When ‘peace’ becomes a management strategy

The Trump-Blair Gaza plan masks occupation as peace, offering administration without real Palestinian self-rule.

So, Gaza is to be pacified by a new Board of Peace.

That phrase alone should set alarm bells ringing. Boards manage. Boards audit. Boards review balance sheets. What they do not do is liberate people. Yet here we are, told that the way out of one of the most brutal bombardments in living memory is to turn a strip of land – already one of the most surveilled, blockaded, and starved places on earth – into a case study in international administration.  

The scheme is being sold as common sense. Hostages for prisoners. Aid trucks rolling in. Israeli forces pulling back in stages. Hamas stepping aside. Foreign troops at the borders. Reconstruction funds flooding the ruins. A Board of Peace to keep the whole thing ticking. People stop dying, or at least stop dying from bombs. Who wouldn’t want that?

But common sense has always been the camouflage of empire. It sounds unreasonable, precisely because it conceals what is unreasonable. It displaces the real question: will Palestinians govern themselves, or will they be governed forever by others?

And here, the text is explicit. This is not a Palestinian state. This is not sovereignty. The Board is appointed, not elected, chaired by Donald Trump and flanked by Tony Blair. Laws and budgets require approval abroad. Elections are “promised”, but with no dates. This is Gaza rebranded as a “project,” supervised by donors, guarded by foreign soldiers, managed by technocrats – a trusteeship in all but name, closer to a colony than a state.

The contradictions are glaring. Trump says the Board will stop the war, yet promises Netanyahu he has America’s blessing to “do what you have to do” if Hamas resists. The plan claims to leave the door open to a Palestinian state – someday, maybe – but only if the Palestinian Authority reforms itself according to a list drafted by outsiders, with no timetable for when this reformed future might arrive.

Meanwhile, Trump denounces Britain, France, Canada and Australia as “foolish” for recognising Palestinian statehood at all. One minute, Gaza is to be pacified; the next, it is to be remodelled into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Schrödinger’s peace plan: occupation and holiday resort, at the same time.

This is hegemony in action: domination dressed as consent. A fragile, manufactured “consensus” built not with Palestinians but with international spectators desperate to believe the problem is solved.

It is precisely in this haze of contradictions that power operates best. What looks like relief – bombs stop, food trucks roll in – turns out to be administration. Aid convoys and construction contracts take the place of freedom. What Palestinians get is the symbol of sovereignty without its substance: ministries without authority, flags without borders, parliaments without power.

This is not liberation. It’s management.

And management has always been colonialism’s great disguise. Once upon a time, imperial powers spoke openly of civilisation and conquest. Today, they speak the language of order, reform, and security. The rifle becomes the checkpoint; the garrison becomes the administrator; the occupation becomes a “transitional authority.” Violence does not end. It is merely reorganised.

That is why the name Board of Peace is so apt. It is not a contradiction. It is an admission. Peace here is not the absence of domination. It is domination reorganised into flowcharts. War by other means – tidied into meeting minutes and strategy papers.

The genius, if you can call it that, lies in how natural it sounds. Who wouldn’t want the killing to stop? Who would object to rubble being cleared, children being fed, and prisoners being returned? But this “common sense” is precisely how domination secures consent. Consent not from Palestinians – who were not asked – but from international audiences desperate to believe that order has been restored, that someone, somewhere, has ‘fixed it’.

“Real peace is what emerges when a people govern themselves, when they are not perpetual subjects of plans devised abroad, when they are trusted with the risks that come with freedom. ”

It is worth remembering how the violence is narrated. October 7th is cast as the beginning, as if history starts with Hamas’s massacre and nothing came before. The rubble of Gaza is justified as punishment for Hamas, as though two million civilians were its appendages. This is Frantz Fanon’s script: resistance is pathologised, occupation sanitised.

The colonised fight back, and the coloniser declares them the sole author of violence. The occupier’s bombs are a regrettable necessity; the colonised’s bullets are unforgivable barbarity. October 7th was not the cause of this onslaught. It was the alibi.

What emerges is a script we have seen before. Palestinians are cast as the immature and violent Other, incapable of sovereignty until they “reform.” Extremism is the problem, never occupation. Hamas is the pathology, Israel the reluctant surgeon. Palestinians can be patients, wards, or recipients of aid. They cannot yet be citizens. It is Orientalism reissued in policy briefs – sovereignty indefinitely postponed until Palestinians prove they are ‘orderly’ enough to deserve it.

Meanwhile, economic life is reimagined as contract opportunities. Reconstruction becomes the marketisation of ruins. The plan’s own blueprint imagines foreign investors developing Gaza while a layer of Palestinian “technocrats” runs basic services (schools, hospitals, water, waste) under outside supervision.

Gaza is not rebuilt for Palestinians to own, but for foreign companies to profit from, under the supervision of donors who demand guarantees that money will not disappear into corruption – or worse, fund another round of rockets. Sovereignty is hollowed out into the right to manage your own poverty.

And here lies the danger. A temporary calm can look like progress. But without sovereignty, all else is temporary. The rubble may be cleared, but the foundations remain cracked. To accept such a plan is to accept that peace is no longer the presence of justice but merely the absence of noise.

The cruelty of it is that Palestinians will be asked to choose between death and administration. Accept foreign rule and live. Reject it and die. That is not a choice; it is coercion. And coercion is the essence of this peace.

The truth is that no Board, no matter how well staffed with technocrats or decorated with humanitarian rhetoric, can substitute for freedom. Real peace is not drafted in Washington, or London, or Trump’s Mar-a-Lago backroom. Real peace is what emerges when a people govern themselves, when they are not perpetual subjects of plans devised abroad, when they are trusted with the risks that come with freedom.

The truth is absent here. The Trump plan is bold only in its dishonesty. It claims to end war while entrenching occupation. It claims to open the door to statehood while denouncing states that recognise Palestine. It promises reform while ensuring Palestinians will never be in a position to deliver it.

And so we return to the central question: is this peace, or is it colonialism with a PowerPoint? The answer is obvious.

The courage required is not in drafting another blueprint for trusteeship. It is in stepping back. In accepting that sovereignty means Palestinians themselves setting the terms of their future, not managing the ruins left by someone else’s bombs. And in admitting that what drives Israeli policy is not “security” but the Zionist settler colonial logic of control: expansion, displacement, and the systematic denial of Palestinian self-rule. Security is only the sales pitch. The real objective has always been to rule and take over the land that Zionism believes to be theirs, and to do that while recognising Palestine and Palestinians is impossible.

Under this plan, Palestinians are offered at best the role of local administrators – allowed to run services, but never to decide their own political fate. They are reduced to technocrats of their own confinement, managers of their poverty.

The Trump-Blair Board is not a break in history. It’s history reheated: the same denial of sovereignty, now dressed in the language of peace management. Palestinians have never been given a seat at the table; this plan doesn’t set one, it locks the dining room door.