The announcement of a so-called “Board of Peace” tasked with shaping Gaza’s post-war future has been presented as a serious and responsible effort to end violence and restore stability. But behind the language of reconciliation and reconstruction lies a familiar and troubling reality: Palestinians, the people most affected by the war, have been entirely excluded from the process.
There is not a single Palestinian representative on the board. Not one voice from the communities whose homes have been reduced to rubble, whose families have been torn apart, and whose political fate is now being discussed in distant rooms of power.
Instead, the board includes political elites, former officials, and global power brokers. Among them are individuals accused of war crimes—including one whose government is currently on trial before international courts for genocide against Palestinians. These figures are now being recast as peacemakers, entrusted with imagining a future for a people they neither represent nor answer to.
This exclusion is not accidental. It is deliberate.
Peace, as defined by this board, is something done to Palestinians, not with them. Their suffering is treated as a humanitarian crisis to be managed rather than a political injustice to be confronted. Their voices are absent precisely because they would challenge the assumptions on which this version of “peace” rests.
For readers in the Global South, this pattern is painfully familiar. Colonial history is filled with peace plans imposed by imperial powers, negotiated among elites, and justified as benevolent interventions—while systematically excluding the very populations they claimed to help. From British mandates to partition plans, from trusteeships to imposed settlements, exclusion has been the defining feature of failed peace-making.
These processes did not bring justice. They brought order without dignity, stability without freedom, and calm enforced by force.
The current “Board of Peace” fits squarely within this tradition. It reflects a worldview in which Palestinians are objects of policy rather than subjects of rights. Their political agency is seen as a threat to stability rather than its foundation.
The presence of figures associated with mass civilian harm makes the project even more troubling. International law emerged from the ruins of past atrocities with a clear promise: that grave crimes—war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide—would never again be excused by power or erased by time. Accountability was meant to be the cornerstone of peace, not an obstacle to it.
Yet this board sends the opposite message. It suggests that accountability is negotiable, that allegations of mass killing can be set aside in the name of “moving forward,” and that those accused of devastating violence can be rehabilitated as moral authorities—so long as they belong to the right political camp.
The lesson is stark. Power absolves. Suffering disqualifies.
This inversion corrodes not only the credibility of international law but also the moral foundations of peace itself. When victims are excluded and perpetrators elevated, peace becomes indistinguishable from domination.
Peace without Palestinians is not peace. It is management—of outrage, of optics, of an occupied people whose resistance is inconvenient and whose consent is unnecessary. It is domination repackaged in the language of diplomacy and development.
If the goal is stability without justice, this approach may succeed temporarily. But if the goal is a durable, legitimate peace—one that does not collapse under the weight of unresolved injustice—history offers a clear warning.
You cannot build peace on exclusion. You can only postpone the reckoning.