AI Summary
5 min readUnrest in peace: misery in Gaza
A year after Donald Trump announced the Board of Peace—a private club of world leaders dedicated to peacebuilding, with membership costing a billion dollars and the former president serving as veto-wielding chairman—the situation in Gaza has only deteriorated. The executive board appointed to oversee Gaza negotiations consists mostly of people better at scouting for business than ending humanitarian crises, and it includes not a single Palestinian. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and envoy, recently unveiled a $2.5 billion recovery plan at the UN General Assembly, complete with a slide deck promising "a connected, prosperous Gaza delivering security, dignity, and opportunity." But as The Economist's Middle East correspondent Nicholas Pelham reports, there is nothing to show for it.
Life on the ground
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:25) **The Board of Peace: A Billion-Dollar Club for Gaza Reconstruction** - Jason Palmer introduces the Board of Peace, a private club of world leaders with a $1 billion membership fee, created by Donald Trump to handle Gaza reconstruction, but its executive board lacks a single Palestinian member.
- 2 (02:59) **Reporting on Gaza from Outside: A Deeply Frustrating Limbo** - Pelham describes the agony of reporting on Gaza remotely, relying on UN agencies and voice notes from friends, as Israel and Egypt block journalists from entering.
- 3 (04:38) **Life in Gaza: Broken and Focused on Bare Survival** - A voice note from a Gazan contact, Hishan Matar, paints a grim picture of daily life, where people queue for hours for a single loaf of bread and live in cramped, unprivate shelters.
- 4 (06:23) **Who Controls Gaza? Israel and Hamas, Not the Technocrats** - Israel controls two-thirds of the strip, which is depopulated of Palestinians, while the remaining area is under Hamas control, meaning the powers that govern Palestinian life have not changed despite the war.
- 5 (07:56) **The Unraveling Social Fabric: Child Marriage and Desperation** - The strong social code that once governed Gaza is disintegrating, with people fighting over scarce resources and the psychological state of the population on the edge.
- 6 (09:08) **Israel's Political Consensus on Gaza: No Palestinian State, Just "Voluntary Migration"** - Pelham, just back from Jerusalem, sees little difference between the frontrunners in the upcoming Israeli election on the question of Gaza, with a broad consensus to destroy Hamas and reject Palestinian self-determination.
- 7 (10:05) **The Palestinian Political Deadlock: No Elections, No Way Forward** - Many Palestinians are fed up with the division between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza, and see elections as the only way to break the internal deadlock, but President Mahmoud Abbas is unwilling to surrender his seat.
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Show Notes
A year ago Donald Trump created the Board of Peace to rebuild Gaza. Yet for many Palestinians, life is even harder, as the ceasefire is repeatedly violated, crime is rising and poverty rife. Why record labels are in a spin over AI music. And Japan is struggling to benefit from the global matcha boom.
Guests and host:
- Nicolas Pelham, Middle East correspondent
- Henry Tricks, US technology and media editor
- Moeka Iida, East Asia reporter
- Rosie Blau, co-host of “The Intelligence”
- Jason Palmer, co-host of “The Intelligence”
Topics covered:
- Gaza, Board of Peace, Hamas
- AI music, slop, Warner Music Group
- Matcha, Japan, Kagoshima
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