Donald Trump’s strangely artificial Board of Peace event in Davos on Thursday looked like a Hollywood rendering of an international summit. Everything was too slick, faintly uncanny. Like an AI-generated image, it was photo-real yet failed the most basic human glance test. Too perfect. No wabi-sabi.

The first tell was visual: the set, complete with a crisp new institutional logo: a globe on a shield, flanked by olive branches. It carried the unmistakable whiff of Grok or ChatGPT, but the strangeness went deeper than design. The speeches themselves were weirdly messianic and utopian.

The most peculiar part was the show-within-a-show: a piece of political meta-theatre featuring Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner and a pre-recorded video greeting from Ali Shaath, newly appointed head of the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, the technocratic body intended to run Gaza’s civil administration under the new framework. Like Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzago, this pantomime may yet prove to be the event’s central dramatic device, designed to force an uncomfortable truth into the open. If that sounds far-fetched, stick with me.

The segment, billed as a showcase for Gaza’s reconstruction, unravelled into a series of contradictory and fantastical claims that strained credibility. Kushner, long associated with the Peace to Prosperity plan from Trump’s first term, once again took centre stage. Despite its wholesale rejection by Palestinians at the time, the plan has been defrosted, reheated and rebranded. Today it is called Phase B of the Trump ‘point plan’. But it is the same meal, just a bit staler.

Undeterred, Kushner radiated optimism. ‘We do not have a Plan B,’ he declared. ‘We have a plan. We signed an agreement.’ He spoke of holding Hamas to its commitment to disarm, planning for what he called ‘catastrophic success’. The concern most normal people have is that the catastrophe will vastly outweigh the success.

He noted, correctly, that roughly 85 per cent of Gaza’s GDP has long come from aid. ‘That’s not sustainable. It doesn’t give these people dignity. It doesn’t give them hope.’ He may be right. Yet he spoke as if Palestinian mainstream politics were not riddled with corruption and the systematic embezzlement of aid. Yasser Arafat died a billionaire. Hamas leaders today are exceptionally wealthy, many living comfortably in Qatar. The Palestinian........

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