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A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’
(JTA) — Jeremy Dauber subtitles his new biography of Mel Brooks “Disobedient Jew.” It’s a phrase that captures two indivisible aspects of the 96-year-old director, actor, producer and songwriter.
The “Jew” is obvious. Born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, Brooks channeled the Yiddish accents and Jewish sensibilities of his old neighborhoods into characters like the 2000 Year Old Man — a comedy routine he worked up with his friend, the writer and director Carl Reiner. He worked Jewish obsessions into films like 1967’s “The Producers,” which features two scheming Jewish characters who stage a sympathetic Broadway musical about Hitler in order to bilk their investors.
Brooks’ signature move is to inject Jews into every aspect of human history and culture, which can be seen in the forthcoming Hulu series “History of the World, Part II.” A sequel to his 1981 film, “History of the World, Part I,” it parodies historical episodes in a style he honed as a writer on 1950s television programs such as “Your Show of Shows,” whose writers’ rooms were stocked with a galaxy of striving Jewish comedy writers just like him.
The “Disobedient” part describes Brooks’ relationship to a movie industry that he conquered starting in the early 1970s. In a series of parodies of classic movie genres — the Western in “Blazing Saddles,” the horror movie in “Young Frankenstein,” Alfred Hitchcock in “High Anxiety — he would gently, sometimes crudely and always lovingly bite the hand that was feeding him quite nicely: In 1976, he was fifth on the list of top 10 box office attractions, just behind Clint Eastwood.
Dauber describes the parody Brooks mastered as “nothing less than the essential statement of American Jewish tension between them and us, culturally speaking; between affection for the mainstream and alienation from it.”
Dauber is professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, whose previous books include “Jewish Comedy” and “American Comics: A History.” “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” is part of the Jewish Lives series of brief interpretative biographies from Yale University Press.
Dauber and I spoke about why America fell for a self-described “spectacular Jew” from Brooklyn, Brooks’ lifelong engagement with the Holocaust, and why “Young Frankenstein” may be Brooks’ most Jewish movie.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “History of the World, Part II” comes out March 6. “History of the World, Part I” may not be in the top tier of Brooks films, but it seems to touch on so many aspects of his career that you trace in your book: the parody of classic movie forms, the musical comedy, injecting Jews into every aspect of human civilization, and the anything-for-a-laugh sensibility.
Jeremy Dauber: I agree. There’s the one thing that really brings it home, and it’s probably the most famous or infamous scene from the film. That’s the Spanish Inquisition scene. You have Brooks sort of probing the limits of bad taste. He had done that most famously in “The Producers” with its Nazi kickline, but here he takes the same idea — that one of the ways that you attack antisemitism is through ridicule — and turns the persecution of the Jews into a big musical number. It’s his love of music and dance. But the thing that’s almost the most interesting about this is that he takes on the role of the Torquemada character.
As his henchman sing and dance and the Jews face torture, the Brooklyn-born Jew plays the Catholic friar who tormented the Jews.
That’s right. And what’s the crime that he accuses the Jews of? “Don‘t be boring! Don‘t be dull!” That’s the worst thing that you can be. It’s his way of saying, “If I have a religion, you know, it is show business.”
His fascination with showbiz seems inseparable from his Jewishness, as if being a showbiz Jew is a denomination in its own right.
One of my favorite lines of his is when he marries [actress] Anne Bancroft, who of course is not Jewish. And he says, “She doesn’t have to convert: She’s a star.” If you’re a star, if you’re a celebrity, you’re kind of in your own firmament faith-wise, and so it’s okay. Showbiz is this faith. But it is very Jewish, because show business is a way to acceptance. It’s a way that America can love him as a Jew, as Mel Brooks, as a kid from the outer boroughs who can grow up to marry Anne Bancroft.
Jeremy Dauber is the author of “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press)
You write early on that “Mel Brooks, more than any other single figure, symbolizes the Jewish perspective on and contribution to American mass entertainment.” On one foot, can you expand on that?
Jews understand that there’s a path to success and that being embraced by a culture means learning about it, immersing yourself in it, being so deeply involved in it that you understand it and master it. But simultaneously, you’re doing that as a kind of outsider. You’re always not quite in it, even though you’re of it in some deep way. In some ways, it’s the apotheosis of what Brooks does, which is being a parodist. In order to be the kind of parodist that Mel Brooks is, you have to be acutely attuned to every aspect of the cultural medium that you’re parodying. You have to know it inside and outside and backwards and forwards. And Brooks certainly does, but at the same time you have to be able to sort of step outside of it and say, you know, “Well, I’m watching a Western, but come on, what’s going on with these guys? Like why doesn’t anyone ever, you know, pass gas after eating so many beans?”
You have this great phrase, that to be an American Jew is to be part of the “loyal opposition.”
That’s right. Brooks at his best is always kind of poking and prodding at convention, but loyally. He’s not like the countercultural figures of his day. He’s a studio guy. He’s really within the system, but is poking at the system as well.
You wrote in that vein about his 1963 short film, “The Critic,” which won him an Oscar. Brooks plays an old Jewish man making fun of an art film.
On the one hand, he’s doing it in the voice of one of his older Jewish relatives, the Jewish generation with an Eastern European accent, to make fun of these kinds of intellectuals. He’s trying to channel the everyman’s response to high art. “What is this I’m watching? I don’t understand this at all.” On the other hand, Brooks is much more intellectual than he’s often given credit for.
For me the paradox of Brooks’ career is conveyed in a phrase that appears a couple of times in the book: “too Jewish.” The irony is that the more he leaned into his Jewishness, the more successful he got, starting with the “2000 Year Old Man” character, in which he channels Yiddish dialect in a series of wildly successful comedy albums with his friend Carl Reiner. How do you explain America’s embrace of these extremely ethnic tropes?
Brooks’ great motion pictures of the late 1960s and 1970s sort of track with America’s embrace of Jewishness. You have “The Graduate,” which came out at around the same time as “The Producers,” and which showed that someone like Dustin Hoffman can be a leading man. It doesn’t have to be a Robert Redford. You have Allan Sherman and all these popular Jewish comedians. You have “Fiddler on the Roof” becoming one of Broadway’s biggest hits. That gives Brooks license to kind of jump in with both feet. In the 1950s, writing on “The Show of Shows” for Sid Caesar, the Jewishness was there but in a very kind of hidden way. Whereas, it’s very hard to watch the 2000 Year Old Man and say, well, that’s not a Jewish product.
What he also avoided — and here I will contrast him with the novelist Philip Roth — were accusations that he was “bad for the Jews.” Philip Roth was told that his negative portrayals of Jewish characters was embarrassing the Jews in front of the gentiles, but for some reason, I don’t remember anyone complaining even though the Max Bialystock character in “The Producers” can be fairly described as a conniving Jew. What made Brooks’ ethnic comedy more palatable to other Jews?
“The Producers” had a lot of pushback, but for a lot of other reasons.
I guess people had enough to deal with when he staged a musical comedy about Hitler.
Exactly. But the other part is that his biggest films are not as explicitly Jewish as something like Roth’s novel “Portnoy’s Complaint.” I actually think “Young Frankenstein” is one of the most Jewish movies that Mel Brooks ever made, but you’re not going to watch “Young Frankenstein” and say, wow, there are Jews all over the place here.
What about “Young Frankenstein,” a parody of classic horror movies, seems quintessentially Jewish?
The script, which is a lot of Gene Wilder and not just Mel Brooks, is really about someone saying, “You know, I don’t have this heritage — I’m trying to fit in with everybody else. My name is Dr. FRAHNK-en-shteen.” And then people say, “No, this is your heritage. You are Dr. Frankenstein.” [Wilder’s character realizes] “it is my heritage, and I’m embracing it. And I’m Frankenstein. And you may find that monstrous but that’s your business.” It’s about assimilation and embracing who you are.
And of course, Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein is unmistakably Jewish, even when he plays a cowboy in “Blazing Saddles.”
Right. Again, by the mid-’70s, you know, you have Gene Wilder and Elliot Gould and Dustin Hoffman, all Jews, in leading roles. “Young Frankenstein” ends up being a movie about coming home and embracing identity, which is playing itself out a lot in American Jewish culture in the 1970s.
I guess I have to go back and watch it for the 14th time with a different point of view.
That’s the fun part of my job.
You talk about what’s happening at the same time as Brooks’ huge success, which is, although he’s a little younger, the emergence of Woody Allen. You describe Brooks and Woody Allen as the voice of American Jewish comedy, but in very different ways. What are the major differences?
Gene Wilder, who worked with both of them, says that working with Allen is like lighting these tiny little candles, and with Brooks, you’re making big atom bombs. The critical knock against Brooks was that he was much more interested in the joke than the story. And I think with the exception maybe of “Young Frankenstein” there’s a lot of truth to that. The jokes are phenomenal, so that’s fine. Allen pretty quickly moved towards a much more narrative kind of film, and so began to be seen as this incredibly intellectual figure. In real life, Allen always claimed that he wasn’t nearly as intellectual as everyone thought, while Brooks had many more kinds of intellectual ambitions than the movie career that he had. There is a counterfactual world in which “The 12 Chairs,” his 1970 movie based on a novel by two Russian Jewish novelists and which nobody talks about, makes a ton of money.
Instead, it bombs, and he makes “Blazing Saddles,” which works out very well for everybody.
Although he does create Brooksfilms, and produces more narrative, serious-minded films like “The Elephant Man” and “84 Charing Cross Road.”
Right, and decides that if he puts his name on these as a director, they’re going to be rejected out of hand. There is a shelf of scholarship on Woody Allen, but if you look at who had influence on America in terms of box office and popularity, it’s Brooks winning in a walk.
You also mention Brooks and Steven Spielberg in the same sentence. Why do they belong together?
Partly because they had huge popular success in the mid-’70s. Brooks is a generation older, but they are hitting their cinematic success at the same time. And they are both movie fans.
Which comes out in their work — Brooks in his film parodies and Spielberg in the films that echo the films he loved as kid.
Until maybe his remake of “West Side Story,” Spielberg is not really a theater guy in the way that Brooks is, when success meant to make it on Broadway. When Brooks was winning all those Tonys in 2001 for the Broadway musical version of “The Producers,” it may have been almost more meaningful for his 5-year-old, or 7- or 8-year-old self than making his incredibly popular pictures.
You also write about Brooks being a small “c” conservative, a bit of a square. Which I think will surprise people who think about the fart jokes and the peepee jokes and all that stuff. And by square, I mean, kind of old showbizzy, even a little prudish sometimes.
I think that’s right. There’s a great moment that I quote at the end of the book where they are trying out the musical version of “The Producers,” and they want to put the word “f–k” in and Brooks is like, “I don’t know if we can do that on Broadway,” and Nathan Lane is like, “Have we met? You’re Mel Brooks!” He’s a 1950s guy.
Another place where this kind of conservatism comes in is when you compare him to other comedians of the 1950s and ’60s — the so-called “sick comics” like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl who were pushing the envelope in terms of subject matter and politics. He wasn’t part of that. He was part of Hollywood. He was trying to make it in network television.
There is an interview in that era when he complained that people who are writing for television are not “dangerous.” Meanwhile, he himself was writing for television. But I think it’s fair to say that “The Producers” was really something different. You didn’t have to be Jewish to be offended by “The Producers.” But as we were saying before, he is more of the loyal opposition, rather than sort of truly out there. He’s not making “Easy Rider.”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
“The Producers” is part of Brooks’ lifelong gambit of mocking the Nazis, I think starting when he would sing anti-Hitler songs as a GI in Europe at the tail end of World War II. Later he would remake Jack Benny’s World War II-era anti-Nazi comedy, “To Be or Not to Be.” And then there is the quick “Hitler on Ice” gag in “History of the World, Part I.” Brooks always maintains that mocking Nazis is the ultimate revenge on them, while you note that Woody Allen in “Manhattan” makes almost the opposite argument: that the way to fight white supremacists is with bricks and baseball bats. Did you come down on one side or the other?
To add just a twinge of complication is the fact that Brooks actually fought Nazis, and also had a brother who was shot down in combat. So for me to sit in moral judgment on anybody who fought in World War II is not a place that I want to be. What’s interesting is that Brooks makes a lot of these statements over the course of a career in which Nazism is done, in the past, defeated. Tragically, the events of the last number of years made white supremacy and neo-Nazism a live question again. When “The Producers” was staged as a musical in the early 21st century, people could say, “Okay, Nazism’s time has passed.” It’s not clear to me that we would restage “The Producers” now as a musical on Broadway, when just last week you had actual neo-Nazis handing out their literature outside a Broadway show. It would certainly be a lot more laden than it was in 2001.
Time also caught up with Brooks in his depiction of LGBT characters. Gay characters are the punchlines in “The Producers” and “Blazing Saddles” in ways that have not aged well. But you also note how both movies are about two men who love each other, to the exclusion of women.
There’s an emotive component to him about these male relationships. Bialystok and Bloom [the protagonists in “The Producers”] is a kind of love story. One of the interesting things is that as it became comparatively more comfortable for gay men to live their truth in society and in Hollywood, there was an evolution. In that remake of “To Be or Not to Be,” there is a much more sympathetic gay character who’s not stereotypical.
What other aspects of Brooks’ Jewishness have we not touched upon? For instance, he’s not particularly interested in Judaism as a religion, and ritual and theology rarely come up in his films, even to be mocked.
It’s not something that he’s particularly interested in. To him, being Jewish is a voice and a language. From the beginning of his career the voice is there. What he’s saying in these accents is that this is Jewish history working through me. It is, admittedly, a very narrow slice of Jewish history.
The first- and second-generation children of Jewish immigrants growing up in Brooklyn neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Jewish.
It was a Jewishness that was aspirational. It was intellectual. It was a musical Jewishness. It was not in the way we use this phrase now, but it was a cultural Jewishness. It was not a synagogue Jewishness or a theological Jewishness. But of course he is Jewish, deeply Jewish. He couldn’t be anything else. And so he didn’t, and thank God for that.
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The post A history of Mel Brooks as a ‘disobedient Jew’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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US Envoy Calls for Syria Truce to Be Upheld
US special envoy for Syria Tom Barrack speaks during a press conference with Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shibani and Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi, in Damascus, Syria, Sept. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi
A US envoy called for a truce between the Syrian government and Kurdish-led forces to be upheld, urging steps to build trust after Damascus captured swathes of the northeast in a push to reassert central authority.
Tensions between President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) spilled into conflict this month as the SDF resisted government demands for its fighters and enclaves to be integrated into the state.
Under a ceasefire announced on Tuesday, the government gave the SDF four days to come up with a plan for its remaining enclaves to merge, and said government troops would not enter two remaining SDF-held cities if an agreement could be reached.
US envoy Tom Barrack said he met SDF commander Mazloum Abdi and leading Syrian Kurdish politician Ilham Ahmed on Thursday, and reaffirmed US support for an integration process set out in a Jan. 18 agreement.
“All parties agreed that the essential first step is the full upholding of the current ceasefire, as we collectively identify and implement confidence-building measures on all sides to foster trust and lasting stability,” he wrote on X.
The SDF, dominated by the Kurdish YPG militia, and the government have accused each other of violating the ceasefire since Tuesday.
The SDF was once Washington’s closest ally in Syria but its position has been weakened as President Donald Trump has deepened ties with Sharaa. Barrack said on Tuesday the original purpose of the SDF had largely expired.
The SDF has now fallen back to Kurdish-majority areas.
ABDI MEETS IRAQI KURDISH LEADER
Abdi also met Nechirvan Barzani, president of Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region, on Thursday. Iraqi Kurdish politician Wafa Mohammed of Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) said the meeting had been convened at the request of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership to discuss the SDF’s deal with Sharaa.
“There is strong US and international pressure on the Syrian Democratic Forces to end the disputes and implement the agreement, but that does not necessarily mean the US pressure will lead to a positive outcome. The problem is that the SDF does not trust the promises made by (Sharaa),” Wafa Mohammed told Reuters.
A second Iraqi Kurdish source close to the meeting said talks would also focus on a proposal for both sides to withdraw forces by around 10 km (6 miles) from the outskirts of Hasakah city, which is ethnically mixed and still in SDF hands.
The territories seized by the Syrian government from SDF control in recent days have included Syria‘s biggest oil fields, agricultural land, and jails holding Islamic State prisoners.
The SDF, which once held a quarter or more of Syria, has sought to preserve a high degree of autonomy for areas under its control, expressing concern that the Islamist-led government in Damascus aims to dominate the country, despite Sharaa’s promises to protect the rights of all Syrians.
A Syrian foreign ministry official said the government had preferred a political solution from the outset, and continued to, adding the rights of Kurds were guaranteed and they would not be marginalized as they had been under the ousted President Bashar al-Assad.
All “options were on the table,” the official told Reuters, speaking on the condition of anonymity, urging the YPG to “heed the voice of reason and come to the negotiating table.”
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Iran Exposed the Myth of Independent Journalistic Access
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 17, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
In October 2025, an opinion piece published in Iran International cited a telling remark by British broadcaster Jon Snow about his reporting from Tehran. When asked how his network, Channel 4, managed to secure access to Iranian officials, he said simply, “They whistle, and we go.”
That seemingly innocuous line was jumped on by journalists and critics because it revealed something about the way Western media covers authoritarian states like Iran. It was a rare moment of honesty but also representative of a deeper issue in Western journalism and a reminder that when dealing with tyrants, access is not the same thing as truth.
Access as Control: How Authoritarian Power Shapes Reporting
Snow’s comment should make anyone who cares about reporting from conflict zones or closed societies sit up and take note. The problem is not just that some correspondents end up parroting the messaging of the regimes they cover. The bigger problem is that the structure of modern foreign reporting rewards access above all else. If you have a visa, if you have a fixer approved by the intelligence services, if the state can decide where you go and who you interview, then you are in. If you challenge the narrative you are shown, you risk losing that access. The idea is simple: stay onside with power and you stay in the country; challenge power and you are out. This is a kind of press freedom in name only.
This dynamic is not unique to Iran, though the Iranian case makes the point with shocking clarity. To report from Iran, Western journalists must operate under state supervision. Their fixers are often regime-approved minders who decide which families they can meet, which streets they can visit, and what stories they can tell. The price of defiance is expulsion. Most choose to stay, and so they comply. The result is journalism that reports through the regime’s lens. In this case, the coverage mirrors Tehran’s narrative while ignoring its contradictions or its crimes.
The Iran International article highlighted how this kind of reporting perpetuates the illusion that “moderates” or “reformists” within the clerical regime are always on the brink of pursuing a more friendly policy toward the West, if only Washington and its partners would be more conciliatory.
But they are the only ones able to meet with foreign press, for a reason.
It must be acknowledged how easy it is, due to simple language barriers, for a regime like Iran to tell the West one thing, through these hyper-managed interviews, and to tell their allies or their own people something entirely different. In Iran, a younger, connected, defiant secular generation is fighting for their lives against a religious dictatorship.
Stories about women walking unveiled in defiance of the compulsory hijab law are rarely told with the depth and persistence they deserve, even though they represent one of the most sustained grassroots challenges to the Islamic Republic.
When Gatekeepers Become Storytellers
This tension between access and truth is not a quirk of reporting on Iran. It applies across many of the most important conflict zones of our time.
Look at how journalists cover the Palestinian territories. To report from the West Bank or Gaza, you need permission from the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, or the relevant security forces. If you want to talk to armed groups such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad, you must do so through intermediaries, and translators, and with the blessing of those groups.
The consequence is that journalists become dependent on these authorities to open doors for them. That dependency shapes the story. The authorities are the gatekeepers and the journalists end up telling the story they want told rather than the story that needs to be heard.
The same dynamic is evident in southern Lebanon.
In 2006, Nic Robertson of CNN spoke about his experience covering the conflict in Lebanon and how Hezbollah “had control of the situation.” That level of control creates an environment where reporters must negotiate and constantly accommodate the group’s conditions for reporting, if they want to stay in the country and file their stories. That negotiation inevitably affects the substance of the reporting. Some stories that might make those groups uncomfortable never get told. The result is a version of events curated by those terrorists themselves.
When a regime-backed organization can quietly move money, people, and logistics through cartel routes, the southern border stops being a political debate and becomes a national security vulnerability.
The Iranian regime’s threat to the U.S. doesn’t just rely on missiles. It… pic.twitter.com/kHU8OwX76Q
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 16, 2026
The Cost of Choosing Access Over Truth
And that brings us to the central problem. Journalists who operate under these conditions face a stark choice: they can stay close to power and preserve access, or they can push harder for truth and risk being shut out. Many choose to stay. That choice is understandable on a personal level. Journalists want to be where the action is. They want to file video and cables from the front lines. They want their editors to see them as intrepid and essential. But when access is the primary measure of success, it distorts what journalism is supposed to do. Journalism is supposed to challenge power, not accommodate it. It is supposed to expose abuses and amplify voices that might otherwise go unheard. But when access is controlled by those in power, journalism can become an unintentional arm of propaganda.
This dynamic matters beyond public opinion, but also politically, as leaders in Western capitals still rely on the press to gauge what is happening inside these societies. When the media misreads a country, so do the governments that read the media. Western policy on Iran for decades has been shaped by reporting that overemphasized factionalism and the potential for internal reform, even as the reality on the ground showed a population oppressed by the clerical establishment. That disconnect between media portrayal and lived reality has consequences for diplomacy and strategy.
Some journalists have tried to break free from this dynamic. But journalists who take that approach often find it difficult to return. They may be denied visas or locked out of future assignments. That is part of the price of choosing truth over access.
This issue does not mean that journalists should never go to places like Iran, Gaza, the West Bank, or southern Lebanon. On the contrary, those places deserve reporting. But it does mean rethinking how that reporting is done and how it is viewed and understood. Journalists must be willing to acknowledge the limitations of access, to report on what they are not shown, and to seek out voices beyond those sanctioned by power. We need journalism that recognizes the structural pressures that shape reporting and ultimately pushes back against them.
If and when journalists do eventually get deeper access to places like Gaza, they will face the same issues. Access will be contingent. Permission will be dependent on staying within certain lines. Journalists will need to think clearly about the ethical and professional implications of those conditions. Should they accept them in order to be able to say that they were there? Or should they insist on the freedom to report what they see and hear without being steered by those who have an interest in shaping the narrative? That is a question every correspondent must answer for themselves.
Ultimately, the lesson of Jon Snow’s offhand comment about reporting in Iran should not be boiled down to a joke or a sound bite. It should be a warning. Journalism that prioritizes access over truth fails its audience. It confuses permission for credibility. It allows power to define the terms of reporting instead of letting reality speak for itself. If we want journalism that truly informs and challenges the powerful, then we need to demand more of the reporters in the field and more of the editors who send them there. We need journalism that listens to the streets and not just to those pulling the strings.
Founder of the modern Jewish Pride movement, Ben M. Freeman is the author of Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People (2021), Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride (2022), and The Jews: An Indigenous People (2025). Educating, inspiring and empowering, his work focuses on Jewish identity and historical and contemporary Jew-hatred. A Holocaust scholar for over 15 years, Ben came to prominence during the Corbyn Labour Jew-hate crisis in the UK and quickly became one of his generation’s leading Jewish thinkers and voices against Jew-hate.
This article was originally published by HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Trump Launches Board of Peace, Says International Body Will Work ‘In Conjunction With’ UN
President Donald Trump takes part in a charter announcement for his Board of Peace initiative aimed at resolving global conflicts, alongside the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF), in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
US President Donald Trump on Thursday launched his Board of Peace, initially designed to cement Gaza’s rocky ceasefire but which he foresees taking a wider role worrying to other global powers, although he said it would work with the United Nations.
“Once this board is completely formed, we can do pretty much whatever we want to do. And we’ll do it in conjunction with the United Nations,” Trump said, adding that the UN had great potential that had not been fully utilized.
Trump, who will chair the board, invited dozens of other world leaders to join, saying he wants it to address challenges beyond the stuttering Gaza ceasefire, stirring misgivings that it could undermine the UN’s role as the main platform for global diplomacy and conflict resolution.
While regional Middle East powers including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, as well as major emerging nations such as Indonesia, have joined the board, global powers and traditional Western US allies have been more cautious.
Trump says permanent members must help fund with a payment of $1 billion each, and Reuters could not immediately spot any representatives from governments of top global powers or from Israel or the Palestinian Authority at the signing ceremony.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the board‘s focus would be on making sure the plan for peace in Gaza was fulfilled but that it could also “serve as an example of what’s possible in other parts of the world.”
GLOBAL ROLE
Apart from the US, no other permanent member of the UN Security Council – the five nations with the most say over international law and diplomacy since the end of World War II – has yet committed to join.
Russia said late on Wednesday it was studying the proposal after Trump said it would join. President Vladimir Putin said Moscow was willing to pay $1 billion from frozen US assets in the US “to support the Palestinian people,” state media said.
France declined to join. Britain said on Thursday it was not joining at present. China has not yet said whether it will do so.
The board‘s creation was endorsed by a United Nations Security Council resolution as part of Trump‘s Gaza peace plan, and UN spokesperson Rolando Gomez said on Thursday that UN engagement with the board would only be in that context.
Few of the countries that have signed up for the board are democracies, although Israel, Argentina, and Hungary, whose leaders are close allies of Trump and supporters of his approach to politics and diplomacy, have said they will join.
“There’s tremendous potential with the United Nations, and I think the combination of the Board of Peace with the kind of people we have here … could be something very, very unique for the world,” said Trump, who has long disparaged the UN and other institutions of multilateral cooperation.
Board members also include Rubio, the US Gaza negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
BRITTLE GAZA CEASEFIRE
Kushner, who is Trump‘s son-in-law, said the next phase of the Gaza ceasefire deal would address funding for reconstruction in the territory, which lies mostly in ruins, as well as disarmament by Gaza’s dominant Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, one of the most intractable unresolved issues.
“If Hamas doesn’t demilitarize, that would be what holds this plan back,” Kushner said.
“The next 100 days we’re going to continue to just be heads down and focused on making sure this is implemented. We continue to be focused on humanitarian aid, humanitarian shelter, but then creating the conditions to move forward.”
In a sign of progress on unresolved elements of the first phase of the truce, the Palestinian technocratic committee leader Ali Shaath said the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, Gaza’s main gateway, would reopen next week.
The ceasefire in Gaza, agreed in October, has sputtered for months with Israel and Hamas trading blame for repeated bursts of violence.
Both sides accuse each other of further violations, with Israel saying Hamas has procrastinated on returning a final body of a dead hostage and Hamas saying Israel has continued to restrict aid into Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted an invitation to join the board, the Israeli leader’s office said. Palestinian factions have endorsed Trump‘s plan and given backing to a transitional Palestinian committee meant to administer the Gaza Strip with oversight by the board.
Even as the first phase of the truce falters, its next stage must address much tougher long-term issues that have bedeviled earlier negotiations, including Hamas disarmament, security control in Gaza, and eventual Israeli withdrawal.