Jared Kushner participates in a panel discussion during the TIME 100 Summit 2019 on April 23, 2019 in New York City.

The first stage of U.S. President Donald Trump's Middle East peace plan will be launched on Tuesday at a conference the White House touts as a bid to begin drumming up $50 billion in investment but which Palestinians deride as an "economy first" approach doomed to fail.

The two-day international meeting in Bahrain, led by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has been billed as the first part of Washington's long-delayed broader political blueprint to revive the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which will be unveiled at a later date.

But neither the Israeli nor Palestinian governments will attend the curtain-raising event in the Bahraini capital, Manama.

There will be close scrutiny as to whether attendees such as Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf Arab states show any interest in making actual donations to a U.S. plan that has already elicited bitter criticism from Palestinians and many others in the Arab world.

Bahrain, a close American ally and home to the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet, has been making preparations for weeks.

Although the conference is supposed to focus on economics, Gulf Arab states hope their presence will also show their solidarity with the Trump administration over its hardline against Iran, a senior Gulf diplomat said on condition of anonymity.

Under the plan, donor nations and investors would contribute about $50 billion over 10 years, with $28 billion going to the Palestinian territories — the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip — as well as $7.5 billion to Jordan, $9 billion to Egypt and $6 billion for Lebanon.

Among 179 proposed infrastructure and business projects is a $5 billion transport corridor to connect the West Bank and Gaza.

"I laugh when they attack this as the 'deal of the century,'" Kushner told Reuters, referring to the lofty nickname that Trump's peace plan has assumed over the past two years. "This is going to be the 'opportunity of the century' if they have the courage to pursue it."

Kushner, a senior Trump adviser who like his father-in-law comes from the world of New York real estate, is presenting his plan in a pair of pamphlets filled with graphs and statistics that resemble an investment prospectus.

But pushing back against critics who accuse Kushner of trying to forge a strictly "economic peace," he told Reuters last week: "A lot of past attempts have failed. Calm down ... and keep an open mind."