Israel angered as Trump's 'Board of Peace' internationalises Gaza issue
US President Donald Trump wants his new peace board to make a big splash at the Davos Economic Forum, but his test case for this new Trump stamp of diplomacy, the de facto internationalisation of Gaza, is rankling Israel.
Trump plans to unveil his "Board of Peace" at the Davos Forum in Switzerland on Thursday.
The board includes key Trump allies such as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and envoy Steve Witkoff. American billionaire Marc Rowan is a member, and King Mohammed VI of Morocco has become the first world leader to confirm his participation.
Gaza is not mentioned in the board’s charter, but Marwa Maziad, a Middle East and security expert at the University of Maryland, told Middle East Eye that Trump clearly envisions the destroyed enclave being one of the board’s first “franchises”.
“He wants to take this board concept to Gaza, then Venezuela and Ukraine. He is going to go around to different countries and tell them to join the board or face war and conflict,” Maziad said.
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Some figures, like Rowan, Witkoff, and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, sit on Trump’s Board of Peace and an executive board established to govern Gaza.
But Aaron David Miller, a former State Department negotiator, told MEE that, aside from Trump’s fondness for bringing corporate titles to diplomacy, the peace board is a distraction from the painstaking work of shoring up a fragile ceasefire in Gaza.
“This is a misplaced solution to a problem we don’t have,” Miller told MEE. “The Board of Peace is not going to move Gaza from Phase 1 to Phase 2."
“In Gaza, you need Trump to exercise his leverage over Israel and the Qataris, Turks and Egyptians to exercise their influence over Hamas,” he added.
Miller said that Trump's penchant to bring new international players into Gaza would mark a defeat for Netanyahu.
“If you could internationalise Gaza, why not internationalise the occupied West Bank?” he said. “That’s the last thing Netanyahu wants.”
'Spread the wealth around'
Maziad said Trump has “spread the wealth” in his Gaza board.
In addition to Rowan, Yakir Gabay, a Cypriot-Israeli tycoon close to Kushner, was given a seat, as was a senior official from the UAE, the Arab state closest to Israel.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing back against the inclusion of two senior officials from Turkey and Qatar on the board: Qatari diplomat Ali al-Thawadi and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.
"We have a certain disagreement with our friends in the United States regarding the composition of the advisory council,” Netanyahu’s office said on Monday. "The Prime Minister has instructed the foreign affairs minister to contact the US secretary of state on this matter.”
Qatar hosts Hamas’s leadership at the request of the US, and Erdogan has praised Hamas members as “freedom fighters”. Across the wider region, both Fidan and Thawadi have been on the frontlines of frustrating some of Netanyahu’s key power plays.
Fidan is a suave former Turkish spymaster who has been instrumental in rehabilitating Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, where Netanyahu is angling for influence.
Thawadi is a steely Qatari diplomat who helped broker the Gaza ceasefire. He was photographed discreetly sitting in the White House when Netanyahu was forced to call the emir of Qatar in September to apologise for an attack on Hamas negotiators in Doha.
Maziad told MEE the inclusion of Turkey and Qatar on the board is worrying for Israel because it could foreshadow the deployment of Turkish and Qatari troops as part of an "International Stabilisation Force" in the future.
The force received a United Nations mandate in November but has yet to deploy, as Arab and Muslim countries baulk at demands from Israel that they confront Hamas, which has yet to disarm.
'One step closer to Turkish troops?'
“I think we are closer or more likely to see Turkish and Qatari forces on the ground,” Maziad said. “Both are willing to send them, which is a good thing. They would get along fine with the Egyptians at this point,” she said.
Egyptian spy chief General Hassan Rashad is another member of the Gaza executive board.
"There will be no Turkish or Qatari soldiers in the Gaza Strip," Netanyahu told the Knesset on Monday.
Miller, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that Netanyahu’s rhetoric was likely for a domestic audience.
“Trump was determined to put the Qataris and Turks on the board. There is a lot of broken crockery between the US and Israel, but this is a hiccup. Not a real rift,” he said.
The White House also announced that former UN envoy Nikolay Mladenov was appointed as the "High Representative for Gaza" and would act as the key link between the Gaza executive board and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza - a technocratic committee made up of Palestinian officials that’s meant to run the enclave.
The UAE-based Mladenov forged good ties with Kushner when the latter was negotiating the 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan normalise ties with Israel, Arab and western officials previously told MEE.
Once praised by Hamas, however, he is widely seen as a capable diplomat.
In October, the US brokered a shaky ceasefire in Gaza. The enclave is divided, with Israel in control of slightly more than half and Hamas holding the rest. Miller said that no amount of Davos bling would change that reality without hard diplomacy on the ground.
“Caesar famously said Gaul is divided into three parts, well, Gaza is divided into two, and those divisions are going to harden,” Miller said.
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