“What we are doing is very simple: Peace,” proclaimed President Donald Trump during the inaugural meeting of the “Board of Peace” on February 19, just nine days before he launched an unprovoked war against Iran. The effort, which stems from Trump’s broader 20-point peace plan announced on September 29, 2025, and is designed to resolve the Israel–Palestine conflict, is no small task. Amid ongoing Israeli bombardment and widespread deprivation across Gaza and across the broader Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), alongside the joint U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, proper conceptualizations of “peace” appear further away than ever.
To be sure, Trump did acknowledge the difficulty of the situation: “It’s called the Board of Peace, and it’s all about an easy word to say, but a hard word to produce.” Indeed, not in over 75 years and 15 U.S. presidential administrations has a true, enduring peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict been achieved. The conflict has largely hardened as a result, making serious solutions difficult to reach, let alone imagine. The new regional war is only worsening its prospects now.
Yet that is what makes Trump’s Board of Peace all the more worrisome today. Contrary to what many analysts, journalists, and politicians argue, the conflict is not complicated. Per international law, including numerous United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions, International Court of Justice (ICJ) rulings, international conventions, and the UN Charter, constituting the basis of international law, Israel’s occupation of the state of Palestine is patently illegal and has been so for decades. That territory constituting the OPT includes Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The Board of Peace is not steeped in any of these understandings, which constitute the core problem of both its supposed mandate and the broader understandings surrounding the conflict among most of its stakeholders. That problem is clear: there is a refusal on the part of Western officials—specifically in Washington—to recognize the illegality of Israel’s occupation, producing a lack of political will or interest in seriously shifting the status quo toward an equitable and sustainable solution steeped in justice, accountability, and international law. The Board is no more than an outgrowth of that problem—a refusal to acknowledge the flawed anti-Palestine stance defining the conflict across generations.
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