The Great Trust and the 20 Points: Gimmicks of War and the Documentary Materiality of Genocide in Gaza

In 2025, PDF files circulated under the banner of “ceasefire” and “peace” in Gaza : a twenty-point diplomatic framework and an economic-development prospectus, circulating as a roughly 38-page GREAT Trust blueprint dense with speculative renderings and AI-generated imagery. Bringing science and technology studies and history to bear, I situate this paired dossier as a boundary object, an infrastructural medium that enables convening even as parties disagree and feasibility recedes. I argue that visual instruments sustain the circulation of a “plan” treated as fantastical across much of its audience while still reorganizing what counts as diplomatic action. I treat these PDFs as “gimmicks of war,” unstable artifacts of affective intensity that simultaneously overperform and underperform, staging authority through bullet points, diagrams, and images, an authority that draws precisely on this ambivalence. A placebo technology, they produce effects through belief, circulation, and institutional performance rather than accuracy, and crystallize a low techno-politics around small instruments displayed at decisive moments. Tracing the files’ material life across platforms and meeting rooms, I examine the sociotechnical pipeline, image-generation tools, data aesthetics, and presentation formats through which unfeasibility, spectacle, and the disavowal of Palestinian lives morph into administrative reason. I then place these artifacts in a comparative genealogy by tracing how negotiation documents have long operated as administrative genres across three enduring political questions in the modern Middle East: Armenia, Syria, and Palestine. Across these sites, documentary interfaces have prolonged mass violence by rendering it governable and diplomatically legible, translating populations into variables, corridors, screens, and futures to be managed. Drawing on the understanding that gimmicks of war outlive the encounters they convene in civilian and bureaucratic domains as reusable templates of visualization and prediction, this paper asks what their afterlives reveal about the ways perpetual war and exceptional governance return in everyday technological life.