White House senior adviser Jared Kushner has affirmed that his effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was done in good faith—that it was not a plan designed to provoke Palestinian intransigence so that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could do whatever he wanted on the West Bank.
"I understand that people are going to criticize," he said. But "it's okay to take on hard challenges. I'd rather spend time on harder things,” he told Newsweek Magazine.
“The goal is to make a deal and finish this thing,” Kushner added.
Newsweek magazine criticized US President Donald Trump's decision to assign the peacemaking mission in the Middle East to Kushner. Why would somebody 37 years old, with no diplomatic experience, take on the job of making peace in the Mideast? "My father-in-law asked me to do it," Kushner says.
“Never mind that Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Bill Clinton, among others, failed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. President Donald Trump told Kushner to get it done,” according to the magazine.
“Unlike his father-in-law, though, Kushner seems a pragmatic, proud of being someone who simply gets things done,” wrote Newsweek.
Kushner studied previous deals and met with Middle East experts and former negotiator. All describe him as respectful personally but dismissive of previous efforts to resolve the conflict. He did not want to go down the road of past negotiations only to fail again.
Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, commented, "Oh, so you want to fail in a whole different way!"
Observers see that “Kushner's problem was the plan itself. It did put forth a two-state solution. But it required the Palestinians to forgo control over exit and entry into the proposed new state, and allow Israel to oversee its internal security.”
To Satloff, this was Kushner's real estate background poking through. "It was like a landlord trying to entice a tenant to get out of a building because he wants to put up condominiums: You give him 25 cents on the dollar now if he takes the deal, but if he waits two weeks he only gets 10 cents."
