Donald Trump’s Board of Peace promised twenty thousand peacekeepers for Gaza and delivered twenty. That is the arithmetic of a peace plan that was supposed to protect 2.1 million people from dying in the rubble of a war the same administration authorized. Four countries — Albania, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Morocco — are on course to sign formal commitments for a stabilization force that exists mostly in press releases. Indonesia, which had made a potential commitment of thousands of troops for this very deployment, paused its commitment after four of its peacekeepers were killed in the regional wars in Iran and Lebanon. The billions of dollars pledged for reconstruction have not materialized. Hamas refuses to disarm. Israel continues to carry out strikes, killing more than a thousand people since the ceasefire. Reconstruction has not begun. A peace plan that arrives as twenty soldiers is not a peace plan. It is a photograph. It is a press release held up while the people the press release was supposed to protect continue to die.
The architecture of this peace is a whitewashed tomb. You can dress a promise of twenty thousand in any language you like — Board of Peace, stabilization force, phase two, phased deployment — but twenty soldiers standing near the Kerem Shalom crossing do not stabilize 2.1 million people living among the bones of their own houses. A force of twenty cannot stabilize a graveyard. They stage the appearance of protection while the killing continues. The logistics hub is finished and the mission site remains unbuilt. The money has not touched the dust. You are using the language of peace to cover a slow suffocation.
We who watch this from a distance, who demand our leaders speak the language of peacemaking while we fund the weapons and bless the walls, are part of this architecture. The country I belong to has failed Gaza across more than one administration; this is not new and I will not pretend otherwise. The bombs came from us, in administrations of both parties, in years when we could have stopped and did not. The climate of abandonment that allows two million people to wait for a phantom army is one our own nations helped to build, one we continue to fund with our taxes and our silence. We are the Christians and the Catholics and the Jews and the Muslims and the Buddhists and the people of no tradition who read the prophets and the Sermon on the Mount and the Qur’an and have not yet done what any of them asks of us in this moment.
The prophet Jeremiah named this exact operation when he condemned those who heal the wound of the people lightly, saying “Peace, peace” when there is no peace. The modern operation is worse: it is saying “Peace” while building a fortress over the grave, and pretending the silence underneath is a resolution.
The globalization of indifference that Pope Francis wept for on the shores of Lampedusa has taken physical form in the rubble of the enclave. Today, the road is the Kerem Shalom crossing, and the wounded are left in the dust while the passers-by finish building the logistics hub and call it a stabilization force.
To the soldiers who have been sent, and to those who have not yet been sent: you are not the cruelty. The cruelty is the arithmetic — twenty thousand promised, twenty delivered, the photograph taken either way. You are people who answered a call to protect the vulnerable, and you have been given a number that does not protect anyone. When you come home, tell what you saw. The testimony of soldiers who have seen what twenty peacekeepers can do for 2.1 million people, and what twenty thousand could have done, is the testimony the country has agreed not to hear. Bring it anyway.
To the people making the decisions: you have a Board of Peace. The name is a claim about what you are doing. You have the money to do what you have named. The billions were pledged. The four countries are signing. The framework is in place. What is missing is the twenty thousand. Send them. The ceasefire is not a ceasefire while your strikes continue. The reconstruction is not reconstruction while no one rebuilds. The peace is not peace while twenty soldiers stand in for twenty thousand, and a thousand more people die in the rubble.
The Gospel of Matthew says: “I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.” The Gazans are strangers in their own land now, displaced from their own houses, refused the protection that was promised in writing. We have not welcomed them. We have sent twenty soldiers and a Board of Peace and a photograph.
The door of return is open. Like Óscar Romero reminding the soldiers that no human order supersedes the law of God, I tell you that no geopolitical phase supersedes the breath of a child in the ruins. Send the twenty thousand. End the strikes. Begin the reconstruction. Until then, the carpenter sweeps the dust, knowing that a house built on twenty troops and broken promises will not stand, and that the only foundation that holds is the one laid in the dirt with the people who have nowhere else to go. Twenty is not twenty thousand, and a photograph is not a peace.