The Board of Peace’s model for governing Palestine reflects designs for a new world order.
It has now been ten months since the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 2803 establishing a “ceasefire” in Gaza and approving the U.S.-led Board of Peace to oversee its reconstruction and governance. While the arrangement stipulated that Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and Hamas disarmament would be a phased process, Israel rejected the terms after Hamas agreed to them.
As a result, the “yellow line,” a demarcation set by the ceasefire separating Israeli forces from Palestinian enclaves that split the territory in half, has steadily crept inward, expanding Israeli control to 70 percent of Gaza. Tamer Nahed, a journalist based in Gaza City, reports that Israel has built 30-meter-tall cranes equipped with cameras and machine guns that fire randomly to enforce the demarcation, “[turning] the entire city into an open field.” To live in Gaza is to live with “the constant feeling of being an exposed target at all times, where even children cannot run in the street without fear,” he writes. “There is no place to hide, and not a single moment of safety.”
Meanwhile, the Board of Peace has been eager to declare the war’s end. Speaking at the 2026 Munich Security Conference in February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the Board’s founding executives, praised the Trump administration for having “freed captives from barbarians and brought about a fragile truce” in Gaza. In contrast, he said, the UN “has no answers and played virtually no role.” Not only had the UN failed in Gaza, he went on, but it had also failed in Ukraine, Iran, and Venezuela. Even more, the UN posed a threat to national sovereignty itself for attempting to impose such limitations on states as human rights law and the laws of war. “We can no longer place the so-called global order above the vital interests of our people and our nations,” Rubio warned. The United States would not “dismantle” global institutions, he promised (though he has since embarked on a campaign to destroy the International Criminal Court). “But these must be reformed. These must be rebuilt.”
When a journalist asked Trump if he wanted the Board of Peace to replace the UN, he replied, “It might.”
The Board of Peace represents the model of reform envisioned by the Trump administration. According to its charter, it is “an international organization that seeks to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” Yet unlike the United Nations, which has traditionally fulfilled this global mandate, the Board of Peace has made membership invite-only, led by a nine-member executive board selected and overseen by U.S. President Donald Trump. So far, twenty-seven states have joined up: a list that includes Trump’s ideological allies (Javier Milei’s Argentina), powerful Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar), and smaller nations (Vietnam, Kazakhstan, and Kosovo). Though invited, none of the major Western democracies—France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and others—chose to participate. Unsurprisingly, the Board features no Palestinian seats.
Several aspects of the Board stand out in sharp relief: its absolute illegality in international and U.S. law; its imposition of what a legal expert calls an “illegal trusteeship” over Gaza; its likely function as another failed enterprise for the Trump dynasty to launder and make money. But it also reflects a new form of global governance that has the potential to serve as an alternative to the United Nations: the exit model.
Other models of exit seek to free capital from the cumbersome demands of popular democracy. The Board of Peace is a form of escape, too—in this case, though, from a cumbersome international legal order. In the name of “efficiency,” the Board seeks to establish an exceptional legal regime not regulated by existing international law and human rights norms. It has no temporal or geographic limitation, indicating its potential for application beyond Gaza. It operates according to rules of its own making with little to no oversight. And, unlike other forms of exit shepherded by billionaires and tech elites, the Board of Peace bears the precedent-setting imprimatur of the UN. The exit model is being built in Palestine but may be intended for the world.
I. Destruction
The United States’s steady, systematic gutting of international legal institutions has made it possible for the Trump administration to impose on the Palestinian people something genuinely new. For two years, the Biden and Trump administrations undermined international legal institutions, tribunals, and norms: vetoing six ceasefire resolutions at the UN Security Council, disregarding the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) provisional measures to prevent genocide, criticizing the ICJ ruling on Israel’s unlawful presence in the West Bank and Gaza as a hindrance to a negotiated settlement, and imposing sanctions on anyone aiding the case. These violations of the international order did not come out of nowhere: they continued a longstanding U.S. policy that has placed the Palestinian question beyond multilateral reach ever since the 1967 War, when the United States established itself as Israel’s primary ally and imperial patron.
While international law might customarily govern a mandate like the Board of Peace, the group was not born of a negotiated treaty, nor is it reflective of customary state practice. As researcher Mandy Turner has pointed out, unlike the Coalition Provisional Authority, the body established to manage Iraq after the United States’s illegal invasion, the Board of Peace is not recognized as an occupying power and is not subject to occupation law. Instead, with the gift of Security Council authorization, it enjoys its own international legal status.
Market fundamentalists are not only enriching themselves but advancing alternative models of governance that eclipse ideas about national sovereignty and popular democracy.
While its charter, published in January, stipulates that it will function “in accordance with international law,” a leaked June draft resolution reveals that the Board seeks to grant sweeping legal immunity for itself and its individual members. In January, the Trump administration began offering select countries permanent Board seats in exchange for a $1 billion membership fee. The United States claims the fees will be put toward rebuilding in Gaza, though as of May, the fund overseen by the World Bank reported a balance of zero. According to the Financial Times, donors have routed their contributions to a JPMorgan account overseen by the Board’s executive leadership, where they are not subject to the same transparency requirements.
The Board’s twenty-point plan attached as an annex to UNSC Resolution 2803, billed as a “comprehensive plan to end the Gaza conflict,” promises little other than a tighter siege and a more repressive occupation, now featuring U.S. presence. All throughout, it contains deliberate ambiguities and glaring omissions. Absent are lines or a timetable for Israeli withdrawal, mention of the UN-protected Palestinian right to self-determination, or accountability for the perpetrators of genocide.
Yet while the comprehensive plan reveals by omission, the architects of the Board of Peace have elsewhere made their reconstruction aims grimly explicit. At a presentation at Davos in January, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a Board executive member, unveiled the Board of Peace’s “Master Plan” for the “New Gaza.” The presentation is pure settler fantasy, a stark admission of the Board’s desire to supplant indigenous worlds with colonial ones. To do so, it proposes creating three zones: economic, industrial, and residential. The residential zones are modern-day refugee camps intended to reduce refugees to physical bodies that work, sleep, and eat but have no ability to shape their worlds or forge a future. Blueprints for the first “planned communities” in south Gaza indicate that Palestinians will be forced to register to live in these camps, be subject to biometric surveillance, and use cryptocurrency regulated by their colonial overseers.
Gaza’s coastline is set aside for “coastal tourism,” which the Davos presentation illustrates with slick architectural renderings of white, glass-clad buildings ringed with trees. “It could be a destination,” Kushner mused. None of it reflects the existing Palestinian geography of seaside cafes, ports, and fishing industry, and none of it is the product of a Palestinian imagination. Needless to say, New Gaza is not being built for the Palestinian people.
To make good on the development plans, the vultures of capitalism will build over crushed bodies yet to be excavated and properly buried. The Gaza reconstruction plan recognizes that nearly two million Palestinians have survived genocide while 73,000 have been murdered and some 10,000 are still buried under the rubble, but it reduces these precious lives to mere bodies to be managed.
Behind the Board’s vision is the insistence that Palestinians do not constitute a juridical people with the right to self-determination—the position of Western powers since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 recognized the existence of Palestine’s population as a physical fact but denied it as a political one. In Davos, Kushner repeatedly and deliberately referred to Palestinians as “people of Gaza” and “Gazans.”
Freed from the constraints of international law, the Board of Peace can neatly align itself with a longtime Trump family interest: real estate development. Trump and his hand-picked executive board members have been forthright about their eagerness to build what journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous has aptly described as a “theme park of dispossession.” “It’s all about location,” Trump said in Davos. “Look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be for so many people.” Marc Rowan, the billionaire head of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management and a Board of Peace executive member, concurred: “The coastline alone is 50 billion dollars of value alone on a conservative basis . . . it just needs to be unlocked and financed,” he said at the Board’s first meeting. (Also a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, Rowan was behind much of the university’s crackdown against faculty and students protesting genocide and led the call for the resignation of then-president Liz Magill in 2023.)
Other Board of Peace executives include Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy, and Martin Edelman, a New York real estate attorney. These three are bound with Rowan, Kushner, and Trump in a web of financial ties across the Middle East that forms an unequivocal conflict of interest in Palestine. Kushner is the CEO of Affinity Partners, a Miami-based investment company whose $4.8 billion in assets was all raised by investments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE. Affinity owns the largest stake in Phoenix Financial, a financial services group that itself has a partnership with Rowan’s Apollo. With over $100 billion in assets, Phoenix Financial is the largest asset manager in Israel, holding $4.5 billion worth of shares across twelve companies listed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) for their links to Israeli settlements.
Many board members, too, have financial ties with the UAE, whose military and trade bonds with Israel have only deepened since the war’s outbreak. Lunate, the Emirati source of investment in Kushner’s Affinity Partners, is closely associated with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser and brother of UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. Sheikh Tahnoon is also the chairman of AI development company G42 and AI investment firm MGX, both based in the UAE. Martin Edelman is a board member of MGX and general counsel of G42. Edelman is also the former director of Aldar Properties, an Abu Dhabi–based real estate fund. The International Holding Company, chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon, owns a third of Aldar Properties—a firm that Apollo has invested $2.9 billion in since 2022. In May, Apollo also invested $100 million in Witkoff’s real estate development and investment firm, the Witkoff Group. Witkoff’s sons, along with Trump and his own sons, cofounded the cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial, of which 49 percent is owned by the Tahnoon-backed Aryam Investments.
Unlike the rest of the board, former British prime minister Tony Blair holds no such investments, but he has long exercised influence over the United States’s Gaza plans. Last spring, Kushner commissioned the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) to come up with a postwar plan. Months later, Trump announced that he supported Blair’s plan for a Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA), a framework that proposes giving security responsibilities to a multinational International Stabilization Force and oversight of a Palestinian technical administration to an executive board. It also proposes a commercially driven reconstruction plan that could attract private capital. A TBI document referred to devastation in Gaza as “a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild Gaza from first principles . . . as a secure, modern, prosperous society.” It was also Blair who envisioned that GITA would be established by a Security Council resolution—an idea that neatly set the table for the Board of Peace.
GITA was not the Board of Peace’s only forebear. Its most direct precursor may be the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the short-lived organization established in February 2025 to deliver food to a deliberately starved people. Insisting that traditional humanitarian relief was enriching Hamas, the architects of the GHF—together with private equity firms and security contractors—established a privatized model for distributing humanitarian aid. The project was disastrous, not only weaponizing food aid to further concentrate Palestinians in the south of Gaza but also sparking the creation of sadistic traps where starvation could only be averted at the risk of death.
Maria del Mar Logroño Narbona, vice chair of the Euro-MENA Initiative, writes that the GHF, like the Board of Peace, privatizes public services in the name of “efficiency” and defines the primary problem “not as political obstruction or violations of international law, but as poor management.” The Board’s charter stipulates that it will be “more nimble and effective” than existing peace building bodies, but as Logroño Narbona points out,
“Nimble” and “effective” are not legal concepts. They are market metrics. In this vision, peace building is no longer anchored in law, rights, or collective obligation, but in performance, speed, and control.
The Board of Peace appears to be styled in the GHF’s image. In the name of efficiency, both privatize humanitarian mandates by bypassing collectively established norms—be that the delivery of life-saving aid, accountability for genocide, or the right of a people to self-determination. That workaround is precisely the point: an exit from international legal norms and governance.
When, in January, a journalist asked Trump if he wanted the Board to replace the UN, he replied, “It might.” It does not, therefore, seem extreme to suggest that the UN, in passing Resolution 2803, created its own potential competitor: a body that not only seeks to bypass it but may ultimately seek to be one of its alternatives.
II. Exit
In his 1970 book, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, economist Albert Hirschman famously named “exit” and “voice” as the primary mechanisms for exercising agency in response to discontent. In a 1978 essay, “Exit, Voice, and the State,” he developed his theory in relation to capital flight, examining how the rise of movable wealth quickly found forms of exit from the state. While he initially considered exit a public good for imposing restraints on arbitrary government power, Hirschman cautioned that the infinite expansion of capital mobility had become a “menace,” both undermining “the capability of capitalism to reform itself” and empowering the wealthiest class to weaponize their holdings when the interests of the collective good diverged from their personal interests.
Freed from the constraints of international law, the Board of Peace can neatly align its plans with a longtime Trump family interest: real estate development.
By then, experiments in capital’s exit—what historian Quinn Slobodian calls “zones of exception”—were proliferating. They found intellectual foothold in the Mont Pelerin Society, a global intellectual network founded by Friedrich Hayek in 1947 for the preservation of classical liberal free-market capitalism. Founding member Milton Friedman famously argued that political and economic freedom are incompatible because a democratic order that demands the state provide education, health care, and labor protections infringes on the rights of corporations. Mont Pelerin’s solution, Slobodian writes, was to establish enclaves within a state, places “with different laws and often no democratic oversight.”
These often took the form of economic free-trade zones, distinct geographic areas carved out of states and subject solely to their own taxes, regulations, and laws, such as the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in China (1980) and the Jebel Ali Free Zone in the UAE (1985). Zones of exception can exist on a much bigger scale, as in the case of Hong Kong (1997), the special administrative region subject to a legal and financial regime distinct from mainland China that prioritizes market freedom through weak worker bargaining power, minimal tariffs, and limited government oversight of trade and taxation.
Yet in many ways, a patchwork of zones of exception has existed for millennia as a feature of empire. As Lauren Benton has persuasively argued, territorial control was less a defining feature of imperial expansion than an incidental goal, often advanced in service of other aims like protecting “commercial networks and routes.” Indeed, imperial powers preferred to assert their authority through legal commercial arrangements, like tax and tribute, linking political belonging to finance rather than territory.
Distinct legal regimes thus traveled with individuals like merchants, soldiers, settlers, and even pirates, who often positioned themselves as representatives of empires and catalyzed conflicts over the reach of the crown and private interests alike. Julia Elyachar names this “embodied sovereignty,” a phenomenon historically associated with the Roman Empire, in which sovereignty was “linked to the physical person, rather than to territory and borders” and had the capacity to traverse other polities.
After the conquest of Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century, Ottoman jurisprudence began to offer sojourners capitulations, granting them the privileges of being regulated by exceptional legal regimes: trade according to their own laws, freedom of worship, and the right of their consuls to handle their property upon death. Elyachar highlights how the capitulations “brought extraterritoriality into the core of the international legal system of Westphalian territorial sovereign states,” making the Middle East and North Africa “global in orientation long before globalization.” Though originally established as gestures of goodwill by the sultan, the capitulations came to undermine Ottoman sovereignty as the empire’s dependence on Europe deepened in the early nineteenth century and Britain, France, and Germany increasingly partitioned it into varying spheres of foreign economic influence.
Today, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), entities that open collective wealth up for state-led investment abroad, have, in Elyachar’s words, become modern-day capitulations—allowing global finance to flow through the state without regulation in “a kind of extraterritorial corporate zone.” In fact, it was a Saudi SWF that invested $2 billion in Kushner’s Affinity Partners. Other significant SWFs in the region include the Abu Dhabi fund Mubadala, which has invested $100 million in venture capital firms responsible for developing militarized security technologies deployed against Palestinians and plans to invest $10 billion in several other sectors of the Israeli economy. Tariq Dana notes that trade between the UAE and Israel is “booming,” having increased by 11 percent to $3.24 billion between the start of the genocide and 2024. The 2020 Abraham Accords, billed as peace treaties but constructed as security and investment pacts, have established this flow of revenue. Beyond enabling the irreparable harm of genocide, the Accords also intensify Arab dependence on the United States and Israel, further diminishing Arab national sovereignty.
As formal imperial regimes crumbled at midcentury, the nation-state became a primary feature of global governance. Today, as private enterprise threatens to eclipse national sovereignty, neocolonial rule together with a global financial architecture and the proliferation of zones of exception have become core elements of this system. Now, the dramatic expansion of zones includes Palestine. The eleventh point of the twenty-point plan affirms the establishment of a “special economic zone with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.”
Half a century after Hirschman’s essay, the threat posed by these extreme forms of capital mobility to the state and democracy has exploded. The number of billionaires, adjusted for inflation, has increased from fewer than 15 in 1976 to more than 3,000 today. 1,000 zones have launched in the last decade alone. And increasing numbers of corporations have valuations meeting or exceeding the GDP of entire countries: Procter & Gamble is worth three times Morocco’s GDP, Apple two times Mexico’s, and Alphabet equivalent to Russia’s. Evidence of the weaponization of capital’s power can be found in the United States’s criminal operation to kidnap Venezuela’s sitting head of state and commandeer the largest world’s largest oil reserves to the benefit of Chevron, ConocoPhillipps, and ExxonMobil.
Does the dramatic proliferation of zones today mark a new era or a return to a historical era? Or is it rather an enduring, evolving form of imperial rule? In any case, the bid for exit in the name of private sovereignty has only become bolder and more ambitious. Market fundamentalists are not only enriching themselves but advancing alternative models of governance that eclipse ideas about national sovereignty and popular democracy.
Consider the charter city of Próspera Roatán in Honduras. A few years after Honduras introduced semi-autonomous zones for employment and economic development, or ZEDEs, in 2013, a U.S. company applied to establish one on Roatán, an island under Honduran sovereignty. After initial approval of a 4.7-acre plot in 2017, global investors expanded their territory to 1,000 acres through large-scale purchases as Próspera Roatán steadily drew in individuals explicitly interested in abolishing the state. Those investors include Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, the latter of whom, in a 2009 essay, declared that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible, taking Friedman’s warning to its logical end. “The great task for libertarians,” Thiel wrote, “is to find an escape from politics in all its forms.”
Today, as private enterprise threatens to eclipse national sovereignty, the dramatic expansion of zones of exception now includes Palestine.
Próspera is a large experiment in exit, but it is also a bid for a new model of governance. The city makes its own laws, is run by a private entity, and has its own arbitration mechanisms outside the Honduran judicial system. Biotech experimentation, its primary economic driver, has been aided by a hands-off approach to regulation in which companies can choosefrom thirty-six different frameworks to suit their needs. Citizenship is established contractually through an Agreement of Coexistence that guarantees individual rights—though no right to governance—and which, if the contract is breached, can be terminated by the corporate managers of Próspera ZEDE, who can also evict members from the zone. In 2024, after local residents protested the devastating environmental impacts of Próspera’s extractive industries and the ZEDE’s adverse effects on island communities, Honduras’s judiciary declared Próspera unconstitutional. In response, Próspera’s investors sued the Honduran government for $11 billion, approximately two-thirds of the national annual budget. As of August, Próspera remains operative, albeit with slight modifications.
Some of the same players who invest in Próspera and other exit initiatives are also invested in the destruction of Gaza. Thiel’s Palantir Technologies has a permanent desk at the U.S.-led Civil-Military Coordination Center to track food delivery and aid distribution to Gaza. In a June 2025 report, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found that Palantir most likely provided predictive policing technology, infrastructure for building and deploying military software, and an AI platform that enabled data integration for automated targeting in combat.
While Thiel is not directly connected to the Board of Peace, he has financial ties to its executive leadership, including as an investor in Cadre, a real estate and technology company cofounded by Jared Kushner, and Thrive Capital, a venture firm founded by Kushner’s brother, Joshua. Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm cofounded by vocal Trump supporters Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, is a frequent co-investor with Thrive and invests heavily in tech companies such as Shield AI that have profited from genocide in Gaza. Both Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive are investors in weapons and defense company Anduril, headed by Palmer Luckey, a self-described “radical Zionist” who defends the enshrinement of Jewish supremacy in Israeli law.
The relationship between tech entrepreneurs and Zionism, however, exceeds commitment to Israel and war profiteering. Balaji Srinivasan, another significant investor in Próspera who worked for the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase as well as for Andreessen Horowitz, is a self-avowed “Tech Zionist.” Rather than seeking to capture state power, Srinivasan envisions a “network state” to which tech-aligned online communities across the globe flock in a “reverse diaspora.” The process begins, he explains, “with a clear leader, an integrated cryptocurrency, a definite purpose, a sense of national consciousness, and a plan to crowdfund territory.” The leader would be the “founding influencer, who organizes the online community that eventually buys land in the physical world.” Upon settlement, the tech-aligned society will build its own utopia: a new culture, social life, and economy. Most importantly, their legal systems exist outside the nation-state model, constituting another form of exit that, if it builds sufficient power, could earn diplomatic recognition and ultimately reshape the laws of the world.
Srinivasan’s vision has been adopted by other market fundamentalists, even as he faces some resistance on the ground: Malaysia, where Srinivasan was building a digital commune, kicked him out this July. A day later Srinivasan was announcing plans for a new campus in Kazakhstan. Srinivasan’s former employer Andreessen Horowitz is also a supporter of exit and a significant investor in California Forever, a planned charter city for tech billionaires in Northern California. Marc Andreessen and Thiel are both investors in Pronomos Capital—a VC firm founded by Patri Friedman, Milton Friedman’s grandson—which funded the launch of a half-dozen charter cities globally, including Próspera. Friedman, along with Thiel, Altman, and Elon Musk, also invests in Praxis, founded by thirty-year-old Dryden Brown for the explicit purpose of establishing “digital nations.” Before the Trump administration tried to seize Greenland, Brown attempted to buy it for himself. “If humanity is going to build [a colony] on Mars,” Brown explained on X, “we should practice in Greenland.” Recently, Brown’s plans for Praxis’s “digital nation” have shifted to Uruguay.
III. Exception
Some pioneering Zionists did not seek to be an exception, at least within Europe. To the contrary, they sought to establish a Jewish colony in Palestine for the purpose of eliminating their difference as a racialized “other” marked as exogenous to European societies and thus, as Sherene Seikaly and Max Ajl write, earning European acceptance. Israel’s Declaration of Independence explicitly reaches for international legal sanction in its invocation of the Balfour Declaration as well as UN General Assembly Resolution 181. Nonetheless, ever since its adoption as British imperial policy in 1917, the Zionist project has been characterized by a structural form of exception in law.
The Balfour Declaration (1917), later incorporated verbatim into the Palestine Mandate (1920), distinguished Palestine from all other Class A mandates—the former colonies of the vanquished Ottoman Empire to be managed by the League of Nations following World War I—provisionally recognized as independent. As I write in my book, Justice for Some (2019), unlike the other Class A mandates,
where mandatory powers had a duty to shepherd the native populations to self-determination, in the Palestine Mandate, the British Mandatory Power created a duty, through its own legislative efforts, to establish a Jewish national home. This exception enabled Britain to evade its duty under Article 20 of the League of Nations Covenant stipulating that the Mandatory Power not take on any commitments that are “inconsistent with the terms of this Covenant.” This resulted in subverting the will of the native population as well as refusal to establish a representative embryonic government for fear that it would reject Britain’s Zionist policy. The British Government and, later, the UN Special Committee on Palestine, justified these violations because of the sui generis nature of the Palestine Mandate.
Sui generis is Latin for “unlike any other”; as a legal concept it refers to a unique fact pattern to which no other precedent or analogy can be applied. I have argued that rather than being a site of lawlessness, a sui generiscondition constitutes the justification for the creation of new law, in which advocates insist that no applicable law exists. Zionism, and its manifestation in Israel, has relied on conditions that are systematically sui generis: Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is sui generis, thus exempting it from legal adherence to occupation law. Palestinian resistance to Israeli domination and occupation is not a civilian riot, national insurgency, or national liberation war: it is sui generis, affording Israel the right to use lethal force against a people that has no right to fight back. After Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, the territory was neither independent nor occupied but a sui generis “hostile entity” subject to unique legal regulation. Israel’s legal regime that affords preferential citizenship to Jews born anywhere in the world is not apartheid but rather a sui generis form of citizenship justified by the special prerogatives of Jewish self-determination. Most recently, the destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza is not genocide but a sui generis instance of self-defense.
Today’s bids for exit from a singular global order are grounded in a belief in Western civilizational supremacy.
Palestine’s structural exception has proven an inspiration to many racial supremacists, who believe that they have a privileged right to survival even as others perish—what Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor call“supremacist survivalism.” When the likes of Thiel and Srinivasan insist on their right to live on their own terms, with their own chosen community, to the potential detriment of others, it feels as if they are borrowing directly from this model.
While there may appear to be a contradiction between the libertarians’ push for exit and their insistence on domination, these two principles are reconciled through a civilizational logic. No figure has sewn these tensions together better than market-fundamentalist flag-bearer Elon Musk. Musk, who hails from a South African family, laments that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” and that declining birth rates pose an existential risk to the West. His tirades against supposed South African anti-white racism seem to have reached sympathetic ears in the White House: the Trump administration has admitted as refugees some 13,000 white Afrikaners fleeing what Musk called “white genocide,” even as it has suspended asylum for nearly all other asylees globally. The “genocide” in question was a South African law that would allow the state to expropriate certain lands for a public purpose, a meager attempt to address the post-apartheid maldistribution of land in which white South Africans, who constitute 7 percent of the population, continue to own 70 percent of farms and agricultural holdings.
While private property is the market fundamentalists’ supreme value, the right to ownership remains contingent—a principle the Board of Peace plan has put on full display. The Board of Peace plan explicitly denies the common ownership of land by the Palestinian people and proposes to compensate private landowners with one digital token for the right to build on their land. The Board’s June draft resolution also proposes that public property and facilities in Gaza be provisioned to itself and its affiliated bodies without compensation.
Last year, a Heritage Foundation commentator made the even bolder claim that “Gaza is one of the very few pieces of land not under the sovereignty of any nation, a status known as terra nullius in international law,” invoking the settler colonial logic that facilitated dispossession of indigenous people and the supplanting of their sovereignty across the Americas and Australia. Such thinking resembles that of the Doctrine of Discovery, the nineteenth-century U.S. Supreme Court judicial rule that established that native peoples in the Americas had a right to occupancy on, but not title to, their own lands. That right belonged exclusively to the colonial power that claimed it first.
If billionaires see apocalypse as the new frontier, as Zahid Chaudhary has pointed out, that frontier is not for corporate profit alone. Amid apocalypse, elites can establish new and exceptional legal regimes as well. Look to southern Lebanon, where Israeli targeting has displaced one million people—and the United States has suggested that this displacement may be the precursor to creating a “Trump economic zone” stretching from Jabal al Sheikh to Shebaa and Naqoura. In place of Lebanese sovereignty, the United States would like to establish logistics hubs and global shipping routes. In late June, the United States negotiated an interim ceasefire agreement between Lebanon and Israel that made Israeli withdrawal contingent on Hezbollah’s disarmament, sets no timeline or verification mechanism for that withdrawal, and demands no accountability for ongoing Israeli attacks against Lebanese communities and lands.
As Rubio’s Munich address made vividly clear, today’s bids for exit from a singular global order are grounded in a belief in Western civilizational supremacy. Rubio, who is Cuban American but identifies as Spanish, insisted that Americans and Europeans are “are part of one civilization—Western civilization” that is deeply bound by Christian faith and centuries of shared history. Western civilization’s high-water mark spanned five centuries from 1492 to 1945, Rubio states, when missionaries and soldiers “[settled] new continents” and “[built] vast empires.” Its downfall coincided with the rise of anticolonial uprising and socialist revolution. To regain their glory, Europe and the United States must now unite to build a “new Western century” featuring commercial space travel, Western supply chains, and, significantly, “a unified effort to compete for market share in the economies of the Global South.” To accomplish these goals, Rubio entreated his audience, the United States and Europe must work together to build a global order with institutions that do not threaten their national interests. The seed for that order may have already been planted in Gaza.
IV. Repair
The Board of Peace is a reminder that the destruction inflicted on the Palestinian people is decimating the guardrails that protected us all. Private sovereignty is advancing steadily, while national sovereignties—in Venezuela, Cuba, and Lebanon—are undermined and others—in Palestine—are preempted from being realized at all.
While the Board of Peace is not led by the very same market fundamentalists plotting exit models elsewhere, the project is ideologically consistent with the likes of Próspera and Praxis—an affinity that the plans to turn Gaza into a “special economic zone” make clear. Like the other models of exit, the Board seeks to supplant national self-determination with corporate governance and to create an exceptional legal regime beyond the reach of international law and human rights norms. Yet unlike Brown’s Greenland or Srinivasan’s network states, the Board’s plan is being rolled out with the imprimatur of the United Nations on land stolen through outright destruction and genocide.
Moreover, the Board has the potential to compete with the United Nations as the dominant institution of global order. For now, such a possibility is merely conjectural. After all, only twenty-seven member states have joined while scores of others have declined the invitation, and the Board has not even met its funding goals. It is likely that the Board’s efforts will fail. But such failure requires a collective political will on the part of the international community that has been absent in the face of genocide. We cannot rest our hopes on the Board simply falling apart on its own.
The threat posed by an entrenched network of political and economic elites taking over Gaza is overwhelming. Yet a significant front of resistance can be found in Palestine itself. Salvaging the potential of a revived global order must be achieved through boldly rejecting claims to exception and insisting on accountability for genocide. If designs for the Board of Peace are predicated on the normalization of genocide, then insisting on calling genocide by its name and enshrining it among the greatest atrocities of the twenty-first century is imperative. So too is the pursuit of accountability for the weapons manufacturers, the media conglomerates, the complicit governments, and the war criminals, which all stand to enrich themselves through the crimes they have committed.
There can be no exception for anyone, and no exit from international order and human rights norms, lest we jeopardize our collective futures. Israel’s mode of supremacist survivalism, predicated on the denial of Palestinian humanity and the presumed superiority of Jewish life, remains the most pressing front in this struggle. If the final blow to a fallible global order was dealt in Palestine, then any attempt at its restoration must begin there as well.
A version of this essay was originally delivered as the 2026 Edward Said Lecture at Princeton University.