For a man with no formal role in the White House, Jared Kushner last week literally took centre-stage as Donald Trump’s emissary to the Middle East.
As the administration took a victory lap for hammering out a Gaza ceasefire last week, Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, stood in Tel Aviv’s ‘hostages square’, addressing a feverish crowd that had booed the mention of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and later broke into chants of: “Thank You Trump!”
“October 7 for me was a shattering day,” said Kushner, who had shed his customary business suit for a simple black T-shirt. “Since then, my heart has not been complete.” He felt obligated, he said, “to see the hostages come home, to see their families get the closure they deserve, and to end this nightmare. Also, to see the suffering end for the people in Gaza who, for most of them, were experiencing this through no fault of their own, other than being born into a situation that was horrific.”
It was a strong diplomatic sentiment for a man whose boss had threatened to unleash “hell” in Gaza. But the soft-spoken heir to his father’s real estate empire has quietly become a key conduit for Trump’s outreach to the Middle East, leveraging his Rolodex of leaders in the region and positioning himself to win a lucrative windfall if the goal of redeveloping Gaza ever comes to fruition.
It has been a notable return to the political fold after Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, effectively swore off politics after the January 6 riots at the US Capitol that followed Trump’s loss in the 2020 elections.
Now, Kushner, who manages billions of dollars in investments including from Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund in his investment company Affinity Partners, sits at the nexus of power in Washington DC.
“Of course there’s an enormous conflict of interest here,” said Matt Duss, the executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy, who described the influence-peddling in the administration as open corruption.
But, he added: “Part of what’s bizarre is that the Trump organisation is so deeply leveraged in the Middle East that the corruption could sustain the ceasefire. Because they all stand to make so much money there is an interest and an incentive to kind of stop the war.”
The administration has denied that there is a conflict of interest in Kushner’s diplomatic work while continuing to run an investment fund managing billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatari state funds.
“I think it’s frankly despicable that you’re trying to suggest that it’s inappropriate for Jared Kushner, who is widely respected around the world and has great trust and relationships with these critical partners in these countries, to strike a 20-point comprehensive, detailed plan that no other administration would ever be able to achieve,” White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told a reporter during a briefing earlier this month. “Jared is donating his energy and his time to our government, to the president of the United States, to secure world peace, and that is a very noble thing.”
Kushner, who was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New Jersey, had no previous experience in diplomacy before he was proposed by his father, the New York real estate developer Charles Kushner, to join Trump’s first administration. He was mocked after an early interview in Trump’s first term when he said he had “been studying this now for three years. I’ve read 25 books on it, I’ve spoken to every leader in the region, I’ve spoken to everyone who’s been involved in this”.
Now, JD Vance and other backers of the administration have taken to reposting the remarks with a sense of vindication.
When Trump returned to the White House in January, Kushner and Ivanka stayed in their $24m Miami megamansion and did not take any formal role in the transition, keeping more distance between themselves and the administration than during Trump’s first term.
For many, Kushner’s central role in the negotiations was unknown until he and Tony Blair participated in a White House meeting in August to discuss planning for the postwar governance and redevelopment of Gaza.
“I put Jared on it because he’s a very smart person and he knows the region, knows the people, knows a lot of the players,” said Trump last week shortly after the deal was announced. In an interview with the New York Times, Kushner explained it simply: he and Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy, were “deal guys”, veterans of the New York real-estate scene who understood what made people tick.
“A lot of the people who do this are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats. It’s just different being deal guys – just a different sport,” Kushner said.
According to US officials, Kushner and Witkoff had been given virtually unlimited authority by Trump to get both sides to agree to a ceasefire: from a closed-door meeting between Trump and Arab leaders during the UN general assembly to stress test a 20-point Gaza proposal, to persuading Netanyahu to deliver an apology message to Qatar’s prime minister after an Israeli airstrike in Doha last month, to an unprecedented meeting between White House officials and Hamas that led to the best chance to end the war in Gaza since it began in October 2023.
“One of his strengths was that he was unofficial” but still had direct access to Trump, said a former US diplomat of Kushner. “He could work in the background, and through his business interests, to bridge all of these sides and build enough credibility to help get the deal across the line.”
Since Trump’s first term, said diplomats and associates, Kushner had pushed a vision that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a stumbling block preventing a vast rapprochement between Israel and Arab states, especially the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that could transform the region economically.
After Netanyahu’s strike on Qatar earlier this month, Kushner and Witkoff were said to have sensed an opening, as Arab leaders grew worried that the attack could set a precedent for further strikes in the region.
In an interaction first reported by the Wall Street Journal and then confirmed by US officials, Kushner and Witkoff dictated the apology to the Qatari prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani that Netanyahu delivered by telephone shortly before he and Trump appeared together at a White House summit in late September.
“It was the sort of thing that mature people do,” said a US official briefed on Witkoff and Kushner’s efforts to negotiate a ceasefire. “That got us some leverage.”
Observers say Kushner’s imprint on Middle East policy has been visible since the beginning of Trump’s second administration. One signature proposal – that Gaza be redeveloped as a vast beachfront property – was first voiced by Kushner at an event at Harvard in 2024. Critics accused Trump of promoting ethnic cleansing after he said that Palestinians could be forcibly evicted from Gaza before the redevelopment – an idea that Kushner had also floated first.
Aaron David Miller, a former diplomat and Middle East negotiator, and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recalled meeting Kushner during Trump’s first term and described his unsentimental approach to diplomacy in the region.
“[Kushner] said: ‘Don’t talk to me about history,’” recalled Miller. “I’m not interested in history. We’re doing things differently here.”
Kushner’s family had maintained close links with Netanyahu for decades, mainly through his father, Charles Kushner, who had been a major donor to pro-Israeli causes. The relationship was so close that Netanyahu once stayed at the Kushner family’s house in New Jersey, according to the New York Times.
Despite that, Kushner had told Miller that one key to Trump’s diplomacy in his first term was that he would “make it impossible for any Israeli prime minister say no to him”.
“Little did I know … that foundational principle would essentially create a situation unlike any other American president I ever worked for,” Miller said.
Describing the talks, a US official said that Trump’s vocal support of Israel had made it possible for Kushner and Witkoff to work closely with Arab leaders and even meet directly with Hamas without estranging Netanyahu’s government.
Trump, as well as Kushner and Witkoff, had “stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel 100%”, said a US official. “Israel has a lot of trust in President Trump that he’s not going to ask it to do anything that would compromise its security.”
