Jeena Shah examines the ‘security-first’ and ‘capital-driven’ colonial features of Security Council Resolution 2803. Adopted in November 2025, it endorsed President Donald J. Trump’s ‘Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict’ and granted international legitimacy to the establishment of the Board of Peace. Explaining how Resolution 2803 violates the peremptory norm of self-determination, Shah argues for its illegality.
TWAILR: Reflections ~ 89/2026
On May 21st, the Board of Peace (BoP) submitted a six-month report of its Gaza operations to the UN Security Council pursuant to Security Council Resolution 2803, which was adopted late last year. The report’s lack of detail on the BoP’s plans for Gaza compels observers to look elsewhere. The Trump Administration’s presentations at the BoP’s launch at the World Economic Forum in January and its first meeting a month later provide good starting points. Across these two events, the Trump Administration showcased mock-ups of luxury towers and glitzy seaside resorts representing its vision for Gaza, and secured pledges from five countries to contribute troops to an “International Stabilization Force” (ISF) to be stationed there.
By adopting Resolution 2803, the Security Council granted the BoP—and more broadly, Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict—unwarranted international legitimacy. The resolution has been widely criticized for endorsing colonialism. Much of this criticism has focused on its silence regarding Palestinian representation on the BoP and its treatment of Palestinian sovereignty as conditional to the point of non-existence. But the presentation at Davos and the BoP’s meeting in February revealed that actualizing the terms of Resolution 2803 does something more structural: it combines a traditional colonizing entity’s repressive state apparatus with nearly every model of economic control experimented on the Third World since the end of European empire to make Gaza a neo-colony par excellence. As Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, put it, the resolution “replaces clear legal obligations towards Palestinians with a ‘security-first, capital-driven model of foreign control.’” In this short reflection, I explain how, and how by doing so, Resolution 2803 violates the peremptory norm of self-determination.
This understanding of Resolution 2803 has clear legal implications. As I explain, because Resolution 2803 violates a peremptory norm, the Security Council lacked the authority to adopt it. While a fair reading of the resolution is that it refrains from imposing any affirmative obligations on third-party States, UN member states are actually obligated to refuse providing any support to its implementation, lest they become complicit in a gross violation of one of international law’s highest norms.
The United Nations’ Obligations to Palestine
To understand how Resolution 2803 reconstructs colonialism and violates the right of self-determination, the resolution must be read in the context of the duty that the United Nations undertook at its founding to realize Palestinian self-determination.
Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) has long illuminated how international law was birthed to justify and legitimatize European colonialism. Facing this reality, as Third-World anticolonial resistance movements won their struggles and sent representatives of their newly decolonized States to the UN General Assembly, they transformed the international law norm of self-determination to squarely confront the colonialism they suffered. Their efforts ultimately defined self-determination as the “right to independence for the peoples of non-self-governing territories and peoples subject to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.” Under this transformed norm, the vindication of self-determination requires a free and fully informed referendum of the colonized people regarding their future, and—should they choose independence—the restoration of their colonized territory in its entirety, with its integrity intact, along with their full political and economic sovereignty.
Following the dissolution of the League of Nations, the UN assumed responsibility for the territories that had been governed by the former’s Mandate System, which included Palestine, by either immediately recognizing them as independent States or converting them into “trusteeships” (a now-outdated euphemism for colonies) for a delayed path to independence. Though the League of Nations’ Mandate System and the UN’s subsequent trusteeship system maintained the colonial logic that non-European peoples were incapable of immediate self-rule, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has emphasized that the right of self-determination as later developed through the UN General Assembly retroactively applied to all Mandate territories. For this reason, Mandate Palestine should have followed the path of all other trust territories: towards an independent State defined by the borders of the Mandate: from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. (It is true that the British Mandatory Power decided, without Palestinian consent, that Mandate Palestine would serve as a “a national home for the Jewish people,” but, crucially, a “national home” does not necessarily equal a “State” for Jewish people.) However, in an era when much of the Third World was still colonized, the UN General Assembly did not represent many of the world’s peoples. In 1947, it instead proposed a “partition plan” for Mandate Palestine on a divided vote and without Palestinian consent. Even at the time, this was a recognized violation of Palestinian self-determination. Thus, until the Palestinian people are able to exercise their right of self-determination, the UN is unable to relinquish its duty towards the Palestinians.
Given this history, multiple international legal bodies—most recently the ICJ in 2024—have found that Israel’s ongoing and indefinite occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), including Gaza, violates Palestinians’ right of self-determination, thus constituting colonization. The ICJ expressly advised UN member states to take steps to avoid complicity in this violation of a peremptory norm. In stark defiance of the ICJ’s legal advice to the UN, as explained in what follows, Resolution 2803 not only entrenches and prolongs the colonization of the OPT, but also encourages UN member states to actively aid and abet it.
Resolution 2803’s “Security-First” Colonial Architecture
Colonialism requires an array of repressive measures to thwart colonized people’s resistance to their subjugation. These measures have historically operated through the designation of anticolonial resistance struggles as “terrorism,” which enables the suspension of basic human rights protections and manufactures acceptance of the colonizer’s arguments that the laws of war do not apply to its military actions and that anticolonial resistance fighters are not legitimate combatants. Accordingly, the right of self-determination developed by anti-colonial resistance movements affirms the legitimacy of such resistance and its combatants and renders unlawful any third-party assistance to a colonizing power trying to suppress that resistance. Resolution 2803’s “security-first” architecture violates the right of self-determination in several ways.
To begin, Resolution 2803 authorizes the use of force against Palestinians in Gaza by establishing the multinational ISF to act in conjunction with Israel for the purpose of “demilitarizing” the territory. But international law prohibits the use of force to deprive people of their right to self-determination, even when they engage in armed resistance against their colonization. The demilitarization objective also unlawfully transposes the obligations of a colonizing power onto the colonized people. It demands disarmament of an anticolonial resistance movement prior to the withdrawal of colonial forces. But this turns the right of self-determination on its head. The right of self-determination permits armed resistance to colonizing powers and entitles the colonized people, not the colonizers, international support in their armed struggle. And since ongoing colonization breeds ongoing armed resistance, the right of self-determination requires that the withdrawal of colonizing forces occurs first.
Next, Resolution 2803’s ostensible mandate for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)’s withdrawal paradoxically permits Israel’s indefinite occupation of Gaza. Withdrawal is conditioned on Hamas’s demilitarization and exempts “a security perimeter presence that will remain until Gaza is properly secure from any resurgent terror threat.” This replicates the logic Israel has long deployed to maintain indefinite occupation of the OPT—logic the ICJ squarely rejected. The ICJ found that Israel continued to occupy Gaza even after its land force withdrawal in 2005 in large part because its conduct effectively constituted a security perimeter presence and held that Israel may not maintain a permanent presence in the OPT to satisfy its asserted security needs.
At the same time, Resolution 2803 purports to transfer Israel’s colonial rule over Gaza to the BoP, a sui generis body (created outside of existing systems and structures) that functions as an outdated trusteeship. But Israel cannot terminate its colonial rule by transferring sovereign authority to another body without the free and informed consent of the Palestinian people. Nor may it end its sovereign control in a manner that dismembers the territorial integrity of the OPT. This is why the governance structure that came out of the failed Oslo Peace Process did not terminate Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, but instead, as the ICJ found, furthered Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Because the BoP would govern Gaza separately from the rest of the OPT, Resolution 2803 furthers the fragmentation of Mandate Palestine that began with the UN’s recognition of the State of Israel in 1948 and continued with the aftermath of Oslo Accords. Resolution 2803 also fortifies the foundational disruption of Palestine’s territorial integrity by endorsing the Trump administration’s agenda, which explicitly seeks to terminate the refugee status of Palestinians displaced by the 1948 Nakba, and with it, their internationally recognized right of return.
Finally, to the extent Palestinian statehood remains nominally possible under Resolution 2803, it is relegated to a bantustan, a semi-sovereign entity that is subordinate to a settler apartheid state. As I explore in depth elsewhere, this is, itself, a variant of colonialism that violates the right of self-determination. Requiring demilitarization diminishes a Palestinian state’s sovereign power to determine what military structures to maintain. In addition to complete demilitarization, Palestinian sovereignty is also conditioned on an undefined “reform” program that references Trump’s 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” plan. That plan expressly circumscribes Palestinian sovereignty both externally and internally. Externally, the plan mandates Israeli control over Palestinian airspace and territorial waters and regulation of cross-border movement of people and goods and restricts Palestinian participation in international bodies such as the International Criminal Court. Internally, the plan requires Palestinians to construct a governance and legal structure meeting criteria oriented toward Israeli security interests (including going so far as to prescribe limitations on school curricula and textbooks) and foreign capital.
In sum, by further dismembering the territory of Mandate Palestine into small, semi-sovereign entities still effectively controlled by Israel and facilitating the permanent denationalization of displaced Palestinians, the Security Council, once a body that fully condemned bantustanization, has now endorsed it.
Resolution 2803’s “Capital-Driven” Colonial Architecture
The political-economic function of colonialism is to achieve a one-way transfer of wealth from colony to metropole through mutually-reinforcing processes of land and wealth extraction, the latter of which may occur through taxation, super-exploitation of labor, and/or the creation of a captive market, by which colonized peoples are forced to consume the metropole’s goods without the benefits of a trading relationship. This process is referred to as the “colonial drain.” Recognizing the centrality of the colonial drain to their subjugation, victorious anticolonial resistance movements included a people’s permanent sovereignty over their wealth and natural resources as a key component of the right of self-determination.
In direct contravention of this economic sovereignty, Resolution 2803 sets up a legal framework that extracts land and wealth from Gaza, and it invites UN member states to join in this pillaging. Where these processes are not even accompanied by a formal recognition of Palestinian political sovereignty over their land, through which consent to their pillaging could be manufactured (as has happened with much of the decolonized Third World), Resolution 2803 blatantly undermines Palestinian right of self-determination.
Resolution 2803 establishes that the BoP “will set the framework, and coordinate funding for, the redevelopment of Gaza pursuant to the Comprehensive Plan.” That Comprehensive Plan orients Gaza’s governance squarely towards the needs of foreign capital. And as the Trump Administration’s presentation at Davos affirmed, the BoP’s governance of Gaza will draw from Trump’s 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” plan and 2025 “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation” (GREAT) Trust. These plans together present a Gaza that would be converted into a captive market and a source of cheap labor and natural resources for foreign capital—the economic hallmarks of a traditional colony—through policies drawn from a hybrid Washington-Wall Street-Silicon Valley Consensus long experimented on the decolonized Third World. The plans also reveal how these extractive processes will allow for the continuing dispossession of Palestinian land.
The Washington Consensus was originally presented as an economic development model for countries devastated by the U.S.-manufactured 1980s Third World Debt Crisis. It primarily consists of a one-sided commitment by target states to open their borders to Global North imports and capital, and to expand foreign investment opportunities through privatization of public services and the slashing of labor and environmental regulations. After international financial institutions, like the IMF and World Bank, conditioned loans to the Third World on adopting Washington Consensus reforms, this model was shown to increase inequality in target countries while restoring the Global North’s access to captive markets and low-cost resources and labor that it once had in the age of European colonial empires.
Following this model, Trump’s plans create a captive market in Gaza for Israeli, U.S., and other Global North (and sub-imperialist Global South) goods in at least three ways: (i) through a low-tariff scheme for foreign imports that carries no reciprocal commitment for Palestinian-produced exports; (ii) for the security industry through requirements that only “security-vetted individuals and companies” manage import logistics; and (iii) for foreign finance capital through financialization of Gazan real estate and a legal system structured around foreign capital’s needs. The plans also position Gaza to serve as a maquiladora zone—a site of underpaid Palestinian labor and extraction of natural resources serving foreign companies. For instance, the plans envision factories powered by natural gas from the Gaza Marine field, where “low cost” Palestinian labour would assemble components imported from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates into batteries and electric vehicles for U.S. companies.
Under finance capital’s dominance, the Washington Consensus gave rise to the Wall Street Consensus—a suite of policies directing Third World states to plan public-private partnerships (PPPs) specifically to generate investable asset classes for finance capital despite giving lip-service to building infrastructure for target states’ polities. PPPs consist of “long-term contractual arrangements through which the private sector commits to finance, construct and manage public services as long as the state, with multilateral development bank (MDB) support via blended finance, shares the risks by guaranteeing payment flows to PPP operators and investors.” In other words, this model ensures steady cash flows for investors while requiring the target states to absorb investment risks. Since their inception, PPPs have been consistently shown to worsen poverty and inequality.
Trump’s plans for Gaza specifically call for PPPs in critical social infrastructure, including medical facilities, broadband, railways, and ports, as well as security infrastructure under BoP control. The plans also allude to extending this model to cover all aspects of Palestinian life, including parks, libraries, cultural institutions, and athletic facilities. This sits alongside the plans’ requirement of reforms necessary to join international lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Nigeria’s experience with the Azura power plant offers a cautionary precedent: under World Bank guidance, Nigeria entered a PPP contract committing it to purchase power that its grid could not absorb; when Nigeria could not pay (since user fees for the undelivered electricity could not be generated), it accrued debt to the World Bank, which had guaranteed the risks taken on by foreign investors.
The Silicon Valley Consensus completes this framework, billing high-tech industry as a new development model while functioning primarily to extract wealth and data from targeted localities. It prioritizes public spending toward creating markets for tech companies, and helping those companies appropriate necessary resources, including data centres and the data itself. Data collection serves a dual purpose for foreign capital: building tech products and simultaneously facilitating, as scholars have documented, “a regime of control and discipline over the most disadvantaged” to ensure compliance with a neo-colonial order.
Trump’s plans call for expanded markets for ed-tech and med-tech products, as well as data centers drawing heavily on Gaza Marine field power and, given the surveillance systems embedded in the security plans outlined above, presumably extensive data extracted from Palestinian life.
Ultimately, these plans together serve the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians of their land. Not only is it made plain: The GREAT Trust explicitly includes a “voluntary relocation program” premised on 25% of Gazans leaving the country, with 75% of those leaving permanently. And the Davos presentation carried these assumptions, previewing construction of far less housing than existed before October 7, 2023, while erasing some of Gaza’s cities entirely. But Palestinian dispossession would also occur through the wealth extraction processes described above: Wealth extraction generates indebtedness, one of the primary ways Third World populations are dispossessed today. Trump’s plans for Gaza make debt a direct mechanism for annexing land (with the people removed)—by using public land as collateral for financed investments.
Resolution 2803’s Illegality
Because Resolution 2803 mandates violations of Palestinians’ right of self-determination, UN member states are obligated to defy it.
While Security Council resolutions are products of political bargaining rather than legal deliberation, they are nonetheless constrained by law. First, the UN Charter conditions the binding force of Security Council resolutions on their compliance with the purposes and principles of the United Nations. One of the primary purposes of the UN is ensuring respect for the “self-determination of peoples.” Second, the right of self-determination, like the prohibitions of genocide and apartheid, is indisputably a peremptory norm of international law. The International Law Commission (ILC) has emphasized that resolutions violating peremptory norms would be ultra vires—beyond the institutional authority of treaty-based institutions. And more recently, the ILC confirmed that the resolutions of the UN Security Council specifically do “not create obligations under international law if and to the extent that they conflict with a peremptory norm.” As ICJ Judge Hersch Lauterpacht observed, the necessity of this constraint becomes apparent when one considers the alternative: a system in which the Security Council could require member states to participate in a genocide.
Thus, any UN member states contributing to the implementation of Resolution 2803 by participating or supporting in some way the activities of the BoP, such as through investments in Gaza, or the ISF, through troop or other material contributions, would be violating the non-derogable norm of self-determination and should face the appropriate sanctions by their fellow UN member states, as those complicit in colonial and settler apartheid structures in Africa faced in the 1970s.
Conclusion
Rather than remind UN member states of their duty to not recognize or aid and abet the denial of Palestinian self-determination, the Security Council has facilitated the creation of a high-tech bantustan designed to further dispossess Palestinians. UN member states are legally obligated to denounce and defy Resolution 2803, and its accompanying institutions—the BoP and ISF. The resolution is not simply a political failure. It is an illegal act of the highest order, and compliance with it makes member states complicit in that illegality.