Former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is bubbling with fresh ideas on how to resolve the Israel-Hamas war. There’s just one problem: All of his ideas are terrible.
In a February interview at Harvard University posted on YouTube earlier this month, the former senior adviser to Trump offered solutions for managing the conflict that were at turns politically illiterate and offensive, including a seeming openness to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Kushner’s comments serve as a potential preview of how a future Trump administration might approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In a sane world, his views would be nothing more than the ramblings of one of today’s worst real estate investors. But Kushner’s comments serve as a potential preview of how a future Trump administration might approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During his time in the Trump White House, Kushner worked as a point man on, among other things, Middle Eastern diplomacy. He said in February that he wouldn’t join the White House if Trump were to win again, but his outlook still provides a window into the thinking of Trump’s inner circle. And given his family ties to the former president, he could still informally advise Trump on the matter without re-entering the White House.
Kushner’s most eyebrow-raising remark in the interview was that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable if people would focus on building up livelihoods.” It is, at best, insensitive to talk about Gaza through the lens of real estate value as Israel wages a brutal bombardment campaign in the territory that has already destroyed or damaged most of its buildings and killed tens of thousands of people. Hearing a rich real estate mogul treat a war zone that’s become virtually uninhabitable as a potential luxury investment is nauseating.
To be clear, Kushner’s language initially suggests he’s talking about how Palestinians could benefit from…
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