I have a keen interest in Davos and the Trump Peace Initiative for Gaza namely because of the approach President D.J. Trump has taken, as a disruptive force into what hasn't worked to secure the strip for an ambitious (outrageous!) peace plan. However, I throw caution as any ideological plan can be ruined by forces, within and without. History proves my reasoning for caution. As such, I have written a policy paper (link below) that I shall share with a member of the Trump administration, not as what I propose but simply as a check list of ideas they may choose to peruse. My context here are based on my years as a project manager writing policy, executive directives and plans for various disciplines'.
Why Peace Requires the Death of a Narrative?
Davos 'loves' peace. It adores it in panels, abstracts, and carefully managed outrage. What it cannot tolerate is peace that does not flatter its moral self-image. Gaza has long served as one of Davos’ most useful moral stages: a compact theater of suffering where outrage can be endlessly recycled without ever demanding resolution. But peace, real peace, is never performative. It is disruptive. It breaks stories, not just ceasefires.
The fundamental error in how Gaza has been approached is psychological, not political. Conflict psychology teaches us that some conflicts are not sustained by material deprivation but by identity fusion. Gaza is a case study. Over generations, grievance has ceased to be a response to conditions and has become the condition itself. Violence is no longer instrumental; it is expressive. Martyrdom is not a tactic; it is a currency of meaning. In such environments, traditional peace processes fail because they assume rational bargaining where identity preservation is the actual driver.
You cannot negotiate with an identity that feeds on struggle. You can only render it obsolete.
This is where Davos consistently fails. It insists on narrative reconciliation before behavioral change. That sequence is backwards. Behavioral science is unequivocal: incentives reshape identity far more reliably than dialogue reshapes incentives. People do not abandon radical identities because they are convinced; they abandon them because daily life becomes incompatible with them.
A Gaza governed by a Peace Board, secure, technocratic and economically aggressive, would not “heal” trauma. It would sideline it. That distinction matters. Trauma does not disappear through recognition; it disappears through replacement. Routine, predictability, and personal stake are the true solvents of inherited rage.
Urban economics reinforces this conclusion. Small territories do not thrive through justice narratives; they thrive through institutional clarity. Monaco did not become Monaco because Europe reconciled its feudal past. Singapore did not wait for moral consensus in Southeast Asia. Dubai did not emerge from a truth and reconciliation commission. They succeeded because rules were simple, security was absolute, and capital knew exactly where it stood.
Gaza’s geography is not its curse; it is its unrealized leverage. A Mediterranean coastline, proximity to Israel and Europe, and compact density are advantages that urban economists have long identified as accelerants of wealth, if governance friction is removed. Tourism, medical services, finance, and elite residential development are not luxuries; they are stabilizers. They anchor capital, which anchors order, which anchors peace.
This is where deterrence theory enters, and where liberal sensibilities recoil. Deterrence is not about punishment; it is about certainty. Peace emerges when the probability of successful violence approaches zero. Israel’s role in any Gaza revival is therefore not ideological, humanitarian, or even political. It is infrastructural. Security dominance is the foundation upon which all other systems rest. Without it, everything else is theater.
Davos prefers ambiguity. Ambiguity allows moral posturing without consequence. Deterrence eliminates ambiguity, and with it, the oxygen that insurgent psychology requires. When violence no longer produces leverage, visibility, or sympathy, it stops being meaningful, even to those who once worshipped it.
The most controversial aspect of this model is also the most honest: conditional inclusion. Gaza’s Arab population would not be expelled, erased, or collectively punished. They would be treated as adults. Jobs, residency, and participation would be open to those who renounce violence and abide by civil law. No grievance exemptions. No identity-based privileges. No policies designed to preserve anger as a political asset.
This is not cruelty. It is behavioral realism. Post-conflict research from Rwanda to the Balkans shows that peace stabilizes only when civic participation is rule-based rather than identity-based. The moment suffering becomes an entitlement, conflict becomes permanent.
The Trump administration seems to have instinctively understood this logic, even if it never articulated it in academic language. The Abraham Accords were not built on reconciliation narratives; they were built on incentives, power alignment, and elite bypass. Davos mocked them because they were insufficiently poetic. Yet they worked, precisely because populations adapt to realities long before they endorse them.
This is the heresy that offends modern elites: people do not need to agree with peace to live within it. They simply need incentives that make peace more rewarding than war.
A Gaza transformed into a secure, affluent, post-ideological coastal dominion would not just alter the territory. It would expose the moral economy that has profited from its stagnation. NGOs would lose relevance. Panelists would lose talking points. Activists would lose their most reliable stage. And that, more than any security concern, explains the resistance.
Because a Gaza without martyrdom is a Gaza without spectacle.
Peace will not come when the world finally understands Gaza’s pain. That understanding has been monetized for decades. Peace will come when Gaza is no longer useful as a symbol, when it becomes boring, expensive, regulated, and utterly incompatible with eternal struggle.
That kind of peace will be denounced as inhumane by those who never have to live there.
But for those who do, it may be the first peace that does not require their children to die in order to be meaningful.
Link to my Policy Paper: https://thegentile1.blogspot.com/2026/01/gaza-policy-paper.html
The Gentile!
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