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Exclusive Book Extract // Analysis

When Donald Trump handed his son-in-law the Middle East peace portfolio, the media laughed at Jared Kushner’s lack of experience. The joke was on them, as the 30-something Kushner pulled off a diplomatic coup with the Abraham Accords

IT was the Manhattan elevator ride that made Middle East history.

Donald Trump’s journey down to the marble lobby of his tower to launch his presidential bid in 2015 has long since become the stuff of political legend.

But overlooked in all of the storytelling about that day is that the future president wasn’t the only person there about to rocket into the history books.

Standing in a group photo of the Trump family that June 16 was his son-in-law. Almost exactly five years later, Jared Kushner would succeed in pulling off multiple peace deals between Israel and longstanding enemies across the Muslim world.

Along the way, Kushner — a graduate of the Modern Orthodox Frisch High School in Paramus, New Jersey — would become emblematic of a White House that was so heimish that the peace deal ceremony concluded with a Minchah on the Executive Mansion’s lawn.

If any of the reporters, supporters and gawkers in Trump Tower that day identified the then-34-year-old Kushner, it would probably have been to dismiss him as a privileged Jewish son of wealth who had married into a famous New York family.

That reaction would typify the national media’s scornful response once Trump handed his son-in-law and daughter Ivanka top roles in the White House.

Despite Kushner’s masterminding a sophisticated digital campaign strategy in the elections that brought in some top Silicon Valley talent, the accepted wisdom was that the Kushner appointment was plain nepotism. Media outlets looked askance at Jared’s place in Harvard, alleging that he was awarded a place only due to his father Charles’s large donation to the university.

By August 2017, though, it was becoming obvious that Trump’s son-in-law was succeeding in a crucial Machiavellian test — the intra-White House knife fights.

That month, Steve Bannon, Trump’s firebrand advisor who dismissed the couple as “Jarvanka” — globalists unfaithful to the president’s agenda — was fired.

Those watching his rare media appearances were impressed that under the sphinx-like demeanor was a commanding interview presence, a quiet combination of force and suaveness.

Kushner was also displaying another skill: listening.

“If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” Trump said.

While that struck his detractors as Trumpian bombast — the bragging of a rich shver — Kushner proceeded to learn the subject for himself, touring the Middle East open to fresh approaches.

The story of Kushner’s astonishing rise to Middle East peacemaker is told in Breaking History, a heavily trailed new book by Jared Kushner, who provided Mishpacha with an advance chapter on the peace deals to preview.

Not the first book by Trump administration alumni, the author’s seniority has inevitably generated interest in the disclosures about the backstage of the most mercurial White House in modern times.

For those interested in the substance of the peace breakthrough more than the details of run-ins with presidential advisors Steve Bannon and John Kelly, Kushner’s account is a window into the reality of Trump’s biggest foreign policy success.

It’s a reminder of the visionary role that Bibi Netanyahu played in making the geopolitical ground shift.

Parsing the memoir with the help of multiple interviews with Israelis and Americans with knowledge of the accords also emphasizes something that the Israeli right never seemed to grasp: that the annexation of parts of the West Bank promised by the Trump peace plan would have set the stage for a Palestinian state.

With publication shortly after President Biden returned mostly empty-handed from a trip to Saudi Arabia, the account is also a reminder of the biggest counter-factual of Trump’s failure to secure a second term.

If the Abraham Accords team were still in the West Wing on the agreement’s second anniversary, would Israel now be toasting a peace deal in Riyadh?

When I first came to Washington, almost everyone accepted former secretary of state John Kerry’s assessment of peace with Israel: “There will be no advanced and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace.” I had questioned this assumption and instead embraced a new approach, based on my belief that countries would engage in new partnerships that offered more promise for their citizens than the status quo.

Paradigm Shift

If the Trump administration deserves credit for exploring a new path to Middle East peace, Bibi Netanyahu did a lot to beat out that path through the wilderness of failed peace plans.

As his term in office was coming to a triumphant close in December 2020 four months after the peace deal, Israel’s then-ambassador to America Ron Dermer told me that Bibi had been talking about disentangling peace with the Arab states from the Palestinian issue for many years.

“For as long as I’ve been privileged to know Netanyahu, which is 20 years, he’s believed that the paradigm could be reversed, and that a process of opening to the Arab states was possible even before a peace agreement with the Palestinians,” he said.

A public airing of those views came in 2016, when Bibi gave another of his prime-time performances at the United Nations.

“What I’m about to say is going to shock you,” the prime minister began. “Israel has a bright future at the UN — and the biggest change in attitudes toward Israel is taking place in the Arab world. For the first time in my lifetime, many states in the region recognize that Israel is not their enemy. Our common enemies are Iran and ISIS. I believe that in the years ahead, we will work together to achieve these goals, work together openly.”

Decades of Middle East peacemaking was based on the narrative that in order to establish diplomatic relations with the Arab states, Israel first had to solve the Palestinian issue. But Netanyahu thought the prerequisite was far different.

“The critical element for that peace was for Israel to be strong militarily and technologically, and that would create the diplomatic possibility for countries in the region to move toward Israel in order to serve their own interests,” Dermer continued. “That’s the deep background to what happened.”

Having long dreamed of a different approach to peacemaking, how did Bibi know when it was time to go public with his vision?