Should EU leaders sit on Trump's 'Board of Peace' for Gaza?

It's been called everything from a "neo-colonialist sham" to "an affront to international law."

Yet despite all that, some European leaders still say they want a seat on Gaza's new Board of Peace (BoP), an administrative body that will play an integral part in the next phase of the peace plan meant to resolve the long-running conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.

According to the 20-point Gaza peace plan, proposed by US President Donald Trump last year, the Board of Peace will oversee aid and reconstruction and supervise a technocratic Palestinian administration in Gaza.

Trump has said he will chair the BoP, which will have 15 members. The peace plan, including the BoP, was formalized by the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803 in mid-November last year.

So far, the main arguments made against the BoP is that it doesn't allow Palestinians a say in their own future, that it doesn't have an end date, might, therefore, only facilitate the continuation of what the UN classifies as Israel's illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and that it contravenes international law in a number of ways.

For example, contrary to the 2024 opinion on the conflict issued by the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands, the BoP turns what the court called the Palestinian people's "inalienable right to self-determination" into a "conditional privilege," legal researcher Safia Southey wrote in a text for the American Society of International Law last month.

Late last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Nickolay Mladenov, a Bulgarian diplomat, would be the director of the BoP.

Mladenov was the UN's special coordinator for the Middle East peace process between 2015 and 2020 and is known to both Israeli and Palestinian politicians.

There are likely to be more announcements about other BoP members soon, although it's unclear when.

Reports had suggested Trump was going to announce names this week ahead of what was expected to be the board's first meeting on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland next week. Alongside Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Turkey, the European states expected to be invited to join are the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Italy.

But on Tuesday,a story published by Israeli newspaper Haaretz suggested that the Trump administration might want to change the BoP's mandate.

Sources told Haaretz that if the BoP performed well in Gaza, it could be asked to handle other conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, and might eventually serve as a kind of alternative to the UN.

It was already clear that the BoP would act outside the UN framework in a way that observers say is unprecedented. But the idea of bypassing the UN altogether in the future will cause unease among potential European BoP members.

"So contrary to what was announced, we might not see the naming of BoP members in the coming days but rather later this month," Muriel Asseburg, an expert on the Middle East at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, or SWP, told DW. "The BoP's [new] mandate would have to be shared with potential members first and if there are thoughts that this is to become an alternative mechanism to the UN, then there would be much less enthusiasm."

In November, the EU Commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Suica said the blocs members should sit on the BoP . In December, EU leaders issued a statement supporting that notion, saying "[The EU] stands ready to support the establishment of the Board of Peace and will actively engage with partners on the next steps."

But given the many criticisms made about the BoP, should European leaders really be so enthusiastic?

In October, Carnegie Europe, a Brussels-based think tank,  asked experts a similar question. Most answered along the lines of "yes — but."

"The EU should pursue a seat, but only if it transforms rhetoric into concrete policy," H.A. Hellyer, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said. "Otherwise, it becomes merely a legitimizing presence at someone else's table, lending credibility to a process that offers neither a just nor a durable peace."

"The EU should consider joining the proposed board of peace, but only if key conditions are met," agreed Hussein Baoumi, Amnesty International's deputy director for the Middle East. "Yet the board's framework remains opaque, and the political, legal and reputational risks are considerable."

"If Europe engages it should be conditioned on compliance with normative frameworks," Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told DW. "Otherwise, they will be facilitating war crimes and the dismantling of our rules-based system." Ina December article , Hassan pointed out how it was impossible to reconcile the Gaza peace plan, as outlined in Resolution 2803, with international law courts.

Europeans might well have more influence on this conflict if they're on the BoP, than they've actually had over the past two-and-a-half years, Asseburg from the SwP pointed out.

And there are a number of things they can do to work towards a sustainable settlement "even though realistically, in the short term, there is no chance of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on a two-state settlement," she noted, referring to the idea of a Palestinian and Israeli state alongside one another.

Europeans can leverage their role as donors to Gaza's reconstruction and continue technical support through existing European missions, such as training Palestinian police, Asseburg added. To have leverage, Europeans should also work in a more united way themselves and could cooperate with Arab states, with whom they may actually have more in common on this than the US, she suggested.

"Will the Europeans be successful?" Asseburg asked. "Well, we will not see progress without the US, so this is the only game in town. That's why Europeans can and should try to be on the BoP, and try to influence it as much as possible to get policies aligned with international law and humanitarian standards, and to try to achieve a sustainable settlement."

Given Europe's record on the Middle East, and the fact that the EU is much more focused on the Ukraine war and potential US plans for Greenland, Martin Konecny, director of the Brussels-based European Middle East Project, which promotes fact-based policies for the Israel-Palestinian conflict, was not overly optimistic.

"Given the broader European deference to the US, the risk is that European presence on the BoP will be 90% rubber stamping and 10% influencing," he said. "That is, it will be primarily about legitimizing schemes the Americans will be promoting, which in turn will be coordinated with Israel."

On the other hand, Konecny told DW that not engaging with the BoP isn't a solution either, as it leaves everything to the US. "So this will be a very difficult balancing act for the Europeans," he concluded.

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