Giorgio Cafiero
The New Arab / January 27, 2026
The Board of Peace for Gaza signals a shift away from multilateral institutions to personalised, transactional diplomacy driven by private business interests.
US President Donald Trump’s newly created ‘Board of Peace’ has emerged as one of his most controversial foreign policy initiatives, drawing scepticism from close US allies and renewed accusations that he is seeking to upend the post-World War II international order.
Launched at the World Economic Forum, held earlier this month in Davos, Switzerland, the Board of Peace is to be a mechanism to oversee the “ceasefire” and reconstruction effort in Gaza in accordance with the second phase of Trump’s peace initiative announced in September 2025.
Nonetheless, the Board of Peace has since taken on a far broader and more ambiguous mission. Its charter grants it authority to intervene in conflicts worldwide, positioning it, according to critics, as a potential rival to the United Nations – one with Trump at its centre.
As chairman, he would wield veto power over key decisions, retain significant influence even after leaving office, and be able to appoint his own successor, while countries seeking permanent seats have been asked to contribute more than $1 billion.
Despite receiving provisional backing from the United Nations Security Council through a US-drafted resolution that grants it “legitimacy” through 2027, the Board of Peace has deepened divisions among global powers.
Though more than 20 nations have accepted invitations to join, initially at no cost, several European allies have refused, citing concerns about international law, governance, and the erosion of the UN’s role.
The absence of Palestinians
The Board of Peace’s structure includes powerful subcommittees, notably one overseeing Gaza’s reconstruction that features US, Israeli, Arab, and Turkish figures but excludes Palestinians – a decision that has fuelled further criticism and even friction with Israel’s own government.
Additional panels are tasked with implementing the board’s broader peace-building mandate and administering civilian affairs in Gaza.
Supporters argue the body could offer a more flexible alternative to existing institutions. But opponents warn that its concentration of authority, transactional approach to membership, and uncertain relationship with the United Nations risk reshaping global diplomacy in ways that are both unprecedented and destabilising.
“One glaring weakness of the Gaza development plan concocted by President Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner is that they apparently did not consult with any Palestinians,” noted Gordon Gray, the former US ambassador to Tunisia, in an interview with The New Arab.
“It is quite possible that no Arabs were consulted at all, judging by the number of Arabic spelling errors in Kushner’s PowerPoint presentation.”
He added that the lack of answers to questions about how this plan will be implemented is another major shortcoming. Despite Kushner stressing that security in Gaza must be a top priority in order to secure investments, Trump’s son-in-law did not lay out the steps to be taken in order to establish such security, explained Gray.
The former American diplomat went on to say, “It is telling that no Palestinians or Israelis were present when Trump unveiled his so-called ‘Board of Peace.’”
The Board of Peace is about two key objectives, according to Mouin Rabbani, political analyst and co-editor of Jadaliyya. The first is disarming Hamas and other armed Palestinian groups. The second is real estate opportunities. “The Palestinian people, first and foremost those in the Gaza Strip, are a complete irrelevance, at most an obstacle to be removed,” he told TNA.
Rabbani’s assessment reflects a broader concern among analysts that the Board of Peace is less a diplomatic initiative than a vehicle for reengineering governance through economic leverage and security control. By framing peace as a technocratic problem to be solved through disarmament and investment, critics argue, the initiative sidelines questions of political rights, accountability, and self-determination.
In this reading, Gaza becomes not a site of post-conflict recovery shaped by its own population, but a testing ground for externally imposed models that prioritise profitability over justice.
“Trump is market-washing an Orwellian ‘peace’, stripping the term of every aspect of its original meaning and turning it into a device to pursue a new form of colonisation – one in which Trump is running the US not just as a cruel global empire but as a private business. Peace plans are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from business plans,” Dr Marina Calculli, assistant professor in International Relations at Leiden University, explained in a TNA interview.
“What we are seeing materialising before our eyes is an exit from politics in which Gaza is a laboratory for something spreading rapidly everywhere else – a new form of Leviathan where people are not treated as citizens, and not even subjects, but disposable bodies, whose life is valued only to the extent that they act as pacified poorly paid workers or consumers,” she added.
“When they fail to fulfil this role, their fate does not count any longer. This is how this supposed ‘peace’ is trying to render genocide not just ‘normal’ but marketable – a profitable enterprise opening new paths for business.”
International buy-in and growing fractures
Some of the countries which signed on to Trump’s Board of Peace have committed to purchasing permanent seats for $1 billion each. According to Trump, these funds will be used to finance Gaza’s reconstruction. But as Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), told TNA, these pledged payments will not be sufficient for rebuilding the devastated territory.
“As welcome as international support for reconstruction is, the truth is that Israel bears legal responsibility for rebuilding Gaza in the wake of the unlawful destruction it has caused. To outsource these costs would be to reward Israel with impunity by avoiding the consequences of its crimes, both criminal and financial,” she explained.
A further set of questions arises from Trump’s invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin to join the Board of Peace. While it remains unclear whether Putin will accept, the gesture alone has unsettled the United Kingdom and several of Washington’s other Western allies.
Putin has signalled that Moscow could contribute $1 billion to the Board, but only if the United States agrees to unfreeze Russian assets currently held under sanctions. As Dr Calculli observes, the overture to Putin reflects Trump’s characteristically transactional approach to diplomacy.
“Trump is willing to make his own interests in Palestine and Putin’s interests in Ukraine as part of a comprehensive deal, in the style of CEOs rather than statesmen. At the same time, he may be using the invitation to Putin and what could potentially come out of it as a bargaining chip to force Europe to make concessions on Greenland and Ukraine, too,” she told TNA.
Rabbani floated several possible motivations behind Trump’s decision to invite Putin to join the Board of Peace. The move may have been intended as a provocation toward European allies, NATO, and the International Criminal Court, or as an attempt to expand the board’s remit to include Ukraine, potentially sidelining the UN Security Council in the process.
“When an entire organisation is run by the whims of a single unstable individual, such questions are by definition difficult to answer,” he told TNA.
“But given a number of other members invited, I don’t see anything unusual about the Putin invitation. Of course, the Europeans will yell and scream that Putin is an indicted war criminal while Netanyahu was democratically elected and a victim of anti-Semitism, etc., but they have made clear they can and should be ignored,” added Rabbani.
Peace as performance, not justice
Ultimately, the proposed Board of Peace does not read as a credible mechanism for justice or reconciliation, but rather as a hollow spectacle. By sidelining Palestinians from meaningful participation in decisions about their own land and future, the Board of Peace makes a mockery of the idea of justice.
Also troubling is how Trump’s vision for the Board of Peace extends far beyond Gaza. It gestures toward a global body operating under his personal authority, unmoored from institutional checks, international law, or even his formal role as President of the United States. This framing transforms peace from a collective, law-based endeavour into a personalised project of influence, where legitimacy flows from individual power rather than multilateral consent.
Finally, the plans outlined for Gaza’s reconstruction strain credibility to breaking point. They appear untethered from the physical devastation on the ground, the political realities of occupation and blockade, and the basic constraints of resources, time, and security.
In ignoring these realities, the plan treats reconstruction as a branding exercise rather than a material process rooted in human lives. Taken together, the Board of Peace stands not as a pathway to resolution, but as a stark reminder of how easily the language of “peace” can be emptied of meaning.
“There will be no peace in Israel-Palestine until Israeli occupation and apartheid rule over Palestine end. No measure of fantastic reconstruction planning or colonial governance structure will bring an end to these Israeli crimes, and without an end to Israeli crimes, resistance and conflict will naturally persist,” said Whitson.
Giorgio Cafiero is the CEO of Gulf State Analytics
