Commentary
In the Trump Gaza Plan, Diplomatic Failure is Success
By failing to address Palestinian representation, the current process is bound to lead to just another temporary arrangement.
Diplomatic activity over Gaza is suddenly stirring again. Tony Blair, previously the special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East, is resurfacing; even Hillary Clinton is openly suggesting that the Trump Plan is the only game in town. Renewed international efforts augur something more consequential—and far more radical—than diplomatic bromides about Gaza’s reconstruction suggest. Those now attempting to revive the Trump Plan make no effort to answer the question of who speaks for Palestine. Instead, they are striving to make that question disappear. What is being sold under the rubric of administration and reconstruction is actually constitutional design.
The matter under discussion now is not simply who will deliver services or fund projects, it is who will exercise authority. The answer is startling: There will be no national Palestinian entity. Palestine will not be governed as a political community; instead, Gaza’s Palestinians are voiceless inhabitants who will be administered as a population by private international actors and shadowy public ones, overseen by a small group close to President Donald Trump and coordinated with Israeli security bodies.
For years, international discussions mouthed the promise that the Palestinian Authority would eventually govern Gaza. Conditioned on ritual calls for “reform” or “revitalization,” the fiction was that Palestinian national institutions would be strengthened until they could administer the territory.
That idea was always questionable. First, Israel’s current leadership has repeatedly and explicitly rejected any significant governing role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. That position has become a hardened principle: Israel is portraying the Palestinian Authority as being as much of a problem as Hamas. And this rejection extends to any Palestinian national institution. The Trump administration has acted with striking consistency on the same impulse, albeit without broadcasting its position.
Second, in the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinian Authority lost any credibility as a national leadership decades ago. When outsiders have spoken of reforming it, they have focused largely on making it palatable to Israeli leaders—an inherently futile project—and merely furthering the estrangement between Palestinian leaders and their people. Their only success has been to render the term “Palestinian Authority” an oxymoron.
The responses of those actors that might be expected to resist such a drift are revealing. The Palestinian Authority is scrambling to hold elections and demonstrate its relevance. President Mahmoud Abbas has announced legislative elections for November 28, the first in two decades. But it is far from clear how credible national elections can be held in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem under present conditions. It is even less clear how an election decree can reverse decades of institutional decay, political fragmentation, and public disaffection.
Hamas has moved in the opposite direction, announcing the dissolution of its de facto government in Gaza and declaring its readiness to hand administrative responsibility to a technocratic committee. The gesture looks less like a genuine alternative than an effort to avoid being blamed for the predictable stalling of the Trump Plan, while protecting Hamas’s continuing relevance without harnessing it to any viable substitute strategy.
Erstwhile diplomatic opposition has collapsed. The Saudi-French initiative and the New York Declaration—once presented as a major international effort to revive Palestinian statehood and a two-state settlement—has become a distant memory, left to survive as a passing reference in the United Nations Security Council resolution that effectively gave a blank check to American efforts. The Palestinian Authority reaches for procedures it cannot render meaningful; Hamas sheds administrative responsibility without offering a political plan; and outside powers quietly leave their own diplomatic architecture behind.
The response from many outside actors has not been to work against or around these realities but simply to ignore them. The result has been to hide a striking shift in the way governance itself is being imagined. And now, the Board of Peace is not seeking to overcome those realities; it is institutionalizing them. Instead of asking how Palestinian national institutions might be rebuilt, its discussions focus on administrative functions. Who distributes aid? Who provides healthcare? Who maintains civil records? Who oversees reconstruction? Who coordinates security? Each question is treated technically, while the only constant is the exclusion of any national Palestinian leadership. It is this effort that is now being presented as the only path on offer.
National institutions perform the function of combining administrative responsibilities under a political authority that claims to represent a people. They establish lines of accountability, determine who exercises authority in whose name, and connect the routine work of governing to a broader political community. The Palestine Liberation Organization and Palestinian Authority never did these things well, but they still strove to do so. But now, as each function is hived off and assigned to a different mechanism, the question of political representation is quietly disappearing.
The emerging structure concentrates extraordinary authority in a Board of Peace headed by Trump. Its charter puts the president in the chair indefinitely and empowers him to select his successor. He and his close associates have total and personal control over the board’s structure. The plan simply replaces Palestinian representation with personal rule in international guise, coordinated with Israel. It offers only the vaguest pledges about eventual Palestinian self-determination and, at most, a Palestinian fig leaf in the form of a toothless committee of little-known figures deprived of funds and authority and forced to wait in a Cairo hotel month after month.
The scheme also recasts the conflict. It is no longer a struggle over representation, sovereignty, and national institutions, but a problem of administering a (now largely homeless) population. Current diplomacy may produce agreements on humanitarian access, reconstruction projects, or new administrative arrangements. It may improve daily life in important respects. But a darker reality lurks just below the surface. The arrangements now taking shape will entrench different realities in different parts of Gaza: reconstruction and administration where Israeli security control is consolidated; and makeshift relief, institutional collapse, and continuing deprivation elsewhere. For many Gazans, this means a forever war is metamorphosing into forever misery—not because diplomacy has failed but because diplomacy is producing it.
Administrative arrangements can distribute food, rebuild hospitals, register births, or organize reconstruction, though they have barely done much so far. But even if they expand, they cannot answer the question of who legitimately speaks for Palestinians or how Palestinian national politics will be reconstructed after years of fragmentation, war, and institutional decay. They are not designed to.
The danger, therefore, is not diplomatic failure but success. This would bring in increasingly elaborate systems for administering Palestinians while leaving unanswered the political question that has made every previous arrangement temporary.
About the Author
Nonresident Senior Fellow, Middle East Program
Nathan J. Brown, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, is a distinguished scholar and author of nine books on Arab politics and governance, as well as editor of five books.
Recent Work
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
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