The euphoria surrounding the cease-fire and the unveiling of President Trump’s 20-point peace plan for the Gaza Strip is, to an extent, understandable. All living hostages are being released, humanitarian aid is flowing, and a remarkable level of global endorsement has emerged. Yet, even in its earliest days, the plan’s implementation has faltered. Israel and Hamas immediately exchanged accusations of violations, and outside mediators rushed back to keep the deal on life support.
Let us assume the most generous scenario: Israel fully withdraws on the prescribed schedule, Hamas fully disarms, aid flows at scale, and international mediators appear on cue. Even then, the plan is structurally set up to fail. Its scope is too narrow, its language too vague, and it leans heavily on reconstruction models that have repeatedly failed elsewhere. The result is a high risk of collapse, relapse, and renewed conflict.
At the core, the plan promises a rapid cease-fire, full hostage and prisoner exchanges, staged Israeli withdrawal, the demilitarization of Gaza, reconstruction of the Strip, and conditional steps toward Palestinian self-determination. According to the plan’s published text: “Gaza will be a deradicalised terror-free zone that does not pose a threat to its neighbours.”
It also states that “Gaza will be redeveloped for the benefit of the people of Gaza, who have suffered more than enough.” Notably, the emphasis is overwhelmingly on stabilizing and reconstructing Gaza rather than addressing the structural causes of the violence.
Overreliance on Neoliberal Reconstruction
The intellectual origins of the plan lie in the ascendancy of liberal peacebuilding in the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War encouraged confidence in the universal reach of market economics and liberal democracy. Neoliberalism, the belief that free markets deliver growth and, with it, political stability, was clothed in the language of democratic reform and treated as a pathway to peace.
By the early 2000s, however, the limits of that orthodoxy are clear. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Timor-Leste, Iraq, and Afghanistan, imported “best practices” disregarded local capacities and political realities. Privatization was introduced faster than state capacity could regulate markets, causing corruption and the collapse of public services. Market reforms favored external contractors and local elites, fuelling inequality. Liberalization failed because it presupposed the rule of law, social trust, and administrative infrastructure, all of which were absent in these post-conflict societies. Out of these disappointments emerged the so-called local turn: an acknowledgment that durable peace cannot be imposed but must grow from within, anchored in local agency and consent.
Read against this record, the 20-point plan largely sets those lessons aside. It returns, quite deliberately, to peace through economic growth. It repeatedly promises a “prosperous economy” for a “New Gaza” and places economic revival at the center of its theory of change. The proposed instruments are familiar from earlier episodes of post-conflict reconstruction (a special economic zone, tariff reductions, and export quotas designed to fold Gaza into regional and global markets, alongside attracting foreign investment).
Yet, even in Palestine, these levers have been tried before. Preferential access was a mainstay of liberal-peace strategies in the 1990s and figured prominently in Palestine after the 1993 Oslo Accords. Despite EU and U.S. trade preferences, Palestinian exports to the EU remained negligible by 2024, still under €40 million ($46 million). Nothing in the present explains why the same measures, deployed under conditions of economic devastation, would now yield different results. Leon Seidl from the European Journal of International Law critiques how the plan mirrors earlier mistakes: imposing “apolitical” governance and marketized reconstruction in deeply fractured societies.
Technocracy and External Control
The plan’s governance model resurrects another artifact of failed interventions: the technocratic state. Gaza’s reconstruction would be placed under the authority of a Board of Peace chaired by Trump himself, with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as the only named counterpart. Beneath this board, a “temporary Palestinian technocratic committee,” partially composed of international experts, is entrusted with daily governance.
Such a structure epitomizes “apolitical administration,” governance imposed in the name of neutrality, but in substance subordinated to foreign interests. The plan’s aspiration to create “modern and efficient governance” inspired by “miracle cities of the Middle East” evokes the same utopian technocracy that once guided the missions in Kosovo and Iraq. In both cases (Kosovo under the UN’s mission and Iraq under the US Coalition Provisional Authority), Western-led administrations imposed sweeping institutional blueprints that sidelined local actors, bred corruption, and collapsed once international oversight receded.
Even the limited form of local representation envisaged under the plan is heavily constrained. The Palestinian committee’s dual mandate, to serve the population while attracting investment, encapsulates an enduring contradiction. Governance is conceived less as a vehicle of political participation than as a mechanism to ensure market confidence.
Moreover, even if we assumed that neoliberal and technocratic reconstruction tactics were effective, RAND analysts caution: to make these humanitarian and governance plans work, you need “hundreds of experienced, nonpolitical, and courageous administrators … logistics, intelligence support, secure communications networks.” Gaza’s institutions lie in rubble, its economy flatlined, and its society traumatized. To expect rapid transformation into a “miracle city” enclave ignores the gritty realities of war-torn governance.
Finally, power vacuums exist: in the absence of genuine local authority, governance in Gaza would fragment among Israel-backed militias, clan networks, and criminal factions, such as the Popular Forces, the Shujaiya Popular Defense Forces, and the Doghmosh and al-Majayda Clans. These groups are not only even less accountable than Hamas but also risk replacing Hamas’ centralized authority with competing warlordism.
Narrow Scope
The plan treats Gaza as if it can be addressed in isolation. It makes only passing reference to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or the broader occupation and settlement system that has long fueled the conflict. It offers no roadmap for settlement removal, full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, or equal rights for Palestinians in those territories.
History shows that such partial settlements, like the Oslo process in the 1990s or Israel’s 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza, produced neither peace nor prosperity, as the enclave remained under blockade and disconnected from the West Bank. Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza share a collective identity and nationalist aspirations rooted in the experience of Israeli occupation. When violence escalates in one territory, it has triggered solidarity protests and retaliatory actions in the other. Any attempt to isolate Gaza is destined to reproduce the same failed peace.
Vague Commitments
The text is heavy on ambition but light on mechanisms. On statehood, it says only that: “While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the [Palestinian Authority] reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood, which we recognize as the aspiration of the Palestinian people.”
Notice the keyword: “may.” It is conditional, and the trigger, Palestinian Authority reform, is vague and undefined. There is no mandate, no concrete exit criteria, or direct timeline for its transitional body. On security, it demands Hamas “agree not to have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.” However, it gives no clear plan for how demilitarization will be enforced, by whom, or under what legitimacy.
Fundamentally, failing to guarantee a viable Palestinian state leaves untouched the material conditions that sustain the cycle of violence: land confiscations, home demolitions, and violence by Israeli settlers. Violence in Palestine does not occur in a vacuum; it arises from the lived experience of displacement and apartheid-like control that makes political resistance seem like the only remaining path to dignity.
Normative Nihilism and the Rollback of International Law
Perhaps the most revealing feature of the 20 points lies not in what they proclaim, but in what they omit. The document contains no reference to democracy, human rights, or the rule of law. The United Nations is confined to a humanitarian role, and the concept of justice is absent. What once served as the legitimating moral vocabulary of international engagement has been excised altogether.
This omission reflects a wider transformation in U.S. foreign policy toward normative nihilism, the exercise of power detached from principle and unrestrained by law. The pattern is familiar: unilateral military actions in Iran and off the coast of Venezuela, economic coercion disguised as “reciprocity,” and the systematic weakening of multilateral institutions. The Gaza plan fits squarely within this trajectory.
To be sure, liberal peacebuilding in practice has always been fraught with contradiction. Its professed commitment to democracy and human rights often masked the imposition of technocratic governance and market orthodoxy. One might cynically suggest that Trump’s plan merely dispenses with the pretense. Yet this idea does not make it less troubling. By discarding even the façade of legality and moral purpose, it transforms an already imperfect model into one defined solely by instrumental calculation.
From a normative perspective, the consequences are even graver. The plan’s retreat from international law mirrors the broader erosion of the post-war legal order. It embodies the dismantling of a system in which even the most powerful states once sought the appearance of compliance with law.
In this sense, the 20 points do not merely illustrate a policy failure; they epitomize the end stage of liberal peacebuilding’s self-erosion. By reducing peace to management and justice to expediency, they raise a larger and unresolved question: if the post-1945 order of human rights and international norms (embodied in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) no longer serves as the measure of peace, what, if anything, will take its place?
Conclusion
In the rhetoric of the White House, Trump’s Gaza peace plan is a “bold vision,” a “game-changer,” a chance for Gaza to be rebuilt, for hostages returned, and for peace to dawn. However, the fine print reveals that a durable peace is unlikely. The plan offers an illusion of progress: focused on reconstruction, not justice; designed for a technocratic elite, not grassroots empowerment; anchored in complacent assumptions about economic growth, not structural political change.
Gaza has known cease-fires before. They punctuate long wars, raise hopes, and collapse when the structural drivers remain untouched: occupation, settlement expansion, injustice, and deprivation. This plan, too, treats the symptom rather than the core. Unless there is a broadened political settlement, one that includes the West Bank, secures equitable governance, holds all parties accountable, and recognizes Palestinian rights, the lives of the millions in Gaza may yet witness another brittle pause, not a lasting peace.
Associate World Editor
