In the heat of the presidential election last summer, Jared Kushner took a timeout from his father-in-law’s campaign for a secret meeting with one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest donors.
For about 90 minutes at a New York hotel, Kushner sat down with Haim Saban—the billionaire “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers” producer and owner of Univision and one of the Democratic Party’s biggest pro-Israel donors—to talk about Israel.
Kushner had been interested in meeting the Israeli-American entertainment mogul for years but had never before gotten on his radar. In 2010, Kushner cold-wrote Saban a letter expressing his admiration and congratulating him on a magazine feature. The letter had gone unnoticed and unanswered until now.
At their under-the-radar confab, Kushner assured Saban that a President Donald Trump would be “very good for the U.S.-Israel relationship,” a phrase he repeated multiple times during the meeting, according to a person familiar with the discussion. But he offered no specifics on what, exactly, that would look like. Nor was it clear why Kushner wanted to speak during the heat of the election season with Saban, who donated $10 million to a pro-Clinton group and was deeply involved in her campaign, peppering her staff with emails offering advice on how to attack Trump, a man he had called a “conman, a liar, a cheat, a thief.”
Saban confessed to Kushner that he thought Trump was offering a free ride to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on policies like expanding West Bank settlements. Clinton, he said, would take a more balanced approach.
“Who knows?” Kushner responded.
Today, Kushner, 36, a former New York City real estate developer with a serene smile and bottomless ambition but no foreign policy experience, has been tasked with solving one of the most intractable problems in the world, bedeviling Republican and Democratic administrations for decades: brokering peace in the Middle East.
Kushner, an Orthodox Jew from a tight-knit New Jersey family that has given money to support settlements in the West Bank and made political donations to many Israeli causes, will be at the table with Trump and Netanyahu on Wednesday for their first meeting in the White House, according to a senior administration official.
“All my life I’ve been hearing that’s the toughest deal in the world to make,” Trump told a crowd of donors at the Candlelight Dinner on the eve of his inauguration last month. Turning to his son-in-law, he said, “If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can.”
Few in Trump’s own camp seem confident. Even as his pro-Israel allies celebrate the exit of Barack Obama, a president they viewed as dangerously hostile to Israel’s interests and accused of harboring pro-Palestinian sentiments, there’s a sense among them that now is not the right time to push for Middle East peace, and an undercurrent of concern that Trump’s appetite for a deal might get him—and Kushner—into trouble.
“It’s an impossible deal,” said Mort Klein, the national president of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, which backed Trump’s campaign and is funded in part by billionaire Sheldon Adelson. “Of course Trump believes that he is the great dealmaker, but the problem is that it’s a religious war. He’s just wrong.”
And for the foreign policy establishment, as Trump and Kushner prepare for Netanyahu’s visit—Kushner and his family traveled to Mar-a-Lago over the weekend with the president—the powerful son-in-law’s own words appear to sum up what many national security hands think as they try to puzzle out the new administration’s plans for the Middle East: “Who knows?”
Kushner has left few clues to his thinking, declining to broach the subject with veterans of the peace process like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who has spoken with him several times. “It’s not clear to me in what way he’s in charge of it, whether he’s in charge of it with supervision from the White House, or whether he’s supposed to be the actual negotiator. Nor has it been defined what they’re negotiating about,” Kissinger said in an interview.
Since the election, the Trump administration has soft-pedaled its promise to move the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, and it has tempered its language on settlements, releasing a carefully worded statement—crafted with Kushner’s help—that said new settlements beyond the current borders “may not be helpful” in achieving the goal of peace. Trump followed up with an interview in a Sheldon Adelson-backed Israeli newspaper, where he said: “I am not somebody that believes that going forward with these settlements is a good thing for peace.”
Middle East experts interpreted the softening of Trump’s campaign rhetoric simply as a desire not to get ahead of the meeting with Netanyahu and a message to the Israelis not to take the new Trump administration for granted, or to prejudge the strategy.
In preparation for the visit, Kushner has spoken to Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States, as well as the king of Jordan, Abdullah II, and representatives from Saudi Arabia and Egypt. He has also spoken with the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, an aide so close to the prime minister that he’s been dubbed “Bibi’s brain.”
But Kushner has really hit it off with Arab diplomats. He is in almost constant phone and email contact with Otaiba, whom he met last June on the campaign through a mutual friend, the billionaire real estate investor Tom Barrack, one of Trump’s closest friends and the chair of his inaugural committee. Otaiba—a shrewd, well-connected player of Washington politics who has served in his role since 2008—recalled their first 90-minute meeting, at which Kushner peppered him with questions about the entire region.
“He focuses on big, strategic thoughts,” Otaiba said. “He did all the asking, and I did all the talking.”
In the past, would-be American peacemakers in the Middle East have been detail-oriented men. Kissinger made famous the phrase “shuttle diplomacy” for his extraordinarily intensive style of personal negotiation; Dennis Ross, who led Bill Clinton’s ill-fated peace push in the 1990s, kept voluminous notes of his meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and penned a 900-page memoir documenting those efforts. Conversations with Washington’s small army of experts on Middle East peace talks can be a blur of minutiae—What if we tweaked this border line here? How many flowerpots should be allowed over there? What if we traded this patch of desert for this barren hilltop?
Kushner, so far, seems very much the opposite—a big-picture guy who avoids getting bogged down in the weeds. And he’s taken the same approach in other areas of his expansive, virtually unlimited portfolio within Trump’s world. In a meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office about health care, for instance, Kushner was not concerned with granular policy details, according to an attendee. Instead, seated at a table alongside Vice President Mike Pence and White House advisers Gary Cohn and Rick Dearborn, Kushner’s main concern was the president’s overall bottom line: How can we say it’s a better plan? How are we going to say we lowered costs?
When it comes to the Middle East, according to people who have spoken to Kushner about the subject, his focus again is through the zoomed-out lens: How do we deliver peace and prosperity? How do countries fit together in the region? “He rarely comes with a preconceived opinion,” said Otaiba. “His overall framework is about defeating extremism.”
Yet there is a hard edge to Kushner’s Middle East thinking, too, and not just via his parents. Kushner’s views on Israel have been forged by friendships and by his faith—people like longtime friends like Ron Perelman, whose semi-private Orthodox shul Kushner and Ivanka Trump attended regularly in Manhattan; and right-wing celebrity Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a friend of Kushner’s for years who endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign. Perelman is a big donor to Jewish causes and cares deeply about repairing the United States’ relationship with Israel.
But even those longtime confidants said they do not think Israel is—or should be—top of mind for Kushner at the moment. “He’s highly respected by Israeli government officials, who have become close to him,” said Boteach. “But I’m sure there’s no one in the administration that believes this has to be its top priority right now.”
Boteach, who still has Kushner’s ear, is pushing an agenda that puts peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians on the back burner for the time being. “The emphasis should not be Israel and the Palestinians—the administration can make history by making peace between Israel and the Gulf states,” he said. “I think the key is peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia.”
It’s a similar message to what the administration is hearing from other Jewish leaders who have contacts in the White House: Slow down. Klein, who recently blasted the administration for leaving Jews out of a statement condemning the Holocaust, said he has told White House officials in multiple conversations over the past few months: “It’s an impossible deal because it’s a religious war. I’ve told them Israel shouldn’t be pressured to make one-sided concessions.” Their response, he said, was similar to how Kushner spoke with Saban last summer. “They simply say, ‘You know we are a supporter of Israel and we will be Israel’s friend,” Klein said.
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What kind of Middle East dealmaker might Kushner be? The best guide we have may be his career as a real estate mogul, and the record is mixed. His family’s largest purchase, of 666 Fifth Avenue in 2007, for a record-setting price of $1.8 billion, was highly leveraged and quickly ran into trouble—only in part because of the recession. In October 2013, Kushner and a group of investors purchased five Brooklyn properties for $375 million—about $50 million more than the seller expected to get. After Kushner’s company failed to obtain a residential rezoning, many of the commercial spaces in the buildings near the Brooklyn waterfront sat vacant for months. (However, the development is now mostly full of commercial tenants and is thriving.)
Now, his old competitors in New York City are watching carefully to see whether his negotiating skills prove better on the international stage than they did within the five boroughs.
But so far, despite his reach out to Arab nations and his efforts to understand the big picture, Kushner has apparently made no attempt to seek granular guidance from some of the longtime experts on the issue—like Middle East peace negotiator Ross, who served not only under Bill Clinton but also under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Obama, where he served as an adviser to the State Department and the National Security Council. Few know more than Ross about the intricacies of the peace process, or about the personality quirks of the various key players on both sides.
“Obviously, I’m ready to brief anybody who has a responsibility or an interest in the issue,” Ross said in an interview, noting that the only people who have reached out to him so far were some members of Trump’s transition team who did not follow Trump into the administration. “I’m writing things in public. When you do that, you’re hoping to offer a set of ideas that can be seen. They will decide who they’re interested in talking to and when they’re interested in talking to them.”
Ross’ writings caution Trump’s team against moving the Israeli embassy just when they need Arab states to play a larger role fighting ISIS. But Ross isn’t dismissive of Kushner as a potential peace broker, despite the vast gulf between their levels of experience.
“He’ll be seen as being authoritative,” he said. “What I could tell you is in this part of the world, if you don’t have it, they smell it. In this case, what will give him automatic entry is the perception that he’s very close to the president.”
But so much of Kushner and Trump’s plans are still in the “who knows” phase. More than half a dozen foreign policy experts looking for clues about White House policy and personnel who will be focused on the Middle East noted that Kushner seems to have his hands full with the day-to-day—he’s attending meetings with congressional leaders and is often on hand for photo-ops after executive order signings in the Oval Office.
“If he’s going to play this role, it will require a lot of time and attention,” said Ross. “Maybe he creates a small team that has responsibility for this. We don’t know any of that. We don’t know where this fits in, in terms of priorities.”
Kissinger, who met in Trump Tower with the president-elect and Kushner during the transition, said he has spoken with Kushner a handful of times—but the Middle East has never come up in their discussions. “We discussed some organizational problems, and some policy problems in other areas of the world but in a general way,” Kissinger said.
White House officials said Kushner’s main asset to the process is coming to the table as someone who clearly has the president’s ear. “The question is, does he have the full confidence and trust of the president, and the answer is yes,” said a senior White House official, who argued that Kushner’s natural skills as a listener are more important than any expertise in the region.
Kushner may have a longer personal connection to Israel—Netanyahu has been close to his father, Charles Kushner, since he was a kid—but he is not the only senior White House adviser with views on the subject. Senior strategist Steve Bannon spearheaded the launch of Breitbart Jerusalem in his old job as chairman of the right-wing news outlet. The idea for the site was to balance what was viewed by the far right as the anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media—and Bannon wanted to send a message, at the time of its launch, by calling the vertical “Breitbart Jerusalem,” not “Breitbart Israel.” Bannon and Kushner are seen as allies, aligned in their thinking, when it comes to the Middle East.
Even with so many questions unanswered, foreign policy experts are willing to give Kushner the benefit of the doubt, in part because expectations are so low.
“Nobody who is experienced in Middle East issues has been able to resolve this,” said Kori Schake, a former official in the George W. Bush State Department who went public last year with her support for Hillary Clinton and co-authored a book with Defense Secretary James Mattis. “A fresh pair of eyes by somebody unencumbered might actually be able to shake some new things free. And so much of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are about real estate.”
Kushner can only influence his father-in-law so much—on Mexico, where Kushner was reportedly tasked with patching up a relationship damaged by an early skirmish over Trump’s idea for a border wall, the president has already overruled him, or scuttled his attempts at diplomacy, through aggressive statements and tweets. Diplomacy in the Middle East is even more complicated, with volatile politics and powerful inside players like the Saudis, who won’t take kindly to perceived slights or broken promises.
Kushner seems aware of the limits of his power. At his meeting with Saban, where they steered clear of talking about the election, the Clinton megadonor tried to glean a little bit of competitive information from Trump’s top campaign adviser. “What can we expect at the debates?” Saban asked.
Kushner gave his enigmatic smile. “Who knows?”
