The Board of Peace Promises Security. For Whom, Exactly?

Cracked tombstone reading "Board of Peace" with a question mark, set against flags of the US, Egypt, Qatar, Türkiye, and the UN, with the headline "The Board of Peace Promises Security. For Whom, Exactly?"

By: Eli M. Gold, President

President Donald J. Trump and his partners on the Gaza Board of Peace deserve credit for pursuing what so many before them could not achieve, a serious effort to end the Gaza war through Hamas’s disarmament, Israeli withdrawal, and a new governing structure for Gaza.

If this plan succeeds, President Trump will be remembered as the president who did what many of his predecessors could not do, move this conflict from endless war toward a real political settlement.

Screenshot of a tweet from @BoardOfPeace announcing a roadmap agreement with Hamas on disarmament and Israeli withdrawal from GazaThe Board of Peace announcement is bold. Very bold. It says Hamas has agreed to a detailed roadmap for the next phase of the Gaza ceasefire after months of negotiations led by Egypt, Qatar, Türkiye, and the United States. It says Hamas has committed to a plan for giving up all its weapons and that Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will follow. It also says the agreement could bring a better future to the people of Gaza and security to the people of Israel.

That is the promise. Really? Does anyone believe it will actually hold?

The plan is detailed. No one can say it lacks moving parts. It ties Hamas’s disarmament to a phased Israeli withdrawal and to the rise of a new Palestinian governing body, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). It also relies on the International Stabilization Force (ISF), which was authorized under United Nations (U.N.) Security Council Resolution 2803, to help enforce the arrangement, support demilitarization, train police, and help stabilize Gaza while Israel pulls back.

On paper, this sounds orderly. Hamas gives up weapons. Israel withdraws in stages. NCAG takes over. ISF supports the transition. An international verification body confirms compliance at each step. It is all very neat. The region, unfortunately, is not.

Start with the mediators. Egypt, Qatar, Türkiye, and the United States are presented as the countries guiding this process. The problem is obvious. Three of those countries are not trusted champions of Israel’s long term security. They may be useful mediators. Fine. That is not the same thing as being reliable guarantors of peace for Israel. Not even close.

Türkiye’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly taken a hostile line toward Israel. Qatar has long tolerated, enabled, or funded institutions and media ecosystems that are deeply hostile to Israel. Egypt’s public language during this war has also been sharply critical of Israel. These are not background details to be politely set aside. These are the details. They go to the heart of whether this arrangement can survive its first serious test.

That test will not come only from rockets or missiles. It may come from buses, cars, knives, suicide bombs, or loosely organized cells that operate without formal command structures. If Hamas or one of its proxies, members, supporters, or successor networks turns to those methods, who really believes Qatar, Türkiye, and Egypt will come forcefully to Israel’s defense? Who believes they will say clearly that Israel is right and the attackers are wrong? History suggests otherwise. Repeatedly.

That is one of the central weaknesses in this plan. It assumes that mediation can become moral clarity. That would be nice. It would also be new.

The second problem is governance. The roadmap says Gaza will move to NCAG, a Palestinian body meant to assume civilian administration and internal security. It also says Gaza will be governed by the principle of “One Authority, One Law, One Weapon.” That is a clean phrase. It fits nicely in a document. It is also much easier to print than to enforce.

Hamas is not just a militia. Hamas is a movement that has ruled Gaza for years through ministries, schools, mosques, charities, family networks, and neighborhood influence. A document can say Hamas will have no role in governance, directly or indirectly. Wonderful. That does not make it true. Men do not disappear because a paper says they no longer matter. Networks do not vanish because an international committee says they are dissolved.

If Hamas is removed in name, who rules in fact? That question remains unanswered. Will it be NCAG? Will it be Hamas under another label? Will it be a joint reality in which technocrats sit in offices while old power networks control neighborhoods? That is not a side issue. That is the issue.

Will this also become a backdoor, or perhaps more honestly a front door, to the larger political question of why Gaza is being handled separately from the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority (PA)? If Gaza is placed on one political track while the West Bank remains on another, what exactly is being built here, peace, or a new formula for Palestinian fragmentation? And if the Palestinian Authority is supposedly the eventual destination, why is Gaza being treated as though it can be politically reorganized in isolation from the rest of the Palestinian national question? Would this, in the end, become the front door for a renewed push for contiguous Palestinian land, stitched together from Gaza, the West Bank, and whatever else can be leveraged out of Israel under pressure? If Gaza is “stabilized” under this framework, does that then become the model and the political lever for demanding a continuous strip of Palestinian territory running from Sea to the River?

The same problem applies to disarmament. Reports on the plan describe an eight-month process in which Hamas’s tunnels are destroyed, heavy weapons are collected, and additional arms are surrendered in stages. Israeli withdrawal is linked to verification that disarmament is actually happening. That sounds disciplined. In practice, it creates endless room for dispute. Which may be the most realistic part of the plan.

Who decides what counts as real disarmament? Who decides whether enough tunnels were destroyed? Who decides whether enough rifles were surrendered? Who decides when Israel must withdraw from one area to another? Every phase creates room for argument, delay, manipulation, and bad faith. In other words, the usual ingredients.

And even if the formal process works, who believes every weapon will be surrendered? Heavy weapons may be handed over. Tunnels may be destroyed. But small arms are much easier to hide, move, and reuse. A movement that has spent years preparing for war will not be undone simply because it stores a visible portion of its arsenal. That would be convenient. It would also be naive.

Then there is the question of the International Stabilization Force. Resolution 2803 authorized it, and official texts say it will help secure Gaza, support demilitarization, protect civilians, train police, and enable the transition. But even this should be read with caution. International forces can monitor. They can train. They can report. They can buffer. They are rarely able to transform a deeply radicalized political culture. They do many things. Miracles are usually not on the list.

That brings us to the most serious issue of all. Gaza’s problem is not only weapons. Gaza’s problem is the worldview that formed around those weapons. For nearly two decades, children and young adults in Gaza have been raised under Hamas rule, Hamas institutions, and Hamas narratives. A whole generation has been shaped in an environment where hatred of Israel was normalized, violence was glorified, and martyrdom was praised. That does not disappear because someone signed a roadmap.

That is why disarmament alone does not equal peace. It may reduce firepower. It does not remove indoctrination.

The official language speaks of “deradicalization,” tolerance, and peaceful coexistence. Fine. But where are the concrete demands? Where is the binding requirement to change textbooks? Where is the enforcement mechanism for mosque sermons? Where is the plan to remove anti Jewish and anti Israel incitement from media, schools, and civil institutions? Without those changes, one generation hands the grievance to the next, even if the rockets are gone. So yes, the weapons matter. The curriculum matters more.

That is why one question matters so much. With so many countries represented on the Board of Peace, how many do we truly believe will insist on curriculum changes in Gaza that clearly recognise the right to exist for Jews, Christians and other non Muslims, and explicitly affirm the right of the State of Israel to live within secure borders? Will the United Nations?

That question should not be brushed aside. It goes to the core of whether this is a peace plan or a pause.

The United Nations plays a major role in the structure around this agreement. Resolution 2803 endorsed the broader framework and authorized the International Stabilization Force. U.N. channels are part of the aid and reporting architecture. Yet the United Nations has long had a record of treating Israel not as a normal state with legitimate security concerns, but as a permanent defendant before the court of world opinion. That record does not inspire confidence that the U.N. will suddenly become a firm defender of Israel if this arrangement starts to break down. One can always hope. One can also read the record.

Nor should anyone ignore the issue of money. The plan assumes reconstruction, recovery, and a functioning postwar administration. But plans like this live or die on sustained funding, competent administration, and political will. If reconstruction stalls, if services fail, if jobs do not appear, then anger and instability will return quickly. In that setting, the old networks, the old slogans, and the old methods of violence will remain close at hand. Because of course they will.

None of this means the effort should be mocked. It should not. Serious diplomacy deserves serious respect. President Trump and his partners deserve praise for trying to reach an agreement that others never reached. If Hamas truly disarms, if Gaza truly changes, and if Israel truly gains lasting security, the achievement will be historic. That is all true. It is simply not the same as saying it is likely.

Words on paper are not peace. Phased withdrawal is not peace. An international force is not peace. A renamed governing body is not peace. Peace requires something much harder. It requires real enforcement, real political honesty, real educational reform, and real acceptance that Israel is not a temporary fact but a permanent state. That is the part that always sounds so simple in conferences and so impossible on the ground.

That is why the hard questions remain. Who will truly rule Gaza once Hamas is supposedly gone? What happens when violence returns in forms that are easier to deny and harder to trace? Which countries on the Board of Peace will stand with Israel when the first serious post agreement attack takes place? How many will insist that Gaza’s next generation be taught coexistence instead of hatred? Will the United Nations?

These are all questions that must be answered. However, these questions increasingly appear rhetorical in nature.

Eli M. Gold is the President of the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington, DC-based think-and-do tank focusing on foreign policy and defense matters. To learn more about the Gold Institute, visit www.Goldiis.org.

How One Congressional Resolution Could Save the Midterms: The GOP’s Hindu Vote Gamble

The United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., where H. Res. 69 awaits co-sponsors

(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in The Western Journal. How One Congressional Resolution Could Save the Midterms: The GOP’s Hindu Vote Gamble)

The political landscape in America’s crucial suburban swing districts is undergoing a quiet but massive realignment.

For years, the Republican Party has made deliberate, strategic inroads with Indian American voters, a highly educated, affluent, and rapidly growing demographic whose core values of family, fiscal conservatism, and entrepreneurship naturally align with the GOP platform.

Yet, as the mid-term elections approach, this hard-earned momentum is hitting a dangerous roadblock.

There is an alarming wave of nativist, “Groyper” Christian extremist attacks targeting American Hindus. And if GOP leadership fails to denounce this specific brand of bigotry forcefully, they risk throwing away a historic opportunity to secure a vital voting bloc and to finally dismiss the narrative that suggests the Republican Party is racist.

The key to turning this around lies on the floor of Congress: co-sponsoring H. Res. 69, “Celebrating Hindu Americans, condemning attacks on Hindu places of worship, Hinduphobia, and anti-Hindu bigotry, and for other purposes,” a bipartisan resolution introduced to celebrate American Hindu contributions and explicitly condemn Hinduphobia officially.

When far-right agitators target American Hindus, they create an unstable vacuum, and the greatest beneficiaries are, ironically, radical Islamists and their extreme-left allies.

Historically and globally, Hindus and Indians remain the primary victims of Islamist aggression. Yet, when anti-Hindu incidents flare up across Texas and other parts of the country, Islamists expertly weaponize these moments. They use far-right bigotry as a shield to deflect public attention away from their own expansionist agendas.

Simultaneously, pro-Maoist, extreme-left factions exploit these attacks to pull Indian Americans into a superficial, highly manipulative “people of color” solidarity narrative.

In this carefully constructed leftist framework, the specific trauma and distinct identity of the American Hindu community are completely erased, rendering them subservient to the broader Islamist political agenda.

Look no further than the recent elections in Frisco, Texas, to see how this toxic dynamic plays out on the ground.

Frisco, a fast-growing Dallas suburb where nearly 20 percent of the population is of Indian origin, became a dark flashpoint for the party’s internal identity crisis. Far-right activists and outside agitators routinely descended on the town and even tore an Indian flag in a demonstration.

In the mayoral race, a candidate aligned with this extreme rhetoric openly vilified the immigrant population. The result was a decisive, self-inflicted defeat for the nativist camp. Suburban voters, including conservative-leaning Indian Americans who moved to Texas for safer neighborhoods and better schools, rejected the vitriol.

Frisco proved that anti-Hindu and anti-Indian bigotry is a losing political strategy in modern American suburbs.

The shifting allegiance of Indian American voters is backed by hard numbers. Polling data shows that Indian affiliation with the Democratic Party dropped by close to 10 percentage points between 2020 and 2024, with one in three Indians actively planning to vote Republican.

This shift is critical because Indian Americans are strategically concentrated in highly competitive, “purple” congressional districts where a few thousand votes decide the majority. In Texas districts like TX-22 and TX-24, the suburbs around Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth boast some of the highest concentrations of South Asian voters in the country, capable of tilting close suburban seats.

In Georgia’s GA-06 and GA-07, the Atlanta suburbs feature rapidly growing Hindu American populations that have already proven to be the deciding margins in statewide and federal races. Meanwhile, in Virginia’s VA-07 and VA-10, the tech-heavy corridors of Northern Virginia are filled with high-skilled Indian American professionals who vote at incredibly high rates.

If the GOP allows anti-Hindu and anti-Indian rhetoric to go unchecked, these voters will stay home or swing back left out of basic self-preservation.

By targeting American Hindus, who overwhelmingly enter the United States as highly skilled, law-abiding legal immigrants, the far-right unwittingly validates the extreme left’s entire worldview.

The hard left relies on a rigid “oppressor versus oppressed” dynamic. When highly successful, integrated American Hindus are subjected to xenophobic abuse, the left is handed an easy opening to legitimize and weaponize their narrative. They can smugly point to these attacks and argue that America is fundamentally and systematically unsafe for anyone who isn’t white.

By failing to aggressively police its own fringes, the GOP forces a highly conservative, naturally independent demographic right into the waiting arms of the progressive coalition.

Ultimately, passing H. Res. 69 isn’t just a matter of moral clarity. It is a political necessity.

By aggressively co-sponsoring the resolution, the GOP can signal to millions of American Hindus that their faith, their safety, and their contributions are valued. It cuts the legs out from under the left’s racial narratives, exposes the opportunism of Islamist organizations, and protects the precise suburban margins the GOP needs to secure the midterms.

Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

Autonomous Intelligence Could Mean Safer, More Effective Prisons

Rows of empty cells along a prison cell block walkway

(This article was written by Adelle Nazarian and appeared in Newsmax. Autonomous Intelligence Could Mean Safer, More Effective Prisons)

Behind concrete walls and razor wire, a quiet technological revolution is underway in America’s prisons.

Autonomous AI agents are now surfacing actionable intelligence from text, audio, and video, alerting investigators, correctional staff, and law enforcement to emerging crises, prioritizing threats, and even writing and updating reports as new information arrives.

It’s happening because conservatives, and both Trump administrations, recognized that modernizing prisons through technology improves safety and health outcomes for inmates and officers alike, boosts rehabilitation and reentry, and strengthens public safety overall.

Automating labor-intensive work is critical given the severe shortage of correctional officers.

In an environment where a lapse in situational awareness can mean life or death, corrections departments can no longer afford to bury staff under paperwork and outdated protocols.

This urgency is compounded by a broader reckoning inside the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The Trump administration has championed prison reform and modernization, emphasizing rehabilitation’s role in public safety.

Implementation of the First Step Act expanded home confinement and community placement for low-risk inmates with strong reentry plans, cutting costs and recidivism, a signature Trump-era achievement.

But determining who qualifies for these programs, and doing so quickly, requires risk and predictive analyses drawn from millions of data points, scattered across antiquated, siloed systems, case histories, medical logs, visitation and mail logs, incident reports, camera feeds, and more, alongside intelligence surfaced by newer technologies monitoring authorized inmate communications.

Congress has approved $5 billion in new BOP funding for staff retention, facility upgrades, and modernization. But that funding alone cannot hire officers fast enough or modernize facilities quickly enough to match the pace of reform.

Leadership needs a way to close that gap without waiting on staffing and construction timelines.

Existing tools that mine correctional databases for intelligence tend to work in isolation, producing fragmented information.

A system that flags an assault on camera, for instance, may be blind to what that same inmate said in a phone call earlier that day about planning the attack.

What’s needed is centralized intelligence that lets distinct systems and data silos work together.

That’s exactly what a new class of platforms, led by Leo Technologies (“LeoTech”), now provides, combining legacy data with newly derived intelligence into a single analytical system.

LeoTech’s Verus AI translates and transcribes authorized inmate communications in real time across 62 languages.

Using semantic AI, it understands context well enough to surface evidence of drug and human trafficking, planned violence, witness names, confessions, and suicidal ideation, sending continuous alerts to staff. It also performs link analysis and assists in report writing.

Verus AI is used in hundreds of jails and prisons nationwide, with over 13,000 users and analyzed over five billion minutes of communications over seven years. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, the nation’s largest system, recently awarded LeoTech a five-year contract to deploy Verus.

Verus Vision AI, meanwhile, uses a facility’s existing cameras to automatically flag warning signs, prolonged isolation, distress, gang proximity, concealed weapons, unauthorized movement, or gathering crowds, alerting staff within seconds.

It also automatically counts inmates, freeing up hundreds of thousands of staff hours for more important work: finding contraband, escorting inmates to medical and rehabilitation appointments, and human engagement that improves well-being and reduces recidivism.

LeoTech’s Verus ION, an agentic AI platform, unifies these capabilities, bringing together intelligence from correctional systems and external sources.

“Verus ION brings communications intelligence, video intelligence, institutional records and relevant open-source information into a unified operational picture,” said Steven Harpe, LeoTech’s Chief Product and Technology Officer.

“Its autonomous agents continuously evaluate those signals, identify relationships, prioritize emerging risks and route actionable information to the appropriate personnel… updating alerts, assessments and reports in real time.”

Alerts reach whoever is best positioned to respond: correctional investigators, medical staff, social workers, rehabilitation coordinators, internal affairs, or outside law enforcement. Importantly, these tools aid correctional staff; they do not replace human judgment or existing personnel.

In practice, this means an officer with a tablet can receive an alert about a planned contraband delivery and search a cell at the right moment, while ION simultaneously scans news and social media for related leads.

When an inmate alleges rape, relevant video and calls can be automatically preserved and surfaced for evaluation based on timing and proximity.

Dots that once went unconnected, and might have led to an attack, are now visible in time to prevent it.

“Centralized intelligence changes how a correctional institution operates,” Harpe said. “When information moves across systems in real time, leaders gain a clearer understanding of emerging risks and staff can devote more attention to work that requires human presence, experience and judgment.”

As the Trump administration continues to push prison reform forward, technologies like Verus offer the Federal Bureau of Prisons a practical way to close the gap between ambitious policy and the on-the-ground resources needed to execute it safely, turning information into action, and action into a safer, more rehabilitative correctional system for everyone inside it.

(Editor’s Note: The preceding column does not constitute an endorsement of any product or service on the part of Newsmax.)

Adelle Nazarian is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

They’re Coming for the Military

Close-up of a U.S. military camouflage uniform with unit patches in front of an American flag

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in the RealClearDefense. They’re Coming for the Military)

A number of Democratic Socialists of America party members have been campaigning on defunding the U.S. military. This is apparently part of an agenda that seeks to dismantle American military power which is seen as supporting an imperialist history with a colonial agenda. Particularly concerned are these candidates with American “business” investment overseas which they see as uniformly evil, just making “profits” and protected by U.S. militarism.

Two books in particular have made this view popular, especially among college graduates. The first was Franz Fanon’s 1961 “The Wretched of the Earth” and the second was the 1977 Lappe and Collins “Food First”. Fanon advocated violent revolution to end colonialism in the third world. Lappe and Collins argued that U.S. agribusiness reflected the worst form of colonialism and was creating the very violent revolutions the U.S. military was putting down.

Collins and Lappe (also the author of the widely popular “Diet for a Small Planet”) wrote that luxury crops grown by American agribusiness in third world nations was so extensive that it was stealing land that otherwise could grow subsistence crops for the poor. If planted with food and not luxury crops, the new land could produce enough food to literally wipe out hunger in the poorer nations of the world. Written soon after the Sahelian food crisis and the publication of “The Limits to Growth,” “Food First” was part of a Marxist narrative that U.S. business investment overseas was oppressive not beneficial. Including forcing people off the land, into crowded “favelas” and eventually forcing them to migrate north. “Wretched” explained that forced specialization in raw export crops was designed only to enrich the colonial powers, relied solely on plantation violence, and failed to feed the native citizenry. [Fanon’s book was cited by one U.S. President as having markedly affected his view of the role of the USA in the third world.]

In 1978 a study appeared in Ag World that examined such claims in remarkable detail. The study determined that in the third world land devoted to export luxury crops was at the time all of 29 million hectares. This amounted to around 3% of the then 890 million hectares (now 1.6 billion hectares) devoted to crop land, of which 97% was used for domestic food consumption. On top of which 100 million hectares, (now 200 million) of permanent crop land and 3.1 billion hectares of pastureland (now 3.6 billion hectares) were both also used for domestic food production.

Nonetheless, the narrative endured that “luxury” export crops including peanuts, cotton, coffee, sugar, and tobacco for example were being produced and exported from poor countries to rich nations. And as Lappe and Fanon argued, it was colonial agribusiness run by profit seeking oligarchs that were starving the oppressed.

Facts are all available from the Food & Agricultural Food Balance sheets [FA0] prepared by the United Nations which now details production, consumption, imports and exports for agricultural products worldwide for nearly 200 nations.

FAO’s data even back in 1978 illustrated that even if eliminated food and non-food ag exports to rich countries from the less developed world would have no beneficial impact on poverty or hunger. The export land at that time of the Ag World analysis accounted for only .7% of one percent of all agricultural land used in the poor nations of the world. Less than one percent more land wasn’t the solution to hunger. And remarkably, such a relatively small amount of land produced through free enterprise, some $300 billion in export earnings for third world nations around the world which the socialists would destroy, seriously harming the local economies.

In summary, in the poor nations of the world far more land (by a factor of 14,000 to 1) is used for domestic food consumption than luxury crop production for export to rich nations.

Obviously, the DSA types who think “free enterprise agriculture” and agribusiness are starving the world don’t even know the fundamental facts. They are convinced western white imperialists acting like colonialists are stealing top quality soil to grow luxury crops in poor countries for export to rich people in rich countries.

At that time, the coauthor of Food First even told me over lunch that the reports of “agrarian reform” causing deaths in Cambodia were widely exaggerated. But why was Collins defending Cambodia? Well from Chapter 4 in Food First there in black and white is a list of nations (all communist!) that reflect how to get food policy right: Cambodia, Ethiopia, North Korea, Cuba, China, Angola, Mali, Vietnam, and Guinea Basso. Even the USSR got an honorable mention as “at least reducing food inequality.” (Same paradigm comes up as DSA folks embrace Hamas).

Although collectively these national governments killed 80 million of their own people, Food First explicitly praised them. Even as these deaths have been documented by the Black Book of Communism published by the Marxist Institute in Paris after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the firm embrace of communism by the Food First authors was unmistakable. These nations, collectively, had in 1978 according to Ag World, the majority of the 29 million hectares of export crop land producing supposed luxury crops being exported to rich countries.

For example, Cuba grew sugar cane on 1.8 million hectares (1978) and sold the sugar to Moscow at 5 times the world price to make cheap vodka in Russia. China grew more than a million acres of tobacco to make cheap cigarettes to sell around the world. The very nations Food First praises for doing everything right were in fact doing precisely what Food First complained was causing hunger around the world!!

The reality? “Food First” was a complete fairy tale swallowed whole by the Washington Post and New York Times in glowing editorials praising the thesis of the book. They did the same with Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth.”

There’s one thing in common in the countries listed: with respect to their agriculture policies, they have killed millions of their own people. It’s not a coincidence. The DSA are selling the same stuff.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C. based foreign policy and defense think tank.