T. Belman. I was extremely dissapointed on hearing Kushner’s remarks and am very glad Klein put pen to paper to take issue with everything that disturbed me. Kushner is no rightwinger. He is repeating all the memes which didn’t produce an agreement in the past.
Earlier today, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, made a rare public appearance to discuss his efforts to secure an Israeli-Palestinian deal and forge a wider Middle East peace.
While Kushner’s remarks were short on specifics, his 30-minute Q&A at the Saban Forum in Washington revealed dangerously delusional thinking when it comes to issues of U.S. national security, the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, and the largest Middle East.
Here, in no particular order, are six major problems with Kushner’s remarks today:
1 – Kushner would create a Palestinian state despite the current Palestinian “unity government” with Hamas terrorists.
Kushner and the Trump administration are plowing forward with a plan to create a Palestinian state even after the Palestinian Authority (PA) inked a landmark unity agreement with the Hamas terrorist organization, which is committed to Israel’s destruction. This means that any Palestinian state will ostensibly be governed on some level by the new Palestinian National Consensus Government, which includes Hamas as a main power.
Hamas has made clear it will not disarm under the unit deal, and has boasted it will bring its “weapons of the resistance” to the West Bank, where PA President Mahmoud Abbas already has a tenuous and flailing grip on power. In forming a unity government with Hamas, Abbas and the PA made clear where they stand when it comes to moderation and peace with Israel.
2 – Kushner is dangerously conditioning a larger Arab-Israel peace with the creation of a Palestinian state.
President Obama’s disastrous nuclear agreement with Iran has created unique and immediate opportunities to forge economic, military and diplomatic relations between Israel and the larger Sunni Arab world, led by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis and other Sunni Arab nations are pushing for a larger alliance, understanding that the regional tectonic plates have dramatically shifted and that their best hopes for confronting the Iranian threat lie in a new axis that includes Israel.
Kushner is setting up a larger regional deal for failure by pressing first for a solution to the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“I think that if we’re going to try and create more stability in the region as a whole, this issue has to be solved,” Kushner stated about the momentum for relations with between Israel and the larger Sunni Arab world. By “this issue,” Kushner was referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He more clearly stated that for a larger regional peace between Israel and the Arab world to be forged, “we have to overcome this issue of the Israeli-Palestinian issue in order for this to happen.”
Kushner is betting on a losing horse and he is needlessly placing a timed mega bomb inside an unprecedented opportunity for a larger and potentially stabilizing regional alliance between Israel and the Sunni Arab world.
The Palestinians have a 100% track record of bolting negotiations and refusing to sign any so-called peace agreement.
Indeed, the Palestinian Authority has rejected every single Israeli offer of a state. Such state offers were made at Camp David in 2000, Taba in 2001, the Annapolis Conference in 2007 and more offers were made in 2008. It was recently reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quietly made another such offer in 2014. In each of these cases, the PA refused generous Israeli offers of statehood and bolted negotiations without counteroffers. In some cases, they countered statehood offers with a major escalation of violence. There is no evidence to suggest that the Palestinians would accept any future Israeli offer.
3 – Kushner pushed the Palestinian propaganda lie that the so-called Israeli Palestinian conflict is at the center of driving regional instability.
By painting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as critical to bringing “more stability in the region as a whole” and focusing on the creation of a Palestinian state as a precondition for regional peace, Kushner is feeding into the Palestinian propaganda claim that the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict is driving regional turmoil.
This singular focus dangerously lets Iran off the hook for being arguably the greatest threat to regional stability. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict further has nothing to do with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels destabilizing Yemen or targeting Saudi Arabia. It is not a significant factor in the Shiite-Sunni divide that has been at the heart of Mideast violence. It is a footnote to the larger Islamic State designs to create a Caliphate and subjugate non-Muslims in the Middle East and worldwide. The lack of a Palestinian state (the fault of the Palestinians alone for repeatedly rejecting statehood offers) is not driving the Syria civil war, nor is it behind Iran’s attempt to takeover Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.
Reacting to Kushner’s speech, one former Trump administration speaking to me today put it this way: “Jared has in essence reverted to the Susan Rice, Obama administration playbook for blaming Israel for the problems in the Middle East. These are talking points directly from J Street.”
The former official, familiar with the White House foreign policy process, charged that “Jared was clearly following instructions from Dina Powell and H.R. McMaster, who have been pushing viewpoints that Israel is a destabilizing force in the region.”
4 – Kushner’s “peace” drive promotes the fiction that the Palestinian Authority is a partner for peace.
Putting aside Hamas, which again is in a unity agreement with Abbas’s Fatah, the PA’s own rejectionist attitudes toward Israel are highlighted by its repeated use of maps that erase Israel and PA propaganda calling for the dismantling of the Jewish state.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a terrorist group responsible for scores of suicide bombings and deadly shooting attacks, is closely aligned with Abbas’s Fatah party and is routinely referred to as Fatah’s so-called military wing.
Abbas recently exclaimed that he would continue official PA payments to Palestinian prisoners, a grouping that includes convicted terrorists, “until my dying day.” It was reported that the PA’s 2017 budget for payments to terrorists and their families amounts to about half of all foreign aid the PA expects to receive during the next year.
Abbas’s official PA organs and media outlets routinely glorify murderous terrorists. In one of countless examples, Breitbart Jerusalem recently reported on a Fatah summer camp named after Dalal Mughrabi, who led the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in which 38 people—including 13 children—were murdered. Breitbart Jerusalem also recently reported on a song featured on a children’s program on official PA television calling the entire State of Israel, including major Israeli cities, “my country Palestine.”
5 – Kushner’s plan to create a Palestinian state would harm U.S. national security interests.
The very premise of Kushner’s speech—that an Israeli-Palestinian deal is not only “achievable” but is in U.S. regional national security interests—is dangerous and fundamentally flawed.
There is no significant evidence to suggest that a Palestinian state that openly supports terrorism and it in a unity deal with terrorists would be moderate or a force against regional radicalism. There is overwhelming evidence to support the charge that a future Palestinian state would support terrorism, would remain in a permeant state of war with Israel and would work to destabilize the region.
The ailing 82-year-old Abbas is unpopular and hasn’t held a presidential election since 2005. There is no known moderate Palestinian leader or political party viewed as capable of taking over the PA. Indeed, there is no known moderate leader in any senior position in the Palestinian arena.
6 – Kushner scandalously drew moral equivalencies between Israel and the PA.
Kushner talked about “the red lines of both sides” and that they “see a lot of things that could go south quickly.” Only one side, however, seeks to destroy the other and educates its children in anti-Semitic propaganda, radicalism, violence and rejectionist attitudes.
Kushner went on to compare the democratic, pro-Western, anti-extremism government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to that of the terrorist-supporting, anti-Semitic, Hamas-partnership government of the PA.
“We have an open and honest dialogue with both sides, our conversations have opened up a lot. I think there are a lot of instances of great trust between Israelis and Palestinians, but not along the leadership.” he said.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
We all spoke prematurely. I posted an article today on the Saudi Plan and Jared must have known about it. But my guess is that he didn’t want to steal Trump’s thunder expected on Wednesday.
Jared is an embarrassment to the Trump administration and to the country. At least previous American diplomats charged with the same mission of Jared had years and years of political experience. Pardon the expression but Jared is a snot nose in way over his head.
@ Edgar G.:
Not according to the Forbes article. Read it.
Jared has probably been getting his knowledge of the ME from NYT and CNN. He really should know better than to think there is anyone at all in the PA, Fatah, Hamas that could/would ever consider peace brokering honestly with Israel. They have sworn never to do this.They want the land of Israel, all of it and they want Israel dead and gone. It is time to give up and tell the Arabs they lost, they cannot steal Israel’s land, they can have nothing, deserve nothing and if they want a fight “bring it on”.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
I thought Bannon had much to do with that, and I think there were few more who each contributed to the win. And Trump himself was the biggest factor.in that he really appealed to the forgotten masses who came out to vote for him. .Jared is no whiz kid, he’s still learning. And he’s a ferbrente Democrat.
Just my opinion.
@ Edgar G.:Kushner engineered Trump’s victory in November
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusive-interview-how-jared-kushner-won-trump-the-white-house/#3f9174e73af6
But, if this is true, he’s bad news for Israel.
Kushner sounds like a simpleton, and obviously knows NOTHING about the Middle East. He is just mouthing what he has already heard from the various news media over the years. There seems nothing of Trump’s ideas or vision in him. I think that an experience in Real Estate a family business, inherited from forebears does not qualify him to hold and exercise the attributes of a diplomat or politican because he is obviously neither.
Is he to be “The Great Peacemaker”…. where’s the wampum…??
What advice can he possibly give to Trump, or is it just a “position” given to him because Trump loves his daughter and want’s her husband to have a prominent (sounding) place in his administration……???
There’s no chance that anything will come out of his “efforts” because they are on the wrong road and beginning to speed over the limit.