Every significant international conflict resolution effort has been built around existing institutions: the UN Security Council, regional organizations, established treaty frameworks. Trump’s Board of Peace represents a deliberate departure from that approach — an unconventional institution built around American convening power and personal diplomacy rather than multilateral legal authority.
This unconventionality is either the board’s greatest strength or its greatest weakness, depending on one’s assessment of why previous efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have failed. If the problem is that existing institutions have been captured by special interests, blocked by vetoes, or paralyzed by procedural constraints, then a fresh institution without those encumbrances could be more effective.
But if the problem is that the conflict’s parties have fundamentally incompatible interests that cannot be bridged by any external arrangement — that peace requires a level of political will from Israelis and Palestinians that has not materialized — then the institution convening the effort matters less than the positions of the parties themselves.
The Board of Peace has over two dozen founding members, claimed $5 billion in pledges, and the personal involvement of the US president. It has conspicuous absences — France, Norway, Sweden, Palestinians — and unresolved internal tensions. Its first meeting Thursday was a declaration of intent rather than a demonstration of results.
The historic bet is that an unconventional institution, led by an unconventional president, can achieve what decades of conventional diplomacy could not. The evidence for that outcome remains to be produced. The first meeting of the Board of Peace has opened the possibility. Whether it can be realized depends on decisions and actions that lie ahead — in Gaza, in Washington, and in capitals across the Middle East.
