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The proposal to establish a so-called “Gaza Board for Peace” must be rejected outright. It is not a pathway to peace but a mechanism of control, a political contraption designed to manage Palestinians rather than liberate them. Peace cannot be subcontracted to boards, overseen by foreign powers, or engineered through technocratic committees whose legitimacy does not arise from the people they claim to serve. The task of peace-building in Gaza belongs to Palestinians alone. Anything else will fail—and worse, it will facilitate land theft under the guise of reconstruction.
History is unequivocal on this point. Peace imposed from above, especially in contexts of colonial occupation, does not resolve conflict; it institutionalises injustice. The language may be new—“stability,” “post-conflict governance,” “transitional administration”—but the logic is old. It is the logic of trusteeship, the same logic that governed colonial mandates in Africa and Asia, and more recently shaped the disastrous experiments in Iraq and Afghanistan. These arrangements do not empower local populations; they discipline them.
At its core, the Gaza Board proposal rests on a profound denial of Palestinian political agency. Palestinians are treated not as a people with rights, history, and political consciousness, but as a humanitarian problem to be managed. Their political institutions are deemed inconvenient, their resistance delegitimised, their voices filtered through “acceptable” intermediaries. A board that decides Gaza’s future without being rooted in Palestinian consent is not neutral—it is an instrument of domination.
Peace is not a technical exercise. It is not achieved through governance frameworks, flowcharts, or donor conferences. Peace emerges from justice, accountability, and self-determination. Any initiative that bypasses these fundamentals is designed to fail. Worse, it is designed to distract from the real issue: Israel’s ongoing occupation, siege, and systematic destruction of Palestinian life.
The proposal also masks a far more dangerous agenda—land theft. Reconstruction has always been a political act in Palestine. From 1948 onwards, “development” has been used to consolidate dispossession. Villages are erased and replaced with infrastructure that serves new demographic realities. Temporary arrangements become permanent facts on the ground. Gaza’s ruins, soaked in blood, now risk becoming the pretext for demographic engineering and territorial consolidation.
A board overseeing Gaza’s reconstruction without Palestinian sovereignty would inevitably entrench this process. While bureaucrats debate timelines and budgets, Israel retains control over borders, airspace, sea access, and movement. Land confiscations are normalised. The right of return is quietly sidelined. What is framed as rebuilding becomes a mechanism for freezing injustice.
Equally troubling is how such proposals reframe the problem itself. Gaza is not in crisis because it lacks administrators. It is in crisis because it is under siege. It is bombed, starved, and isolated. To suggest that governance reform is the solution is to obscure the crime. This narrative transforms occupation into a managerial failure and war crimes into logistical challenges. It is moral evasion disguised as pragmatism.
The international community has perfected this art of evasion. By focusing on governance structures rather than political rights, it avoids confronting Israel’s impunity. Boards, commissions, and special envoys multiply, while accountability disappears. The occupation becomes permanent because it is never named as the central problem.
Such initiatives also serve donor and geopolitical interests rather than Palestinian needs. These boards are accountable upward—to Western capitals, financial institutions, and regional power brokers—not downward to the people of Gaza. Stability becomes the overriding objective, but stability in this context means quiet. It means the suppression of resistance, the pacification of anger, and the management of despair.
This is not peace. It is containment.
The rhetoric of “security” is especially revealing. Whose security is being prioritised? Certainly not that of Palestinian children who have known nothing but bombardment. Certainly not that of families who live under constant threat of displacement. Security, in these proposals, is coded language for Israeli strategic interests. Palestinian safety is reduced to a secondary concern, conditional and negotiable.
We have seen this script before. The Oslo Accords promised peace but delivered fragmentation. Palestinian territory was carved into administrative zones while Israel retained real power. A Palestinian Authority was created, but without sovereignty, it became a buffer between the occupier and the occupied. Oslo did not fail because Palestinians rejected peace; it failed because peace was never the objective. Control was.
The Gaza Board proposal is Oslo redux, stripped even of its pretence. It does not even pretend to lead to sovereignty. It speaks of management, not liberation; coordination, not freedom. Its failure is guaranteed because it lacks legitimacy, and legitimacy cannot be manufactured in conference rooms far from Gaza’s ruins.
International law is clear. Occupation is illegal. Collective punishment is a crime. Forced displacement is prohibited. Any post-war arrangement that does not begin with ending occupation and recognising Palestinian self-determination violates these principles. A board that operates without Palestinian consent and under Israeli dominance is not just politically illegitimate—it is legally indefensible.
There is also a deeper moral failure at play. Palestinians are being asked, once again, to prove their readiness for freedom while their oppressor faces no such test. They must demonstrate “responsible governance” while living under bombardment. They must renounce resistance while being denied rights. This asymmetry is not accidental; it is structural.
Peace cannot be conditional on the submission of the oppressed. It cannot be premised on erasing the political identity of a people. And it cannot be delivered by those who refuse to name the injustice at its heart.
If the international community is serious about peace, the path is neither complex nor radical. It requires courage, not creativity. End the occupation. Lift the siege. Recognise Palestinian self-determination. Hold war criminals accountable. Allow Palestinians to decide their political future without coercion.
Anything less is not peace-building; it is neo-occupation rooted in gluttony and furtiveness.
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