The founding membership of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace includes a geopolitical curiosity: Israel and the countries it most suspects of enabling Hamas — Qatar and Turkey — are all sitting at the same table. As the board convened its first meeting Thursday, managing that relationship was one of the less-discussed but potentially decisive challenges facing the initiative.
Qatar and Turkey have longstanding relationships with Hamas and played central roles in brokering the ceasefire that the board is now supposed to support. Their presence is valuable precisely because of those relationships — they have channels of communication and influence that the US and Israel do not. But Israel views their involvement with deep suspicion, a tension that could complicate board decision-making from the outset.
Israel’s concerns are not abstract. Qatar hosts senior Hamas political leadership. Turkey has been a vocal critic of Israeli military operations in Gaza. Both countries have resisted maximum-pressure approaches to Hamas disarmament. Their presence on the board could dilute or complicate efforts to press Hamas harder on the disarmament demands that Israel considers essential.
At the same time, excluding Qatar and Turkey from the board would eliminate two of the most effective intermediaries available for communicating with Hamas. Any realistic path to Hamas disarmament — or at minimum, a negotiated weapons freeze — runs through channels that Qatar and Turkey maintain. Their presence, however uncomfortable for Israel, may ultimately be more valuable than their absence.
Trump’s board must find a way to maintain the cohesion of a coalition that includes Israel on one side and Hamas’s closest regional partners on the other. How it manages that tension will be as consequential as any of its formal decisions about reconstruction, governance, or stabilization forces.
Picture Credit: www.rawpixel.com
