Is a Non-UN Conflict Resolution Framework Feasible, Desirable? Trump’s Board of Peace is an Obstacle and Warning
[Prefatory Note: Initially framed as questions responding to Middle East journalist, Mohamed Abd Elaziz, raising question about Stage II of the Trump Plan for Gaza, inaugurating the Board of Peace at the Davos World Economic Forum this January. The questions raises some key issues. My assessment is that the Board of Peace deserves to fail. It insults the Palestinian people, is blind to flagrant violations of the Genocide Convention, and indirectly further undermines international law and UN authority with respect to global security.]
1- How do you view the legitimacy of establishing an independent peace council to intervene in international conflicts, compared to the traditional mechanisms of the United Nations?
The mechanism may work in certain situation, but not if as in the Trump Plan it is
slanted in favor of the wrongdoers and is prejudicial to the legal rights of the aggrieved and victimized party. The idea of an independent peace council could only achieve legitimacy if it is mindful of the imperative of equality with respect to the parties when addressing conflicts and its activities are professionally shaped by their joint participation, with an eye toward determining whether part of the peace council’s writ covers potential accountability of one or both parties in the form of reparation or recommendations of investigation and possible prosecution for individuals seemingly involved in wrongdoing in relation to law, morality, and human rights. Given the present structure of international relations, it seems highly unlikely that leading states would participate and fund such an independent peace council with a mission of conflict resolution as it would encroach upon the traditional sovereign prerogatives with respect to strategic national interests.
2– Do you believe that such initiatives could serve as leverage for UN reform?
It could in principle, but not in the setting of Israel/Palestine, where the partisan nature of the interactive process is one that by its composition, framework, and agenda rewards the perpetrators of genocide and further victimizes those who continue to suffer from severe and cruel wrongdoing by Israel, the U.S, and complicit enabling states. To the extent that UN affirms such an unjust initiative it brings shame to the Organization as it did by the unanimous endorsement of the Trump Plan in UNCR RES 2803 on January 17, 2026, and further stigmatized of the Organization by the show of support for the resolution expressed by the Secretary General, which included encouragement for the establishment of the misnamed Board of Peace that can be more accurately identified as the Settler Colonial Peace Council.
At this time, it is hard to say whether the Trump Plan, especially the Board of Peace by its apparent intention of marginalizing the UN, dramatized by situated its inauguration at the Davos World Economic Forum rather than within the UN System might generate a strong effort to engage in UN reform. This would require a considerable mobilization of pressure and is risky in that might lead to the US exit, which would actually play into Trump’s anti-internationalism approach that seeks to heighten US transactionalism as well as geopolitical outreach.
3- What are the potential risks if a peace council were to assume a larger role than the United Nations in managing global crises?
I have no confidence that such an independent peace council could work unless free from geopolitical manipulation by the US, Russia, China, and above all the US. It would need to be funded independently, and its executive members determined by some process that assured selection would take account of geographical, civilizational, ideological, gender diversities and maybe even strived to obtain an inter-generational balance. If, and this is a big if. such a peace council could become truly independent of the narcissistic geopolitics of Trump it might pose a constructive challenge to transform the UN as now constituted. The UN has performed disappointingly over the decades when it comes to conflict resolution, the enforcement of international law, the accountability of wrongdoers. This is not an accident. It should be remembered that the UN was set up in a manner that protected the strategic interests of the winners of World War II, as exemplified by conferring the right of veto and permanent membership in the SC as a way to ensure that the UN would act in a manner hostile to their perceived priorities. If a IPC could be based, staffed, and funded on the primacy of justice rather than currently as a reflection of the primacy of geopolitics it might displace the UN in the vital policy sphere of the management of global security. It is with respect to global security that the UN has most consistently failed the peoples of the world. This was illustrated dramatically, grotesquely, and fundamentally, by the recent pathetic efforts of the UN to oppose the Israel/US genocidal partnership that has produced the ongoing acute Palestinian ordeal.
Trump’s Board of Peace Is a Dystopia in Motion
While the sheer pomposity, Trumpian megalomania, and painfully paradoxical context surrounding the so-called “Board of Peace” (BoP) might tempt some to dismiss it as mere spectacle or farce, its criminal, inhumane, and hegemonic nature makes it far too dangerous to ignore.
Last week, Trump and his new, thuggish boys’ club of heads of state publicly celebrated the launch of the Board at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Its hypocrisy was inadvertently underscored by Elon Musk—Trump’s on-again, off-again ally—when he quipped onstage that one might call it the Board of “p-i-e-c-e,” a venture devoted to claiming “a little piece of Greenland, a little piece of Venezuela,” to which his interviewer, Larry Fink, billionaire CEO of BlackRock, responded with cheer: “We got one.” Only a room filled with the world’s tech and business elite could find this funny.
In the week since, people of conscience around the world have been left to reckon with what may come of this brazen proclamation of a Trumpified world order. In particular, the BoP’s presentation of plans for “New Gaza” offered stark clarity about the greed-driven intentions Trump, his inner circle, and their Israeli billionaire partners seek to pursue, while raising a fundamental question as to how such a project of colonization and land theft could claim any legal basis at all, let alone a moral one.
As it stands, the BoP charter elevates Trump to a position akin to a global dictator for life, unchecked—on paper— by any external mechanisms of accountability or transparency. Acting as permanent chairman, chief executive, and controlling shareholder of the organization, Trump has declared that he holds absolute veto power, while retaining complete discretion over the potential multibillion-dollar slush fund generated through permanent member fees. In keeping with his long record of felonies and fraud, all budgets, financial accounts, or disbursements the BoP deems “necessary” to carry out its sweeping mission are subject only to the so-called “institutions of controls or oversight mechanisms” designed by the very same Executive Board.
A few invited world leaders, mostly from the EU, have done little more than politely decline their invitations. While they have not yet bent the knee to Trump in this mobster’s reality-show version of U.S. imperial power in action, this has not stopped those same governments from endorsing the other “peaceful actions” Trump is poised to pursue under the guise of BoP authority. These include the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and the seizure of Venezuelan oil; the execution of dozens of extrajudicial boat strikes that have killed more than one hundred people in the Caribbean; threats of war and the promotion of dangerous regime-change fantasies in Iran and Cuba; and support for his complete takeover of occupied Palestine through U.N. Security Council Resolution 2803. That resolution effectively granted Trump authority in Gaza by endorsing his 20-point Gaza peace plan and welcoming the BoP as a transitional governing body. Thus far, Greenland remains the only red line EU states have managed to articulate.
Despite some rejections, other governments have gone ahead and accepted their invitations for a free three-year membership. The participation of Israel’s wanted genocidaire-in-chief, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, should serve as the clearest red flag that this organization has no interest in even pretending to care about the lives of the Palestinian people or any standard of international law. Netanyahu could not even fly to Davos to attend the BoP’s self-appointed pomp and circumstance for fear of being arrested as a wanted war criminal.
Other beacons of democracy and world peace, eager to lend legitimacy to the BoP, include Trump’s own “favorite dictator,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi; Argentina’s scandal-prone, right-wing President Javier Milei; “Europe’s last dictator,” Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko; Netanyahu’s idea of a “moral conscience,” Albanian President Edi Rama; and Hungary’s model in authoritarianism, Viktor Orbán. Leaders from Arab states—including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan, and Qatar—have also joined, and will presumably stand alongside Trump and the Executive Board to help oversee, and quietly endorse, “New Gaza.”
Their participation set the stage for Davos, where none other than Jared Kushner delivered the first public presentation of an investment plan contingent upon the ethnic cleansing and erasure of a national Palestinian identity. Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a member of the BoP “Executive Board,” has long served as the self-styled “master planner” of transforming Gaza into a prime real estate opportunity. He has a track record of articulating his absolute disregard for Palestinian life, describing the besieged Gaza Strip in February 2024 as “very valuable…waterfront property.”
Kushner began his chilling slideshow by urging skeptical investors to “just calm down for 30 days,” declaring, “the war is over. Let’s work together.” Eager to move on to their real business of “peace,” Kushner appeared wholly willing to ignore the ongoing forced starvation, imprisonment, systemic torture, murder, and displacement of Palestinians across the occupied territories. Since the supposed “ceasefire” in October 2025, the Israeli military has killed at least 477 Palestinians in Gaza.
Trump has also failed to address Israel’s continued ban on dozens of international humanitarian and non-governmental organizations, a policy that has deliberately denied life-saving aid and medical care to the region while newborn babies continue to die of hypothermia. Instead, Kushner outright lied about the current scale of Israel’s designed humanitarian catastrophe, claiming that “100% of the food needs are met” and that “the cost of needs has gone down,” before unironically describing the administration’s role as “the largest humanitarian effort into a war zone that anyone’s been able to tell us about.” Meanwhile, as the conference unfolded, Israeli forces bulldozed the UN Refugee headquarters in East Jerusalem, and the Israeli
Knesset voted by an overwhelming majority to annex the entirety of the West Bank.
Amid the distortions and denials of reality, Kushner did allow the logic of the project to surface when he identified the architect behind the purported $25 billion master plan for Gaza: Yakir Gabay, whom he described as “one of the most successful real estate developers and brilliant people I know.” Gabay is an Israeli billionaire and international real estate tycoon with close familial ties to the Israeli government. Reports also indicate that he has participated in efforts to pressure Columbia University administrators to suppress student protests.
Much like Kushner, a recent article by the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, described Gabay as having been eager to craft a plan for “New Gaza” from the very first weeks of Israel’s prolonged assault on the densely populated region:
October 7, [Gabay] tends to say, woke him to action. [Gabay] thought: This time, my capabilities can change the face of reality…Other businesspeople heard about his work a year and a half ago. The White House had asked him to develop something even during Joe Biden’s term. He has good relationships with Tony Blair and Kushner, and when Trump won the elections, it became easier to push the issue.
On the whole, Kushner’s “New Gaza” presentation made no attempt to acknowledge a Palestinian state, recognize Palestinian self-determination, nor address Israeli occupation or the implications of Gaza’s ‘reconstruction’ for the other occupied Palestinian territories. Instead, the eerily bizarre AI-generated slideshow of skyscrapers, oil rigs, and industrial complexes offered only a glimpse into the twisted billionaire fantasy that Kushner’s inner circle—including figures like Gabay—has sought to merge with Zionist imaginaries.
The only part of Kushner’s presentation that even acknowledged Palestinians was a single slide on “Palestinian-led demilitarization.” Beyond this ominous token reference, the narrative repeatedly circled back to framing Gaza as “an amazing investment opportunity” to the room full of multi-millionaires and billionaires.
Recent reporting from Drop Site News has confirmed and expanded upon this language, revealing “Resolution No. 2026/1,” an unsigned State Department document from December 2025 that declares the Board of Peace aims to transform Gaza into a “deradicalized and demilitarized terror-free zone.”
Here, “deradicalization” functions as a catch-all term to delegitimize resistance and criminalize opposition to Israeli occupation—a legal right under international law. Palestinians who maintain their political consciousness, national identity, or will for self-determination, and who refuse to normalize occupation, are almost certain to be labeled “terrorists” or deemed insufficiently “deradicalized.” Those who take up arms to defend their people against some of the world’s most heavily armed and nuclear powers risk being denied existence in their own lands—murdered or turned away by the very architects of genocide who now claim to bring “peace.” Access to basic rights is made contingent on surrendering political and economic agency, including abandoning a historically rooted cultural identity of resistance under occupation, forsaking traditional livelihoods, and subordinating the desire to shape the future of the land to whatever ‘economic opportunities’ BoP members deem investible.
The document further states that only those who “support and act consistently” to establish a “deradicalized, terror-free Gaza that poses no threat to its neighbors” may participate in governance, reconstruction, economic development, or humanitarian assistance. It also bars any individuals or organizations the Board deems to have “supported or demonstrated a history of collaboration, infiltration, or influence with or by Hamas or other terror groups”—a sweeping allegation Israel has long weaponized without evidence.
In practice, such standards mean that anyone who stands in firm solidarity with Palestinians, including international NGOs that seek to hold Israel to even minimal standards of accountability, will likely be barred from operating in Gaza. This has already become an entrenched and worsening reality since October 2023. What the BoP presents as a security framework is, in essence, a blueprint for controlling Palestinian movement, erasing any viable possibility of a Palestinian state, and ultimately, advancing ethnic cleansing, while preventing humanitarian organizations from participating in any meaningful process of reconstruction or the delivery of aid. A framework that insists “no one will be forced to leave Gaza”—as if forced removal were ever legitimate—while simultaneously conditioning access to aid, resources, and even limited political participation on compliance with what Trump and his confidants dictate, is not a framework in which any meaningful shred of freedom or dignity can exist.
In essence, Trump now supposedly wields full legislative, executive, and judicial control over the future of Gaza. He alone, along with his board of resort profiteers—who would hastily clear away the rubble burying the bodies of erased bloodlines and the remnants of mosques, churches, hospitals, and schools—will have complete authority over how surviving Palestinians live, how they are governed, and who may participate in decision-making. Only at the very bottom of the BoP’s tyrannical hierarchy sits a so-called “technocratic committee,” nominally including members of the Palestinian Authority. Its role appears purely advisory, permitted to exist only insofar as it appeases Trump and aligns with his agenda. There is little indication that it will serve, or even slightly represent, the people it claims to speak for.
The development is ultimately so jarring, so rooted in supremacist ideologies, and so flagrantly opposed to basic principles of sovereignty and human rights that it has few historical parallels. The closest comparison seems to be the gruesome reign of Belgian King Leopold II.
Those who participate in this process, including figures such as World Bank President Ajay Banga, lend legitimacy to a project that advances a perverse vision and a chapter of history that is not inevitable. Collaboration in the name of “reconstruction and development of Gaza” for a project so morally and legally corrupt is not a pragmatic compromise—it is active participation in a plan that has no place in the world. The human cost of this complicity is impossible to ignore.
The BoP plan also offers no conception of justice, reparations, or accountability for Israeli terror. Its version of “peace” is imposed through state violence to silence, control, and force Palestinians into submission. It is a project that raises skyscrapers for Western elites atop mass graves, without including, or even acknowledging, the Palestinians, its architects have killed and displaced. It relies too on the pathetic inaction of the overwhelming majority of UN member states.
Much remains unknown about what is immediately required to take a single step toward “peace” in the region: if and when Palestinians may finally find reprieve from Israeli bombardment, whether the Rafah crossing will actually open, what will become of finding and returning the bodies of loved ones buried under the rubble, whether human rights organizations or journalists will even be permitted to document the reality–and work safely–on the ground, if displaced Palestinians will ever be allowed to return to Gaza, and crucially, whether other states will intervene. What is clear, however, is the sheer evil of this project.
Following Kushner’s presentation, many have rightfully said that if this BoP monstrosity were fictional, it would be so dark it would border on being unbelievable. And yet it is profoundly real: a greed-soaked plan dependent on mass murder and land theft, driven by men so wealthy and entitled that they believe they can escape accountability while reaping billions in profit in the process.
World leaders have long entrenched impunity and rewarded the most atrocious US-Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially over the past two and a half years. Yet the Board’s ambitions—laid out in a charter that mirrors the UN and spans what Trump calls “the whole region of the world”—reveal a danger that stretches far beyond Palestine. The very consideration of such an inhumane, corrupt, and cruel project is a threat to humanity. And still—precisely because of the chaos, confusion, and sheer audacity of their plans—this dystopian vision for “New Gaza” is not inevitable. Those with political and economic power must firmly reject and actively work to rein in this Orwellian BoP. If any entity requires immediate disarmament and deradicalization, it is Trump and his so-called Executive Board.
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