If you have been following this newsletter, you know I have spent a long time tracking Oracle through nearly every corner of American infrastructure, from the Cerner rebuild to the Stargate contracts to the Warner Brothers merger. But what has been breaking over the last twenty-four hours is the international version of that same story, and once you see the shape of it, the news stops looking like a collection of separate crises and starts looking like a sequence.
Yesterday, someone noticed that Apple Maps had removed the names of nearly every town and village in Lebanon. Google Maps still showed them, and every other mapping service still showed them. Apple’s version showed the roads, the borders, the coastline, but the towns had no names. No explanation was offered. This happened on the same day Israel announced a stated goal of demolishing every town along the Lebanese border village by village, the same day peace talks with Iran collapsed in Pakistan, and the same day the United States announced a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz beginning Monday morning.
These are not four separate crises, they are one story–and the thread running through all of them leads to the same place.
The Board
In January 2026, the UN Security Council voted to endorse an international body called the Board of Peace, with a stated purpose of overseeing Gaza’s reconstruction. Twenty-six countries signed on, Trump was named chairman, and on paper it looked like multilateral diplomacy finally catching up to a catastrophe. But the Security Council voted on the concept before the charter was ever made public, which means they endorsed an idea of the Board before anyone outside a very small circle had read the actual rules. An international body was legitimized before anyone knew what it was, which is not a procedural footnote. It is the whole trick.
When the charter finally surfaced, two things became clear. The first is that Trump is named in it personally, not as President of the United States but as a private individual, as lifetime chairman. The emoluments rules that prevent a sitting president from profiting from foreign governments stop applying the moment he leaves office, and countries pay one billion dollars for a permanent seat. JPMorgan is currently in negotiations to set up a private account for the organization, accessible to Trump personally. What waits for him on the other side of January 2029 is a multi-billion dollar international body with no auditing, no geographic limit, and no oversight, which he controls for life.
The second thing is that the charter does not mention Gaza. The word is not in the document.
Instead, the charter grants the Board authority to operate in any region affected or threatened by conflict, anywhere in the world, which means any territory at war, any territory recovering from a war, or any territory that someone with power decides is threatened by a war, qualifies. Lebanon qualifies. Iran, if this war continues, qualifies. The Security Council was told this body was about Gaza, but the founding document was written to go anywhere. The political cover of a humanitarian crisis made it possible to build something that would have been unthinkable under any other circumstances, and once it exists, it can be pointed at any map. The opening crisis gave the Board its legitimacy, and the charter made sure the Board would never be limited to it.
Trump chairs the Board, but he does not architect systems like this. He does not write charters or build twenty-year infrastructure plays across multiple countries, and his role here is being the name on the door. So who built it?
The Network
When I started pulling on the Board’s membership, six of the nine members connect to one man: Larry Ellison.
Most people know Ellison as the Oracle billionaire, but his relationship to the Israeli military is not philanthropic, it is operational. He is the largest private donor to the Israeli military in American history, having given over twenty-six million dollars to Friends of the IDF since 2014, including a sixteen and a half million dollar donation in 2017 that was the largest single gift in that organization’s history. Beyond the donations, Oracle holds a twenty-six year contract to build and operate the IT infrastructure for the IDF’s intelligence campus in the Negev, the facility that houses Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence and cyber warfare division. Oracle runs the Israeli Air Force’s entire logistics system, tracking spare parts for F-35s and F-16s, aviation fuel, and munitions inventory. Oracle hosts a battlefield AI system called Fire Weaver that coordinates sensors and weapons in real time, which means Oracle software is making decisions inside the kill chain. The company’s own CEO, Safra Catz, said on the record that Oracle’s commitment to Israel is second to none.
Now look at who Ellison put on the Board of Peace.
In 2015, Ellison had dinner with Marco Rubio, then a senator, and after that dinner he emailed the Israeli UN Ambassador and wrote: “Great meeting with Marco Rubio. I set him up to meet with Tony Blair. Marco will be a great friend for Israel.” Within weeks, Ellison directed five million dollars to Rubio’s Super PAC. Those emails surfaced in 2024 through a hack verified by Drop Site News, and in that one message Ellison told you exactly what he was doing. He was not courting a politician. He was placing one. Ten years later, Rubio is Secretary of State and Acting National Security Advisor, the first person to hold that dual role since Henry Kissinger, and he sits on the Board of Peace.
Tony Blair is also on the Board, and his institute has received over three hundred million dollars from Ellison’s foundation. A Lighthouse Reports investigation drawing on twenty-nine current and former staff sources found that the institute employs a dedicated staff member just to manage the Oracle partnership, shares a board member with Oracle, and was described by former employees as an offshoot of Oracle. Blair’s institute wrote the governance blueprint for how Gaza would be administered after the war, Kushner brought that blueprint to Davos, and the Board of Peace is now implementing it. The former prime minister who designed the reconstruction plan is funded by the billionaire who introduced the Secretary of State to him a decade ago, and I keep returning to that 2015 dinner because it is the clearest window into how this network operates. It does not run through institutions. It runs through relationships that were built long before anyone needed them.
Jared Kushner is the single most connective figure on the Board. The day after he left the White House in 2021, he launched a private investment fund called Affinity Partners, and within months Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund invested two billion dollars in it, despite their own financial advisors rating the fund unsatisfactory in all aspects. The UAE and Qatar followed. A Senate Finance Committee investigation later concluded the fund is likely part of a compensation scheme involving US political figures designed to circumvent foreign agent registration laws, and Kushner now sits on the Board of Peace negotiating the future of Gaza while the governments funding his private firm sit across the table as member states.
But his most important relationship on this board is not with the Gulf states. It is with Benjamin Netanyahu, and it predates every official role either of them has ever held. When Netanyahu visited New Jersey in the 1990s, before his first term as prime minister, he stayed at the Kushner family home and slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom, because Charles Kushner was paying him hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees. A leaked donor list from 2007 ranked Charles Kushner in Netanyahu’s top tier of potential political patrons alongside Sheldon Adelson, and Donald Trump appeared on the same list in the bottom tier. Netanyahu rated Charles Kushner as a more reliable patron than Donald Trump a full decade before Trump became president. Netanyahu is not on the Board of Peace, and he does not need to be.
Two of the nine board seats were concealed at the January announcement and only surfaced ten days later through a leaked document. One belongs to Susie Wiles, the sitting White House Chief of Staff, and the other belongs to Martin Edelman, General Counsel of G42, a UAE sovereign AI company. On January 16th, 2025, four days before Trump’s inauguration, Edelman signed a deal moving one hundred and eighty-seven million dollars from UAE entities to Trump’s family, and exactly one year later, on January 16th, 2026, Edelman was placed on the Board of Peace. They hid those names because announcing them would have made the conflict of interest the story before the Board ever got off the ground.
The Playbook
The same month the Board of Peace launched, Oracle signed a deal with Lebanon to digitize its entire public administration and train fifty thousand civil servants. Oracle got the Lebanon contract before the bombs.
In Gaza, that process is already complete. Oracle’s cloud runs the Board of Peace’s operations, and Palantir, which has a formal strategic partnership with Oracle and a permanent desk inside the Civil Military Coordination Center in southern Israel, now tracks the aid on top of Oracle’s infrastructure. That center is the operational headquarters of the Board of Peace, which means the software that ran the war is running the reconstruction, and the war phase and the peace phase are the same contract.
The pattern is this: infrastructure goes in first, the country destabilizes, the systems that were not Oracle get destroyed, and on the other side of the destruction, Oracle is already holding the rebuild contract. Gaza is the finished version, and Lebanon is next.
And then there is Iran, which has ninety million people and which Oracle cannot legally touch. US sanctions have kept that wall airtight for thirty years, and Iran’s government systems, its banking, its communications, all run on Russian and Chinese platforms, with no Oracle presence of any kind. Iran watched the Oracle contract go into Lebanon in January and watched Oracle’s infrastructure move into Gaza’s reconstruction, and twelve days ago the IRGC struck an Oracle data center in Dubai and named Oracle their number one military target, ranked above Lockheed, above Raytheon. They did not treat Oracle like a tech company. They treated it like a combatant, because within the architecture of the IDF, that is functionally what it is.
The Iranian negotiators at the Pakistan talks set one condition before talks could begin: a ceasefire in Lebanon. They said on the record that aggression toward Lebanon is aggression toward Iran, and when the US refused, the talks collapsed and the blockade was announced. The Iran talks and the Lebanese bombing campaign were never separate tracks. One ended the other.
Two hundred and thirty oil tankers are sitting in the Gulf right now. The Strait of Hormuz blockade begins Monday at ten a.m. Eastern. The US delegation in Pakistan included Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, both of whom sit on the Board of Peace, and we are watching the same people manage the war and design the peace, with the peace already contracted out.
When this ends, one of two things will be true: either the sanctions wall holds and Iran stays closed, or it comes down. I don’t know which one it will be, but I know who is positioned for both.
Sources Cited
The Board of Peace
“Charter of the Board of Peace” — Times of Israel, January 17, 2026. Full text of the charter. Confirms Trump as lifetime chairman, no mention of Gaza, mandate extends to any region “affected or threatened by conflict.”
“The Board of Peace: What We Know About Its Role, Reach and Limits” — Better World Campaign, updated February 18, 2026. Confirms launch via UN Security Council Resolution 2803, charter signed at Davos January 22, 2026.
“International Law and the Trump Board of Peace Charter” — Arab Center DC, January 20, 2026. Analysis confirming UNSC mandate was limited to Gaza through 2027 while charter grants unlimited global mandate; $1 billion permanent seat structure.
The Network
“Larry Ellison Vetted Marco Rubio for Fealty to Israel, Hacked Emails Reveal” — Drop Site News, October 1, 2025. Primary source for the Ellison-Rubio-Blair dinner, the Prosor emails, and the $5 million Super PAC donation.
“Blair and the Billionaire” — Lighthouse Reports, January 14, 2026. Confirms $130 million paid by Ellison’s foundation to TBI 2021–2023, $218 million pledged since; dedicated Oracle partnership staff member; former employees describe TBI as Oracle sales operation.
“Wyden, Garcia Investigate Kushner Raising Billions from Middle East Governments” — Senate Finance Committee, March 18, 2026. Senate investigation confirming Kushner soliciting Gulf sovereign wealth funds while co-leading Trump administration Middle East negotiations.
“Report: Jared Kushner’s $2 Billion Saudi Check Appears Even More Corrupt” — Vanity Fair, May 2022. Documents PIF’s own advisory panel rated Affinity “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; MBS overruled them to invest $2 billion.
“Benjamin Netanyahu Literally Slept in Jared Kushner’s Childhood Bedroom” — The North Star, March 25, 2026. See also original reporting: “When Netanyahu Slept at the Kushners” — Jerusalem Post, February 13, 2017. Charles Kushner paid Netanyahu $400,000 in speaking fees confirmed by Newsweek, February 14, 2017.
“Exclusive: Leaked ‘Board of Peace’ Resolution Outlines U.S.-Led Plan to Rule Over Gaza” — Drop Site News, January 25, 2026. Source for Susie Wiles and Martin Edelman as concealed board members.
The Playbook: Lebanon
“Oracle to Build Lebanon’s Digital Capacities” — The Beiruter, December 9, 2025. Confirms MoU signed December 8, 2025 to train 50,000 Lebanese citizens; signed in presence of US Ambassador Michel Issa.
“Oracle in Lebanon Could Threaten Digital Sovereignty” — SMEX (Social Media Exchange), February 1, 2026. Analysis of Oracle MoU’s implications for Lebanese digital infrastructure dependency.
Apple Maps / Lebanon village names: “Fact Check: Is Apple Erasing Lebanese Towns from Maps App?” — Newsweek, April 13, 2026. Apple denies removing names; says villages were never in Apple Maps to begin with. Viral claim originated April 11–12, 2026. Note: Apple disputes this characterization. Their statement says the villages were never included, not recently removed.
The Playbook: Gaza
“NEW: Palantir’s AI Is Already Playing a Major Role in Tracking Gaza Aid Deliveries” — Drop Site News, February 25, 2026. Confirms Palantir permanent desk at CMCC; CMCC named as Board of Peace operational HQ; Palantir operates on Oracle cloud infrastructure; reconstruction framed as financial “unlocking” at Board of Peace inaugural summit.
Iran and the IRGC
“Iran Says Attacks Oracle Data Center; Dubai Authorities Deny” — Xinhua, April 3, 2026. IRGC claims strike on Oracle data center in Dubai; Dubai government denies.
“Iran Says It Has Struck Oracle Data Center in Dubai” — Yahoo News / Times of India, April 3, 2026. Confirms IRGC named Oracle among companies accused of facilitating US and Israeli military operations, alongside Boeing, Cisco, HP, IBM, Meta, and Microsoft.
Oracle sanctions compliance: Oracle Global Trade Compliance page — Oracle Corporation. Official confirmation that all Oracle products and services are prohibited for export, re-export, transfer, or cloud access to Iran.
Oracle SEC disclosure on Iran transactions: Annual Report 10-K — SEC EDGAR, 2013. Oracle voluntary disclosure to OFAC of two inadvertent Iran-connected transactions totaling under $7,100; both terminated immediately upon discovery.
The Talks Collapse and Blockade
“US Military to Block Ships from Iranian Ports After Talks Yield No Agreement” — Reuters, April 11–12, 2026. Confirms 21-hour talks in Islamabad, Vance led US delegation, talks collapsed over nuclear demands and Strait of Hormuz; blockade announced.
“Trump Announces Naval Blockade on Iran After Peace Talks Collapse” — Axios, April 12, 2026.
“Vance, US Negotiators Depart Meeting with Iran After Peace Talks Fail” — Fox News, April 11, 2026. Iran’s four preconditions included ceasefire across “entire West Asia region.”
