What is it about?
The Board of Peace has been promoted as a way to stabilize Gaza and move toward peace. This editorial asks a simpler question: does this new body actually help Palestinians gain freedom, or does it mainly manage the conflict from the outside? The author argues that the Board looks official and well-supported, but real decision-making power is concentrated in external actors, while Palestinian voices have little control. Rebuilding homes, restoring services, and reducing armed groups can look like progress. Yet those steps do not settle the political questions that matter most: occupation, borders, refugees, equal rights, and an independent state. Without a clear path to self-determination and accountable Palestinian authority, the Board risks becoming a formal peace structure that keeps people living under managed conditions rather than ending the causes of the conflict. Peace that only stabilizes daily life is not the same as liberation.
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Why is it important?
Most commentary on the Board of Peace treats it as a new administrative fix for Gaza: reconstruction, security, and international coordination. This editorial is different because it tests the Board against a harder standard: whether it can produce Palestinian self-determination, not merely quieter governance. It is timely because the Board is being discussed, endorsed, and designed while the political core of the conflict—occupation, borders, refugees, territorial unity, and equal rights—remains unresolved. By reading the proposal through peacebuilding, trusteeship, legitimacy, and accountability research, the piece shows how a formally approved body can still concentrate power outside Palestinian hands and postpone sovereignty. The difference for readers is practical. Policymakers, journalists, and scholars get a clear warning: funding and stabilization can look like progress while locking in a managed peace. That frame helps audiences judge current plans by political outcomes, not by institutional branding.
Perspectives
I wrote this editorial because I kept seeing the same pattern: a new institution is announced, the language of peace is used, and the hardest political questions are postponed. The Board of Peace struck me as an especially important case of that pattern. It is presented as practical and necessary, yet it may ask Palestinians to accept reconstruction and order in place of freedom. As an editor working in religious studies and Islamic studies, I am often close to debates about justice, legitimacy, and moral language in public life. Those debates are not abstract here. They decide whether “peace” means dignity or merely management. My hope is that readers will pause before treating a board, a fund, or a reconstruction plan as the destination. I want this piece to make one idea harder to ignore: a peace that cannot answer who holds power, who is represented, and whether a people can determine their own future is still unfinished. If the article does anything useful, I hope it helps readers ask that question earlier, and more clearly, while these plans are still being shaped.
Yuli Andriansyah
Islamic University of Indonesia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Board of Peace and the Illusion of Palestinian Liberation: Stabilization, Formality, and the Limits of Managed Peace, Millah Journal of Religious Studies, February 2026, Universitas Islam Indonesia (Islamic University of Indonesia),
DOI: 10.20885/millah.vol25.iss1.editorial.
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