JAN 24 — Some decisions are absurd. Some are insulting. And then there are decisions so cosmically deranged they make you feel like the world has finally given up pretending. Putting Benjamin Netanyahu on a Board of Peace is one of those. It isn’t irony. It isn’t satire. It’s geopolitical trolling with a straight face.

If you needed proof that “peace” is now a luxury export brand manufactured in the Global North and sold to the Global South, look no further than Davos — where suffering becomes a panel topic and reconstruction becomes a business vertical.

There is no place more allergic to accountability than Davos. It’s where billionaires meet to discuss “despair” while never allowing any of it to touch their clothing. Snow piles up outside the glass. The champagne never freezes. The panels promise sustainability, resilience, human rights — all the things their portfolios quietly undermine.

It’s in this cathedral of polite hypocrisy that Donald Trump unveils his new flagship product: the Board of Peace. The branding is almost perfect, in that way only American kitsch can be. The logo looks like the UN if it sold timeshares. Membership costs one billion dollars, because in Davos peace isn’t something you build; it’s something you buy.

The pitch is Gaza. Stop the war, rebuild the rubble, insert a technocratic administration, create a special economic zone, roll out the glossy renderings, and voilà — peace. Reconstruction as Ifixit.com meets SimCity, with a dash of colonial nostalgia for “order.”

Then comes the casting choice that tells you everything: Benjamin Netanyahu, a man facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for alleged war crimes including starving civilians, will help design peace for Gaza.

If you’re in Europe or America, this is “controversial.”

If you’re in the Global South, this is predictable.

We have seen this movie before, except usually it’s IMF technocrats writing austerity packages that starve children instead of artillery. The common thread is that the people designing your future are never the ones who lived your past.

People joked that appointing Netanyahu to a Board of Peace is like putting Jeffrey Epstein in charge of a daycare. But the joke lands differently when you come from a place where war wasn’t an abstraction. In the Global South, we know the daycare. We were the daycare.

Netanyahu’s travel now resembles that of a smuggler with better suits. His team has to choose flight paths based not on convenience but on ICC compliance. ICC member states become “no-go zones.” Friendly nations offer to ignore warrants like a shady mechanic offering to “fix” a failed inspection. Hungary volunteers as a legal safehouse and announces it wants to quit the ICC altogether. In another era this would be called aiding and abetting. In this era it’s called foreign policy alignment.

The absurdity of the whole production isn’t just that Netanyahu is wanted for alleged war crimes. It’s that this fact is treated as credential, not obstacle. In the world of Davos, impunity is a feature, not a bug. War crimes are not disqualifying — they’re résumé seasoning. “Relevant experience in the field.”

Meanwhile, the Gaza being discussed in PowerPoints is not the Gaza that exists on the ground. The real Gaza is devoid of metaphors. It is rubble, hospitals without anesthesia, parents burying children in plastic bags, surgeons amputating limbs to the sound of shelling, water shortages that turn into disease outbreaks, families searching through ruins for what used to be bedrooms.

Gaza is not broken because of failed governance. Gaza is broken because it was deliberately broken. Someone did this, and now that someone is being invited to oversee the cleanup.

This is the global order in miniature: the arsonist is hired as the fire safety consultant.

To make the farce complete, Trump and Kushner take the stage. Trump talks about peace the way real estate moguls talk about waterfront views — as an amenity that increases valuation. For Kushner, the Middle East is a legacy UX problem. If you just adjust the incentives and remove friction, maybe centuries of dispossession and occupation will dissolve into a venture capital pipeline.

Tony Blair hovers nearby, a living monument to the West’s ability to reinvent criminals as statesmen. The man helped sell the Iraq War on a PowerPoint and has been touring the speaking circuit ever since, as if Fallujah never happened.

They are joined by billionaires, hedge fund strategists, political fixers — people who think peace comes in quarterly reports and geopolitical risk matrices. If you don’t know what a “convertible bond” is, you are not in the peace business.

Notice something important: not a single Palestinian surgeon, aid worker, mother, engineer, historian, refugee, architect, or negotiator is on the Board of Peace. There are no Gazans in the room, because Gaza is not the point. The audience is the West. The product is legitimacy. The market is governments who want photo ops without accountability.

This is the fundamental difference between how peace is understood. In the West, peace is the management of violence. In the Global South, peace is the absence of violence. Management is still war. Ask Sri Lankans. Ask Somalis. Ask Congolese. Ask Colombians. Ask Afghans. Ask Palestinians.

Every corner of the Global South has a memory of peace-for-export schemes administered by foreign consultants with nice shoes. We get truth and reconciliation commissions, nation-building boot camps, and transitional justice frameworks. Meanwhile, no one ever suggests transitional justice for Britain for carving up continents, or for the United States for turning coups into foreign policy.

There’s a reason the Global South doesn’t clutch its pearls about Netanyahu’s ICC warrant. Not because we don’t care, but because we already learned that international law has tiers:

Tier 1 — For Western leaders: “We believe in a rules-based order.”

Tier 2 — For Western allies: “Mistakes were made.”

Tier 3 — For everyone else: “We regret to inform you that your airport is now a crater.”

The West will always indict African presidents first. It will always lecture Asian nations about democracy while arming monarchies in the Gulf. It will always sanction Latin America for corruption while laundering cartel money through Miami real estate. This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies the existence of values. This is simply policy coherence.

So when Netanyahu sits on a Board of Peace, the Global South understands the moral to the story:

Peace is not the reward for justice. Peace is the reward for power.

And yet here’s the part Davos cannot buy or brand: memory. Because while they plaster reconstruction plans over Gaza, Gaza will remember. The Arab street will remember. The refugee camps will remember. The journalists, the poets, the surgeons, the mothers — they will remember. And one thing the world has learned again and again — from South Africa, from Northern Ireland, from Kigali, from Jaffna — is that memory is the only form of justice that cannot be embargoed.

The West thinks peace is a document. The Global South knows peace is a reckoning.

And reckoning does not attend panels.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.