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‘Today’s Board of Peace meeting all about the message Trump wants to send to allies, adversaries’
We can expect that this will be mostly symbolic and less strategic in nature, given this is the inaugural meeting. We know the US president will be speaking, but also the board will be hearing from the Middle East envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
We expect there could be up to 40 countries in attendance, but there’s no question that this is about Donald Trump, and about him at the helm.
He is using this as an opportunity to send a message to allies as well as adversaries about how the US has centralised its foreign policy and how the channels of negotiation will move forward.
[European countries] certainly have a lot of concerns about this Gaza Board of Peace, about its mandate and about its structure.
We heard some of those already… We know that some European countries are concerned that this board could be positioning itself as some sort of competition to the United Nations; that is something that Europeans certainly don’t see as being constructive.
They are also concerned about the fact that Gaza is not even mentioned in the board’s charter. They are concerned also about the power that would be in Donald Trump’s hands…
And then they are concerned about the people who are actually on the board, the countries or the members that are being represented – the fact that there are no Palestinians, the fact that the Israeli prime minister is on the board, the fact that an invitation was sent to the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
‘Palestinians want solutions, not another crisis management body’
Many people have approached us and asked about this “Board of Peace” meeting headed by Donald Trump, and asked very legitimate questions about whether decisions about Gaza are made with meaningful Palestinian involvement.
Everything is done far away from Palestinians themselves without any participation from them in their future and in what’s going to work for them.
Past experiences with conferences, with regard to reconstruction, with regard to the peace process, all ended up with large needs for funding that were delayed or [plans] that were not implemented.
Palestinians don’t want to see this again; they don’t want to see the Board of Peace as another international body that falls into the category of crisis management rather than finding a tangible solution to this longstanding problem, the Palestinian problem.
