Jared Kushner: belief

Transcript context

…You have to separate it into two different issues. And I think that that’s actually how we came to the Abraham Accords, is that I tell the story in the book, and it was one of my favorite experiences during my time in diplomacy where I went to meet with Sultan Qaboos, who was the sultan of Oman. We fly out there because he’d had a secret meeting with Bibi, and I thought maybe he was open to normalizing with Israel. So after he meets with Bibi, he calls me and says, “I want you to come see me.” So I go over to see him, and again, I tell the story. It was a crazy night and all these different areas, but when I was talking to him, he basically says to me, “I feel badly for the Palestinian people that they carry with them the burden of the Muslim world.” And that line just like stuck with me. A couple days later, I was thinking about it and I said, “Wait a minute, who elected the Palestinian people to represent the Muslim world on the Al-Aqsa Mosque? And so the reason why I felt like it had never been solved was it was a riddle A, that I believed was designed to not be solved, but B, you were conflating two separate issues. You had the issue between Israel and the Muslim world, which really was the issue of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and then you had just a territorial dispute, which throughout history, you have lots of territorial disputes, and they’re usually resolved in different ways. If you go back to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, there’s just a couple components you need to solve. Number one is territorial continuity, right? You need to figure out where do you draw the lines? And that’s something that you can talk about what people were owed 70 years ago, but it’s much more productive to say, “This is what you can make work today.” And that’s kind of what we did. We literally spent months and months drawing a map and we put something out, probably change a couple lines here and there, but by and large, it was a very pragmatic solution that I think could work and I think it could work for- … very pragmatic solution that I think could work, and I think it could work for the safety and security of Israel, which was number one. So first issue is drawing a map. Second issue is security. And again, this is one issue, we were incredibly sympathetic with Israel, which is you can’t expect a prime minister of Israel to make a deal where he’s going to make his people less secure than before. So we worked very closely with them on a security apparatus. We laid something out that I think would keep the whole area safer, and it would make sure Israel was safe and also keep the Palestinian issue safe. So you needs security. hem on a security apparatus. We laid something out that I think would keep the whole area safer, and it would make sure Israel was safe and also keep the Palestinian issue safe. So you needs security. Number three was the religious sites, and that was one that was actually always made much more complicated by people, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, because you basically have Ḥaram al-Sharīf, which is a place where the mosque was built in the seventh or eighth century, but originally it was where the Holy of Holies were in the [inaudible 02:45:52] for the Jewish people. And then compounding by the fact that you have all the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. It’s a city that should be bringing everyone together, but in fact has become a place where you have wars and hatred, and a lot of different conflicts that have risen because of it. But what I said was, instead of fighting over concepts of sovereignty, which is interesting, how I got to the notion that this wasn’t really the big issue. I basically just operationally, why don’t we just make it simple? Let everyone come and be able to worship as long as they’re being able to worship peacefully. So that’s really the contours of it. And what the Palestinians have done is they’ve kind of deflected from a lot of their own shortcomings, and a lot of the Arab leaders did that as well, kind of in the Abraham Accord days, by kind of allowing this issue to be so prevalent. So one thing I’ll say on the Palestinians is that what we tried to do by laying out plan was we said, “Okay, what are the reasons why the Palestinian people are not having the lives that they deserve?” And I’ll give you a couple of things. One is I studied the economies of Jordan, West Bank, Gaza, Egypt, Morocco. This was numbers from like 2019. But what was interesting was the GDP per capita of somebody living in the West Bank was actually the same as Jordan, and it was actually more than somebody living in Egypt. And the debt of GDP that the Palestinians had was like 30, 40% compared to Egypt, which was at like 130%. In Jordan, which was at 110%. Then Lebanon, which is at 200%. And so you’re in a situation where a lot of this stuff didn’t make sense, but if you draw lines, create institutions where Palestinian people can now feel like they have property rights and have ownership over their place, and let the money flow past the leadership ranks to the people, let them have jobs, let them have opportunity, and then let all Muslims from throughout the world have access to the mosque and Israel, making sure that they can control the security, which I think the Jordanians and a lot of others want Israel to have strong security control there to prevent the radicalists and the extremists from coming, you could have peace there very easily. So there’s a lot of things to say here. One is just to emphasize, Al-Aqsa Mosque, says this a holy place, and this is something in our conversations and in my own travels, I’ve seen the importance of frictionless access to those sites from the entirety of the Muslim world. And that’s what Abraham, of course, took big leaps on. Okay, so we’ll talk about that a little bit more, but that’s kind of a religious component. That’s a dignity in the religious practice and faith component. But then the other thing you mentioned so simply, which is you have money flow past the leadership ranks. How do you have money flow past the leadership ranks in Palestine? So make sure that the money that’s invested in Palestine, the West Bank, gets to the people.…

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