00:00And for more, let's cross to Washington. He's a former Middle East negotiator and diplomat, Aaron David Miller, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Think Tank. Thank you for being with us here on France 24.
00:15If you were a world leader, would you join the Board of Peace?
00:20It depends what my motives were. If you look at the 19 to 20 countries that have apparently signed on, they fall into three groups.
00:31The first group are those who are already in Trump's corner and want to stay there.
00:37The second group are those who need Trump in some respects desperately.
00:42And I put Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel in that box.
00:45And then you have the third category of a number of authoritarian leaders who do not have any constitutional, political or legal obstacles to signing up to this thing.
00:56No country that's credible and that is a democratic process and has thought this through is going to sign up to a board which has no set of governing principles.
01:08And it's completely tethered to the whims, fancies, and likes or dislikes of a single individual.
01:16So my takeaway is very, isn't it performative?
01:20The Gaza piece of this board of peace might actually be potentially useful.
01:25But boards and committees do not resolve conflicts.
01:29Mediators resolve conflicts.
01:31The trilateral that will be taking place in Abu Dhabi may not lead to a breakthrough, but it's that kind of negotiation with leverage applied.
01:41In the Abu Dhabi case, a lot of leverage on the Russians.
01:44That's how conflicts get resolved.
01:47And were you, on that score, surprised to see the likes of Italy's Giorgio Maloney ease off signing on the dotted line?
01:57I'm sorry, I missed, what on the dotted line?
02:02Were you surprised to see Italy's Giorgio Maloney, who stated that, actually, I have to check if it's constitutionally okay.
02:09She's not on board for now.
02:12Right.
02:12And she is viewed by the Europeans, I think, quite correctly.
02:16She's very smart as a Trump whisperer.
02:19I mean, but that's the basic problem here.
02:22I mean, it can't replace the UN.
02:24It can't replace the UN's humanitarian functions.
02:26It can't replace the UN's peacekeeping functions.
02:30And you don't have a mandate, an authority, or a set of governing principles that could offer any number of other countries the option of actually joining something that could actually be a positive force.
02:47Look, I think, by and large, the international community, in its various iterations, can be very effective in complementing, in supplementing, in providing resources, expertise, and, of course, money to support conflicts that are resolved.
03:07But in the end, and Donald Trump knows this, phase one of his Gaza deal came about because he was able to exert extraordinary leverage on an Israeli prime minister, unprecedented, I might add, among Republican Democratic predecessors that I worked for.
03:26And the Qataris, the Turks and the Qataris, the Turks and the Egyptians were prepared to leverage and apply pressure, perhaps with some incentives on Hamas.
03:34That's how things get done, not through a very large, unwieldy border piece.
03:41Right now, when it comes to the Gaza Strip, the good news is that there is a process that's slowly going forward.
03:54The bad news is they're still shooting, and Hamas still has its guns.
03:59Will this phase two and phase three come to fruition?
04:02Look, the three ceasefires since October 7, the one in November 2023, the one in January 2025, and the one in October that Trump has brokered, all cratered and came apart because there's a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between the current government of Israel on one hand and what remains of Hamas's internal and external leadership on the other.
04:31They have different visions for Gaza.
04:34And as a consequence of that, nobody has been able to figure out how to commit the Israelis to withdrawal and how to commit Hamas to a decommissioning and demilitarization process that would reduce its capacity, not just to co-op, but to intimidate Palestinians on the ground.
04:54Hamas remains after three years as the most preeminent political actor in Gaza because it can intimidate, it can co-opt, and it can deploy thousands of public servants and police in order to maintain order.
05:12That problem, how to get Hamas off of that, and how to get the Israelis committed to a Palestinian interlocutor like the Palestinian Authority as weak as it is, those are the kinds of things I think that over time could make Gaza work.
05:30But I worry that the longer this goes on, the differences and the divisions within Gaza are going to harden.
05:40And 2026 may well be a future of a divided, dysfunctional, and sadly and tragically, primarily for Palestinians, a sporadically violent Gaza.
05:55We'll have to leave it there for now.
05:56Aaron Daylor of Miller, many thanks for speaking with us here on France 24.
06:01And thanks for having me.
06:02Really appreciate it.
06:04Stay with us.
06:04There's much more to come.
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