Davos becomes the stage for Trump’s Gaza push

The World Economic Forum in Davos became the stage for a disruptive proposal when US President Donald Trump announced a ‘Board of Peace’ framed as a permanent, pay-to-participate global conflict-resolution body emerging from Gaza’s ceasefire and reconstruction efforts. While some governments feel compelled to join to avoid alienating Washington, critics—from Australia to France—warn that the initiative echoes colonial-era mandates, concentrates unprecedented authority in U.S. hands, and risks eroding the United Nations and established norms of international law.

Gaza today stands at a fork in history that few places endure and even fewer survive with dignity intact. More than 70 per cent of homes have been damaged or destroyed, basic infrastructure has collapsed, and the World Bank estimates economic output has contracted by well over half since the war began. The figures are brutal, yet numbers alone fail to capture the deeper truth: Gaza is not merely a site of devastation, but a test of whether the international system still knows how to rebuild hope after catastrophe.

Reconstruction, in this moment, is not about concrete and cranes alone. It is about whether global diplomacy can move beyond managing conflict and instead summon the courage to design a future. 

The emerging debate around Gaza’s recovery—shaped by ceasefire arrangements, new governance proposals and unprecedented levels of international attention—offers a narrow but real opening. History suggests such windows do not stay open for long.

Past reconstructions show both the promise and the peril. Europe’s Marshall Plan mobilised roughly US$13 billion between 1948 and 1951, about US$150 billion in today’s terms, and helped anchor not just recovery but a new political order. Bosnia and Herzegovina received more than US$5 billion in post-war aid during the late 1990s, yet fragile institutions and unresolved political fractures continue to haunt it. Iraq absorbed hundreds of billions in reconstruction spending after 2003, much of it squandered through poor coordination and corruption. 

Gaza sits uneasily among these precedents: smaller in scale, but more politically charged than any of them.

What makes Gaza different is not only the depth of destruction, but the density of global involvement. According to the United Nations, rebuilding Gaza could cost between US$40 and US$50 billion, a sum well within global capacity if political will aligns. Gulf states alone have pledged comparable amounts to regional projects in recent years. The European Union remains the largest single donor to the Palestinians. The United States continues to wield unmatched convening power. China and multilateral development banks have signalled interest in infrastructure-led recovery models. The resources exist; coherence does not—yet.

The most compelling argument for optimism lies in the quiet convergence of interests. Regional actors want stability on their borders. Global powers seek to avoid Gaza becoming a permanent humanitarian emergency due to its demonstrated links to long-term instability and regional spillovers. International financial institutions want proof that post-conflict reconstruction can still succeed in an era of fractured multilateralism. Even markets, often caricatured as indifferent, have an interest in Gaza’s Mediterranean location as a future logistics and energy corridor. Reconstruction, properly designed, is no longer charity; it is enlightened self-interest.

Yet optimism must be disciplined by realism. Gaza cannot be rebuilt as an enclave of dependency, governed indefinitely by external custodians and conditional promises. 

The failures of the Oslo process loom large precisely because economic development was allowed to substitute for political resolution. Think tanks such as the International Crisis Group and the Quincy Institute have repeatedly warned that reconstruction without credible pathways to Palestinian self-determination risks entrenching instability rather than resolving it. Bricks without rights do not produce peace; they merely postpone the next collapse.

A sustainable reconstruction framework must be grounded in legitimacy, connectivity, and trust. Palestinian ownership has to sit at its heart, with reformed and accountable local institutions leading planning and delivery, supported—but never substituted—by international administrators. Recovery also depends on reconnecting Gaza to its region: economic revival is impossible without access to neighbouring markets, labour mobility, and integrated energy networks linking Egypt and the wider Levant. 

Above all, any governance arrangement must carry international legitimacy, operating in line with international law and reinforcing, rather than eroding, the United Nations system that continues to anchor global consent and cooperation.

There are early signs that this thinking is gaining ground. Proposals circulating among policy circles in Washington, Brussels and the Gulf increasingly emphasise phased reconstruction tied to institutional reform, monitored by multilateral bodies rather than unilateral patrons. The World Bank and IMF have outlined models that combine emergency relief with medium-term state-building benchmarks. 

Regional development funds are exploring blended finance instruments to crowd in private capital while managing political risk. None of this guarantees success, but it suggests learning is occurring.

For middle powers across every continent, Gaza’s reconstruction speaks to a deeper global truth: distance no longer confers moral or strategic shelter. In a world of instantaneous images, displaced populations and interlinked economies, the consequences of failure travel faster than diplomacy ever has. A Gaza left in ruins would not remain a local tragedy. It would radiate instability into global supply chains, fracture already fragile multilateral institutions, and harden a sense that international law is selectively applied. 

Every veto, every stalled resolution, every unrebuilt hospital would echo in Geneva, New York, Addis Ababa and beyond, quietly corroding faith in the idea that rules still matter.

Yet the inverse is equally powerful. A Gaza rebuilt with dignity could become something far larger than itself: a rare demonstration that collective action is still possible in an age of strategic rivalry. It could show that the international system is capable not only of managing crises, but of repairing them; not only of issuing statements, but of restoring lives. For countries that do not command empires or aircraft carriers, this distinction is existential. 

Middle powers survive not by imposing outcomes, but by investing in norms—by believing that cooperation, law and legitimacy are not sentimental ideals but practical tools of survival.

There is also a more profound opportunity embedded here. Gaza could become a laboratory for a new kind of global reconstruction—one that blends humanitarian urgency with political inclusion, regional ownership with international guarantees, and economic revival with legal clarity. 

Imagine a model where reconstruction funds are tied not to geopolitical loyalty but to transparent governance benchmarks; where regional states co-invest not as patrons, but as partners; where multilateral institutions regain relevance by delivering visible, human outcomes rather than abstract communiqués. Such an approach would not just rebuild Gaza—it would help re-legitimise multilateralism itself.

For the Global South, Gaza is a mirror. Many societies see in its ruins the reflection of their own histories: territories administered, futures deferred, rights made conditional. A credible reconstruction process could signal a break from that past, offering proof that post-conflict recovery does not have to replicate the hierarchies that caused the conflict in the first place. 

For Europe and North America, it is an indicator of whether proclaimed values hold beyond familiar theatres; for Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it reflects whether global governance can adjust to multipolarity without stagnation.

Ultimately, Gaza’s reconstruction is not about charity, nor even about conflict management. It is about whether the international community can still imagine progress in a time defined by cynicism. A perpetually shattered Gaza would confirm the darkest assumptions of the age: that power eclipses law, that suffering is background noise, that diplomacy has forgotten how to build. A recovering Gaza, by contrast, would stand as a quiet rebuke to despair—a signal that even now, cooperation can outpace destruction.

That choice matters far beyond the Mediterranean. It will shape how future crises are approached, how smaller states calculate their faith in the system, and whether global order is remembered as something that merely managed decline—or something that still knew how to renew itself.

Diplomacy, at its best, is the art of transforming tragedy into shared responsibility. Gaza demands that art in ‘full measure’. The task ahead is immense, but the alternative—a managed ruin, rebuilt just enough to survive and never enough to live—is far costlier in the long run. The global community has spent decades debating Gaza as a problem to be contained. Reconstruction offers a chance, perhaps the last in a generation, to treat it instead as a future to be built.

Hope, in international relations, is often dismissed as naïve. Yet history suggests the opposite. The most consequential reconstructions were born not from certainty, but from a refusal to accept permanent destruction as inevitable. Gaza now waits to see whether the world still possesses that refusal.

OPNION: After UNRWA, what breaks next?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.