflict that has never been meaningfully addressed.

The 1948 displacement. The 1967 occupation. Sixty years of relentless settlement expansion—500,000 Israeli settlers now living among 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank, with plans announced to annex 82 percent of occupied territory. A comprehensive blockade of Gaza that’s lasted since 2007, strangling the economy, restricting movement, creating what the UN accurately describes as a “forever emergency.”

The statistics tell a story of systematic immiseration. Before the blockade, Gaza’s unemployment rate was 23.6 percent—already dire. By 2021, it had reached 47 percent, with youth unemployment at an almost unfathomable 64 percent. The poverty rate climbed from 40 percent to 81.5 percent below the poverty line. Eighty percent of the population became dependent on international humanitarian assistance just to survive. Exports were virtually eliminated. The manufacturing sector shrank by 60 percent. Rolling blackouts averaged eleven hours daily.

Then came the destruction of the past two years. Fifty to 62 percent of all buildings damaged or destroyed—a scale and pace of devastation that surpasses the combined bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London during World War II. Ninety percent of schools and universities damaged or destroyed, because education is dangerous, because educated people remember and resist. Ninety-four percent of health facilities damaged or destroyed. Over 271 people dead from malnutrition by October 2025. A famine officially declared in August 2025, with 470,000 people on the brink of mass starvation.

The UN Commission of Inquiry concluded in September 2025 what many had been documenting for months: Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The Commission found genocidal intent based on Israeli officials’ own statements and unmistakable patterns of conduct—killing unprecedented numbers of Palestinians, imposing total siege and starvation, systematically destroying healthcare and education infrastructure, sexual and gender-based violence, deliberate targeting of children, attacks on religious and cultural sites.

Seventy percent of verified fatalities were women and children. The UN termed it “a systematic violation of fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.” That’s diplomatic language for atrocity.

Systematic attacks on hospitals, schools, UN facilities, places of worship—all protected sites under international law, all targeted anyway. Healthcare workers detained, tortured, killed in significant numbers. Over 2,873 Palestinians held in administrative detention without charge or trial, an all-time high as of December 2023. Mass detentions of thousands of men and boys, some as young as twelve, subjected to forced stripping, blindfolding, beatings, humiliation.

The International Court of Justice issued binding orders requiring Israel to take all necessary measures to prevent genocide, to ensure unhindered humanitarian assistance, to end its unlawful occupation. Israel has violated these orders repeatedly, almost contemptuously.

Palestinians are returning now to what remains—which is almost nothing. Over 300,000 have returned to northern Gaza since late January 2025, coming back to landscapes of complete devastation. No homes, no infrastructure, no electricity, no running water. Many are setting up makeshift tents on the rubble of what used to be their houses, camping on the graves of their former lives.

Over 600,000 people who briefly regained access to drinking water were cut off again following power disruptions. Most now depend on insufficient quantities delivered by trucks. Many are forced to drink brackish, contaminated water just to survive. Ninety-four percent of health facilities are damaged or destroyed, many operating without power for critical equipment.

One mother, visiting her son’s grave before returning north, asked the question that haunts: “How would I go back without him?”

Another returnee: “I’m going to Gaza City even though there are no conditions for life there—no infrastructure, no fresh water. Everything is extremely difficult, truly difficult, but we must go back.”

They return to nothing because it is still home. Because leaving would mean conceding victory to the men who wanted them gone. The resilience is remarkable. The necessity of that resilience is obscene.

But what should alarm us most profoundly is what we’re creating for the future: a generation that will never forget, never forgive, and has every reason for both.

Over 17,400 children killed. Hundreds of thousands more who survived but are profoundly traumatized, displaced, having watched their world systematically destroyed. And they watched it happen knowing the entire world was watching too—that’s the particular cruelty of this moment. This is the first genocide livestreamed in real time, documented on TikTok and Instagram and Twitter, every atrocity archived and undeniable.

Another president who thought pushing peace would rehabilitate his presidency.

An entire generation of Palestinian children has grown up watching their schools bombed, their families killed, their siblings starve to death—while the world watched on screens and called it “self-defense,” while international institutions issued warrants and orders that were promptly ignored, while weapons continued flowing and diplomatic cover persisted.

These children know. They saw. They will remember with the perfect clarity of trauma.

They’ll remember that 149 countries recognize Palestinian statehood but it didn’t matter. They’ll remember the International Court of Justice issued binding orders to prevent genocide and Israel ignored them. They’ll remember the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants and Netanyahu remained in power. They’ll remember the UN called it genocide and aid was still deliberately blocked.

Most significantly, they’ll remember that we all watched. Every adult with a smartphone, every news organization with correspondents on the ground, every government with intelligence capabilities—we all saw what was happening and, with few exceptions, did nothing or actively enabled it.

They’ll remember that Trump had the power to stop it from the moment he took office on January 20, 2025, and chose to delay meaningful intervention until October. They’ll remember that he waited until Israel had nothing left to offer him before finally acting substantively. They’ll remember watching their siblings die while the most powerful man in the world calculated his political advantage.

What happens to children who grow up watching atrocity, knowing the world witnessed and was largely indifferent? What happens when they come of age understanding viscerally that international law is conditional, that human rights are selectively applied, that some lives matter and others are acceptable collateral damage in someone else’s political calculations?

This isn’t abstract trauma that will fade with time and therapy. This is witnessed, documented, global-scale abandonment that will be carried forward by millions of young people who’ve learned exactly what the international community’s promises are worth. They’ve received their education in how power actually functions, who it protects, whose suffering is considered regrettable but necessary.

We cannot predict precisely how this generation will process what they’ve experienced and witnessed. History suggests collective trauma transforms—sometimes into extraordinary resilience and determination for justice, sometimes into despair and paralysis, and sometimes into the very cycles of violence that everyone claims to want to prevent. We are creating the conditions for one of these outcomes right now, in real time, and we seem largely unconcerned with which it will be.

Netanyahu, Trump, and Kushner won’t face these consequences. They’ll be insulated by wealth and power, living comfortably, perhaps even receiving awards for their supposed peacemaking. But the children who survived will be here, watching, remembering, knowing exactly who profited from their suffering and who looked away.

They will not forget that we all had screens in our pockets. That we all saw. That we all knew. That most of us did nothing.

There is nothing to celebrate in this “peace”—not in its timing, coming only after Israel exhausted its usefulness to Trump and the world’s tolerance for watching genocide in real time finally reached some ineffable limit. Not in its terms, which involve digital tokens and smart cities built on mass graves. Not in its architects, men motivated by legal jeopardy, narcissistic vanity, and the kind of predatory real estate ambition that sees opportunity in mass death.

Nothing to celebrate in over 67,000 dead. Nothing to celebrate in a generation of traumatized children who will carry this forward into a future we can barely imagine. Nothing to celebrate in a world that watched systematic atrocity unfold and largely responded with press releases expressing “concern.” Nothing to celebrate in a president who possessed the power to intervene from day one and chose to delay while calculating his advantage.

The era of “hands-off Israel no matter what” must end. The era of dangerous men orchestrating tragedy for personal gain—to avoid prison, to win undeserved prizes, to secure lucrative real estate deals—must end. The era of treating Palestinian lives as acceptable losses in someone else’s political calculations must end.

Until it does, there is nothing whatsoever to celebrate. Only warnings to heed, and a generation of witnesses we have catastrophically failed who will never, ever forget what we did and didn’t do.

If these men were products on store shelves, they would require warning labels detailing their dangers to human health and dignity. Instead, they are world leaders with nuclear codes and peace plans and private equity firms. The fact that this doesn’t seem to alarm us more is perhaps the most damning indictment of all.

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