The Gaza Board of BS

You cannot build peace while the people who built the machinery of war still have leverage over what comes next.

photo: The White House/Wikipedia

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There is something almost perfect about the name “Board of Peace.”

It sounds official, serious, historic.

It conjures images of diplomats sitting around polished tables, maps spread out before them, finally solving one of the most stubborn conflicts on Earth.

There is only one problem: You cannot have a Board of Peace when the people you are negotiating with have spent decades building an infrastructure of war.

You cannot have peace in Gaza when Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad remain meaningful political and military forces. You cannot have lasting peace in the Middle East while the Islamic Republic of Iran and Qatar finance and support armed organizations dedicated to destabilizing the region. And you certainly cannot create peace by constructing an elaborate international bureaucracy that depends, in significant part, on the cooperation of the very organizations that made Gaza the jihadist fortress it is today.

That is why the Gaza Board of Peace has felt like a farce from the beginning. The entire enterprise is built around a fantasy: that organizations whose power comes from Islamist terrorism can somehow be negotiated into peacefully surrendering the source of that power.

The Board of Peace calls this a roadmap. I call it naïveté with numbered paragraphs.

To be fair, the document itself says many of the right things.

Hamas and other Palestinian factions are supposed to surrender their civilian and security authority to the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza. Militias are supposed to give up control of their weapons. Heavy weapons, military production facilities, weapons depots, and tunnels are supposed to be decommissioned. Eventually, only the new Palestinian authority is supposed to control weapons in Gaza.

Wonderful. If all of that actually happens, I will happily admit that I was wrong, but notice what we are being asked to believe: Hamas will voluntarily surrender the power it spent almost two decades consolidating. It will give up its weapons. It will give up its tunnels. It will give up its military infrastructure. It will give up its political control. It will allow a new authority to govern Gaza independently. It will permit its fighters to be excluded from the new security services. And it will accept all of this while Israel gradually withdraws.

That is not a peace plan. It is a plan whose success depends on Hamas ceasing to behave like Hamas.

There is a fundamental problem in Western diplomacy that appears over and over again in the Middle East: We assume everyone ultimately wants approximately the same things we do — like prosperity, stability, economic development, housing, jobs, and a better life for our children.

And, on an individual level, some Arabs and Muslims unquestionably want those things. But political movements are not individuals. Organizations have ideologies, incentives, institutional interests, foreign patrons, patronage networks, and reasons for continuing to exist.

Hamas did not become powerful because Gaza lacked enough urban planners. Palestinian Islamic Jihad does not exist because someone forgot to convene an international development conference. The Iranian regime did not spend decades supporting Palestinian militant organizations because the Islamic Republic was desperately searching for a pathway toward peace in the Middle East.

The U.S. Treasury has repeatedly documented Iranian financial and logistical support for both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, including mechanisms used to move Iranian money to the organizations. That is not a side issue. It is the issue. Because Gaza is not an isolated political laboratory. It sits inside a much larger regional struggle.

The Iranian regime has spent decades cultivating armed partners and proxies across the Middle East. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have been part of that architecture. The objective has not been merely Palestinian independence. These relationships give Iran influence on Israel’s borders and provide the Iranian regime with another mechanism for applying pressure against Israel and its regional partners.

Then there is the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas did not emerge from nowhere. It grew out of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and its founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, had been deeply involved in the Brotherhood movement before Hamas was created during the First Intifada. That ideological lineage is not a footnote. It is a key paragraph in a critical chapter.

And then there is Qatar, which is not Iran, and it would be intellectually lazy to pretend otherwise. Qatar is an American and European security partner and has played an important mediating role in negotiations between Israel and Hamas. The United States has repeatedly relied on Doha precisely because it possessed channels to Hamas that Washington and Jerusalem did not — but that relationship has always contained an extraordinary contradiction.

Qatar hosts Hamas leaders in Doha for years and has provided enormous financial assistance to Gaza (i.e., Hamas) during the Hamas era that began in 2006. Qatar and other actors spent years creating systems in which Hamas could remain the dominant force in Gaza while outsiders attempted to moderate its behavior through money, mediation, incentives, and periodic negotiations.

October 7th should have ended our confidence in that model. Instead, we appear determined to build an even more complicated version of it, which brings us to the most absurd controversy yet.

This week, it was reported that Hamas could potentially benefit from as much as $400 million in debt relief under the new 15-point Board of Peace roadmap. The actual language deserves attention: Clause 5 says the new Gaza administration will audit Gaza’s finances and assess “legitimate commitments to suppliers, contractors and other parties” totaling up to $400 million and “address them.”

The language does not explicitly prohibit Hamas-connected suppliers or creditors from benefiting from the process.

The Board of Peace has strongly denied the interpretation. Its Gaza representative, Nickolay Mladenov, said that there is no financial agreement with Hamas and that such an arrangement was never discussed, negotiated, or considered.

But consider how insane it is that we even need this clarification. Hamas governed Gaza for nearly two decades. It built ministries. It employed people. It awarded contracts. It operated institutions. It developed financial relationships. It embedded itself throughout Gazan society. And now an international governing structure is contemplating settling as much as $400 million in supposedly legitimate obligations inherited from that system.

If there is one lesson we should have learned by now, it is that money flowing into a territory dominated by a terrorist organization requires extraordinary scrutiny. The relevant question is not merely: “Is this invoice legitimate?” The question is: “Who ultimately benefits?”

Who owns the company? Who controls the contractor? Who receives the payment? Who is the beneficial owner? Was the contract awarded through a Hamas-controlled ministry? Was the supplier affiliated with Hamas? Could repayment restore capital to a network that Hamas can later exploit?

Those are not technical details. Those are the difference between rebuilding Gaza and rebuilding the ecosystem that allowed Hamas to dominate Gaza and inflict October 7th on Israel.

And this illustrates the larger problem with the Board of Peace: It is trying to skip to the happy ending. Reconstruction, governance, international investment, Palestinian economic development, Israeli withdrawal. Those may all be worthy subjects of discussion, but they come after something much less glamorous: Defeat the system that made peace impossible.

There is an order to these things. Before Germany could become one of the most peaceful democracies on Earth, Nazism had to lose power. Before ISIS-controlled territory could return to ordinary governance, ISIS had to lose control of that territory. You cannot build a functioning political system on top of an armed Islamist movement that reserves for itself the ability to intimidate the population, sabotage political decisions, restart a war, or assassinate its rivals.

That is not sovereignty. It is sovereignty with a terrorist veto.

This is where Israel’s skepticism about the latest roadmap becomes considerably more understandable. The disagreement is not necessarily over what the finish line should look like. The Board’s roadmap itself says Hamas must eventually relinquish control and that only the new governing authority should possess weapons.

The argument is about sequence. The Board envisions phased disarmament alongside phased Israeli withdrawal, with progress theoretically verified before the next stage proceeds. Israel is essentially asking a much simpler question: What happens if we leave and Hamas does not finish disarming?

That question is not paranoia. It is the question October 7th forces every Israeli to ask. International promises are wonderful until the promise fails and the people who bear the consequences live in Sderot, Kibbutz Be’eri, Kfar Aza, or another Israeli community along the Gaza border.

Israel has already conducted one enormous experiment in trusting that territorial withdrawal might create a fundamentally different reality in Gaza. It withdrew its soldiers and settlements from Gaza in 2005. Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections the following year and violently seized control of Gaza in 2007. Israelis remember what happened next.

So when Israeli leaders insist that Hamas be genuinely disarmed before Israel gives up the security leverage required to make disarmament happen, they are not rejecting peace. They are rejecting another experiment in hope.

There is another uncomfortable truth here: Hamas agreeing to a document that says it will eventually disarm is not the same thing as Hamas being disarmed. A terrorist organization does not become peaceful because someone changed the verbs in a diplomatic agreement.

Weapons have to disappear. Command structures have to disappear. Weapons-production capabilities have to disappear. Tunnels have to disappear. External financing has to be cut. Iranian resupply networks have to be broken. The ability to rebuild the military organization has to disappear.

And, perhaps most importantly, Palestinians who oppose Hamas need to know that Hamas cannot simply return six months or six years later and punish everyone who cooperated with the new government. Otherwise, Hamas does not need to govern Gaza officially. It can govern Gaza unofficially through fear.

That is why the Board of Peace’s phrase “One Authority, One Law, One Weapon” is actually the smartest sentence in the entire Board of Peace roadmap. The problem is that it must be the starting condition, not merely the promised destination — because there cannot be two sovereigns in Gaza.

There cannot be a civilian government above ground and Hamas underneath it. There cannot be Palestinian police officers on the streets while another organization retains weapons in apartments, warehouses, tunnels, and hidden depots. There cannot be a government passing laws while Hamas maintains the ability to decide which laws actually matter. And there cannot be billions of dollars of reconstruction money pouring into Gaza while the same ideological and financial networks that helped create the previous disaster remain capable of capturing the next economy.

Otherwise we are not rebuilding Gaza. We are recapitalizing the conditions for the next war.

Real peace would look very different. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad would be completely removed from armed political life. Iranian financing and resupply networks would be aggressively disrupted. International reconstruction money would be subject to radical financial transparency. No Hamas-connected business, official, front organization, contractor, charity, or financial intermediary would receive international reconstruction funds.

A new Palestinian government would have an actual monopoly on force. Palestinians who wanted ordinary lives would no longer have to worry that an armed Islamist organization could drag them into another war whenever its leaders or foreign sponsors decided the time was right.

Israel would have confidence that withdrawal did not simply mean moving the next battlefield a few kilometers closer to its civilians. And Palestinians would finally have something they have rarely envisioned: a chance to build a future that does not overindex on permanent conflict with Israel.

That would be a peace plan.

The tragedy is that international diplomacy constantly confuses the architecture surrounding peace with peace itself. Conferences are not peace. Committees are not peace. Foreign aid is not peace. Reconstruction is not peace. Diplomatic recognition is not peace. And a Board of Peace is most certainly not peace simply because somebody put the word “peace” in its name.

Peace exists when the people who profit politically from war can no longer determine everyone else’s future.

Until Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have been stripped of that power — and until Iran and other outside actors can no longer easily rebuild it — everything else is theater.

Maybe the Board of Peace will prove me wrong. Maybe Hamas will dismantle its military infrastructure, surrender its weapons, abandon political control, sever itself from Iran, accept a different Palestinian government, and permanently relinquish its ability to wage war against Israel. I sincerely hope so, but international policy should not be built around miracles. It should be built around incentives, capabilities, verification, and reality.

And reality has been screaming the same lesson at us for decades: You cannot buy peace from people whose power depends on preventing it. You cannot negotiate your way around an ideology committed to perpetual conflict. And you cannot build the new Gaza while leaving the old Gaza’s power structure capable of coming back to life.

Call it a roadmap. Call it a framework. Call it a historic diplomatic initiative. Call it the “Board of Peace.” Until that changes, I have another name for it: the Board of BS.

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