Dana Al Kurd (10:59)
Now. Things get even worse when we bring in the guy who's been tapped to be the Director General of this board. Nikolay Mladinov is a Bulgarian politician, an ex UN envoy who has been tasked with, quote, disarming Gaza. According to a report by Al Jazeera published January 15, he's the guy who's going to oversee the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic government which is run by Palestinian bureaucrats, and make sure that they stay in line during the reconstruction phase. Somehow these bureaucrats are supposed to reconstruct Gaza while not being able to operate in most of it Anyway. Madanov, this guy is really something. He's a Bulgarian diplomat that worked as a minister for one of the most corrupt governments in Bulgaria, a government that faced mass protest pretty persistently. He is part of a right wing populist party in Bulgaria. His father was also involved in politics, specifically in the Bulgarian version of the KGB before the transition from the communist regime. Since 2021, he's been working in an Emirati institution, the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, where he came out as a vocal proponent of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states. Now, it all checks out honestly that this is the guy who's going to be the Director General. The fact that this person is the one being chosen for phase two of the ceasefire and the fact that he has this kind of political background should make clear that the plan for Gaza isn't just a blueprint for the world new levels of authoritarian conflict management with no pretense, but also part and parcel of the US Israeli Emirati vision for the region. Now, this vision is one where Arab authoritarian regimes and Israel, with the US supporting, remake the Middle east into a, quote, modern, developed, tolerant Middle east, essentially by pouring concrete over graves and building mega cities on top of rubble. Their vision of the Middle east is one that is authoritarian and contained more citizens are subjects. These subjects can have some social freedoms and maybe some economic opportunities, but should never think that they can have an opinion on anything that happens to them. This is a vision where states like the uae, the United Arab Emirates can arm militias to conduct ethnic cleansing in Sudan, and Israel can get away with ethnic cleansing in Palestine, because ethnic cleansing and genocide are apparently a perfectly reasonable way to, of getting rid of undesirables. Now, I'm not saying that this isn't how these states operated even before the genocide in Gaza, and I'm not saying it wasn't how the US allowed certain allies to operate even before Trump. Perhaps the writing was on the wall when Palestinians were indefinitely occupied and no one cared, or when Artsakh was ethnically cleansed and Azerbaijan got away with it. President Biden gave his blessing to the destruction of Gaza after October 7, after all. But there used to be a pretense, a pretense of international law and a liberal international order. There also used to be variation on these issues. This type of authoritarian conflict management wasn't always tolerated. In fact, Arab liberals who advocated for democracy would often say that the US is different from China or Russia in that at least it was committed to democracy and international law and human rights. Rhetorically, even if there was hypocrisy, they thought that that space between reality and rhetoric could be leveraged and exploited. But now there's nothing to be leveraged. Authoritarian conflict management is the modus operandi of powerful states. And according to Donald Trump's new doctrine, the Don Road doctrine, each powerful state gets to do what it wants in its own sphere of influence. In fact, not only is territorial aggression valid, it's actually the way the world should work. According to all of Trump's spokespeople and parts of his administration, conquest is totally fine. Here's Stephen Miller on Greenland, for example. Under every understanding of law that has existed about territorial control for 500 years, to control a territory, you have to be able to defend a territory, improve a territory, inhabit a territory. Denmark has failed on every single one of these tests. So Gaza is indeed the blueprint for what happens to weaker states in war, or what happens in this case to stateless people deemed undesirable and expendable. Now, what are the Palestinians saying about all this? The technocratic government made up of Palestinian bureaucrats is saying it's committed to a reconstruction of Gaza that is rooted in, quote, peace, democracy and justice. The Palestinian Authority, the largely illegitimate and undemocratic governance body that apparently governs the west bank somehow and represents Palestinians. They're putting out statements welcoming the Board of Peace and Trump's vision, maybe because they think this will earn them a seat at the table, or maybe it's a way to sideline their main opposition, Hamas, in whatever crumbs of Palestine they're allowed to control in the future. Hamas has said in a statement that they also welcome the formation of the Administrative Committee for the Gaza Strip to, quote, achieve calm in Gaza, while noting that they are working with mediators to get to the next stage of the ceasefire. And they accuse Israel of trying to break the ceasefire agreement. The Israeli government ironically rejects any Palestinian involvement, even at the technocratic level, and have vowed to take it up with their friend Trump and the Palestinian people. Well, here is Gazan journalist Hind Khadari of Al Jazeera.
