GOA — The idea of constituting a “Board of Peace” for Gaza may sound benevolent, even urgent, to those watching the carnage from a distance.

 It appeals to the liberal imagination: technocrats around a table, former leaders with gravitas, global figures invoking reconciliation, reconstruction, and stability.

Yet beneath this humanitarian vocabulary lies a deeply flawed premise. Gaza does not suffer from a deficit of ideas, administrators, or plans. It suffers from occupation, siege, apartheid, and genocide. No board - however well-branded - can substitute justice with management. Besides, the plan will be carried out by a pre-dominantly a set of colonialists, Western-dominated down to the bone. The formation and, thus, the formulae that might emanate from it, will be racially toned and tuned, imperialist, and tilted in Israel’s favour – and the West as a whole. The very fact that Trump has brought a white Western-dominated clique suggests that a permanent and just solution will be elusive. It is futile to expect more substance coming from a senile leader and a group of people who do not have a track record of justice.

The idea is already in distress. Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly criticized the US over the composition of a newly announced Gaza governing body. The entire idea simply does not align with what Netanyahu wants, and/or does not want. Netanyahu does not want Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan in the group. Just as well, an objective analyst would surmise. The question is, who gave Netanyahu any authority to veto names or even propose them? 

Like most things Trump plans for, get to be non-starters. This Gaza initiative is a non-starter by its very looks. Literally speaking, Israel and the US – with the sneaky support of Europe – lost the Gaza war. Gaza might be in the rubble, but it exists. And the Palestinian resilience will not allow it to go uncontested. This is Palestinian land. Trump has no right to form Boards and Trusts or anything he wishes for in territory that is not his in any remote sense. Neither does he have the cultural sense or the political touch. Those close to him have suggested that his knowledge of the existence of Gaza and Palestine- there is no ‘West Bank’ in his lectionary. 

The very concept of a Board of Peace is compromised by its genealogy. Such boards have historically emerged not from solidarity with oppressed peoples but from imperial anxiety: the desire to stabilise a crisis without addressing its root causes. They are instruments of containment, not liberation. Gaza, like Iraq before it and Afghanistan after, is being reimagined as a “problem” to be administered once resistance has been crushed or neutralised. This is not peace-building. It is post-violence governance without accountability.

The names floated for such initiatives only deepen the crisis of legitimacy. Tony Blair’s involvement alone should disqualify the exercise. Blair’s legacy in the Middle East is not peace but devastation - from Iraq to his disastrous tenure as Quartet envoy, where he normalised Israeli settlement expansion while preaching economic “peace” to a people under military occupation. Blair does not lack experience; he lacks moral credibility. He represents precisely the model that has failed Palestine: diplomacy without justice, growth without freedom, and negotiations without consequences. Each member appointed by Trump is irrational. Without exception, none of them possesses the qualifications for a politically sensitive task.  

Equally hollow is the invocation of figures like Marco Rubio. Rubio is not a statesman of peace; he is a foot soldier of American exceptionalism and Israeli impunity. His public record reveals no engagement with Palestinian history, law, or suffering - only reflexive allegiance to Israeli militarism. To imagine Rubio contributing meaningfully to Gaza’s future is to mistake ideological rigidity for expertise. He is not neutral, not informed, and not trusted.

Jared Kushner’s name, meanwhile, exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of the entire project. What does a real estate developer - whose primary intervention in the Palestinian question was to reduce it to land deals and luxury investments - know of dispossession, trauma, or decolonisation? Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan collapsed because it treated Palestinians as obstacles to be bought off rather than as a people with rights. To resurrect such thinking under a new label is not innovation; it is an insult.

This brings us to the central flaw of the Board of Peace concept: it assumes peace can be engineered externally, by elites who neither live the consequences nor bear the costs of failure. It reduces Gaza to a laboratory of governance experiments, rather than recognising it as a site of resistance, memory, and political agency. Palestinians are not stakeholders to be consulted after decisions are made. They are the authors of their own future.

Any credible peace process must begin with a non-negotiable precondition: Palestinians must lead it. Not as tokens, not as junior partners, but as architects. Gaza’s civil society—its doctors, teachers, lawyers, journalists, artists, and intellectuals - has survived conditions that would have destroyed most societies. These are not broken people awaiting instruction. They are among the most politically literate populations on earth, shaped by decades of struggle, debate, and sacrifice.

Beyond Gaza, the wider Palestinian intellectual and political tradition - spanning the diaspora, the West Bank, refugee camps, and exile - offers a reservoir of ideas on governance, accountability, resistance, and reconciliation. From Edward Said’s insistence on moral clarity to contemporary Palestinian scholars articulating decolonial futures, the intellectual groundwork for peace already exists. What has been absent is the international willingness to listen without controlling.

Equally vital is the role of regional intellectuals and actors, not as proxies for Western power but as independent voices rooted in the histories of colonialism, partition, and resistance. Arab, Iranian, Turkish, African, Latin American, and Asian thinkers - many of whom understand occupation not as abstraction but as lived experience—must be central to any genuine peace architecture. Peace cannot be monopolised by those whose geopolitical interests are aligned with the oppressor.

A real peace framework for Gaza would therefore look radically different from a boardroom exercise. It would begin with an unequivocal recognition of Israeli crimes under international law, including war crimes and genocide. It would insist on accountability, not reconciliation without truth. It would prioritize the right of return, the lifting of the siege, and Palestinian self-determination—not as end goals but as starting points. Peace is not the absence of bombs; it is the presence of justice.

The obsession with boards, envoys, and committees also reveals a deeper moral evasion. It allows the international community to appear active while avoiding the hard political decisions - sanctions, arms embargoes, diplomatic isolation - that real pressure requires. A Board for Peace becomes a substitute for courage. It manages outrage rather than confronting power.

There is also a danger that such a board, however framed, becomes a mechanism to sideline Palestinian resistance by rebranding it as extremism incompatible with peace. This is a familiar tactic: delegitimise resistance, sanitise occupation, and then invite the occupied to be grateful participants in their own containment. Any peace initiative that does not affirm the legitimacy of resistance to occupation is not neutral—it is complicit.

Hypocrisy has no limits. Gaza does not need a Board of Peace imposed from above. It needs the world to stop enabling its destruction and start respecting its people. Peace will not emerge from recycled elites who failed yesterday and remain unaccountable today. It will emerge from Palestinian leadership, regional solidarity, and a global commitment to justice over convenience.

Until then, a Board of Peace is not a solution. It is a distraction.

Dr. Ranjan Solomon is a veteran social justice activist and writer who has long supported global movements, particularly those advocating for Palestinian freedom.

(The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of the Tehran Times.)