The White House is planning a leaders’ meeting for the Gaza “Board of Peace” on February 19. The name alone feels like a parody drafted by someone who has never watched a war from the inside of a bombed apartment or read the minutes of history with anything resembling humility. “Board of Peace” suggests clipboards, seating charts, bottled water, administrative calm applied to a place that has been methodically unmade. It is the kind of phrase that hopes language itself can anesthetize reality.
According to U.S. officials and diplomats, the gathering will bring together powerful men to discuss the future of Gaza. None of them are Gazans. None of them were elected by Gazans. None of them will return to Gaza when the meeting adjourns, when the doors close, when the communiqués are released in that familiar, bloodless dialect of “frameworks” and “pathways.” They will return instead to motorcades, secure compounds and the soothing abstraction of distance.
There is something almost antique about the idea, imperial councils deciding the fate of a territory whose people exist only as a “problem” to be solved. It recalls an earlier era of mapmaking, when borders were drawn with rulers by men who would never cross them on foot. The difference, now, is that this process is live-streamed through headlines and press briefings, wrapped in the vocabulary of diplomacy and sold as pragmatism.
Most striking, if anything still qualifies as striking, is the possible presence of Benjamin Netanyahu as a legitimate architect of Gaza’s future. This is not irony; it is something darker. Netanyahu is not a neutral stakeholder. He is not a distant observer. He is the leader most directly associated with the devastation of Gaza as it currently exists, the flattened neighborhoods, the hospitals reduced to rubble, the families erased into statistics. To invite him to a “Board of Peace” is to invite the arsonist to chair the fire safety committee and then to praise him for his experience with flames.
The moral inversion is staggering but familiar. Power has a remarkable ability to launder responsibility. Once enough suits are in the room, culpability dissolves into consensus. War becomes “context.” Civilian deaths become “complexity.” Accountability becomes “unhelpful at this stage.” The dead, meanwhile, remain inconveniently dead.
The United States, hosting this gathering, plays its usual role as both referee and sponsor, insisting on its indispensability while quietly shaping the outcome. Washington has long mastered this choreography: concern expressed in public, leverage exercised in private and astonishment afterward when nothing fundamentally changes. The meeting will be framed as necessary, unavoidable, the only realistic option. Alternatives, namely, listening to Palestinians themselves, will be dismissed as naïve or impractical, as if democracy is a luxury item reserved for stable climates.
What is being decided in Washington is not merely Gaza’s reconstruction or governance. It is the more basic question of whether Palestinians are allowed to be political subjects at all or whether they remain permanent objects of international management. The very existence of a “Board of Peace” implies that peace is something granted downward, not built upward; something administered, not lived.
There is also the quiet, unsettling admiration embedded in the guest list. Trump’s fondness for authoritarians is not an aesthetic quirk; it is a worldview. Strongmen, in this vision, are efficient. They make decisions without the nuisance of dissent. They deliver clarity, even if that clarity comes soaked in blood. The problem, of course, is that efficiency without justice is merely brutality with better scheduling.
Netanyahu fits seamlessly into this pantheon, not despite Gaza’s ruins but because of them. In a political culture that increasingly mistakes force for strength, destruction is rebranded as resolve. Civilian suffering becomes collateral evidence of seriousness. The ruins of Gaza, then, are not a disqualification; they are his résumé.
Absent from this meeting will be the voices that matter most: the parents who have buried children, the doctors who performed amputations without anesthesia, the journalists who documented their own cities disappearing behind them. Their exclusion is not an oversight; it is the premise. Genuine Palestinian participation would disrupt the narrative. It would insist on rights instead of arrangements, justice instead of stability, memory instead of amnesia.
And amnesia is essential here. For the “Board of Peace” to function, it must forget how Gaza arrived at this point. It must treat devastation as a natural disaster rather than a human decision. It must speak of the future as if the past were negotiable, optional or simply too inconvenient to mention.
The tragedy is not only that this meeting will likely fail to deliver peace. It is that it will succeed in normalizing its absence. Another summit, another declaration, another cycle in which power congratulates itself for engagement while sidestepping responsibility.
Peace, real peace, is never born in rooms where the victims are uninvited and the perpetrators are rebranded as partners. What will be decided on February 19 is not Gaza’s future. That future is being deferred, once again, to a later date, one that Palestinians are perpetually told to wait for, quietly, patiently and preferably off-camera.
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