Jared Kushner: evaluation

Transcript context

…I have a lot of questions to ask you about the journey towards this historic progress towards peace with Abraham Accords, of course. But first on this situation to step back and some of the history, is there things about the history of Hamas and Gaza that’s important to understand what is happening now? Just your comments, your thoughts, your understanding of Hamas. I think you did an excellent job, Lex, of really giving the summary. Just a couple of things, maybe I’ll add to it, is that Hamas was originally founded from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is a group that’s caused a lot of issues in the region. They’ve attacked Israel many times in the past. There’s a lot of discussion about how Israel is an occupying power. Well, in Gaza, in 2005, they withdrew from all the land, and then they say, Israel’s an apartheid state. Well, Israel then gave governance of the region to the Palestinians, and then what’s happened is the Palestinian people’s lives have now gone down, not up since then. I will say that under Hamas’ leadership in Gaza, the people who have suffered the most are the Palestinian people and I see and I’ve watched cries throughout my time in government from people saying we want to see the Palestinian people live a better life. I agree with those people. I think that the Palestinian people in Gaza are essentially hostages. In Gaza, you have basically 2.2 million people that are being held hostage by 30,000 Hamas terrorists. That’s really the problem, and I would just encourage people to push their attention and energy in this moment and their anger towards Hamas, those are the people who are killing innocent civilians, who are murdering indiscriminately, and those are the people who have held back the Palestinians from having a better life. Finally, what I would say is what we saw with Hamas was that if you go back to 2007, they basically had just one plan that they did over and over. We were very careful to try to monitor very closely and stop the Iranian money and the resources from coming in. Again, we took a little bit of criticism from the international community for keeping the border tight, but unfortunately, every time you’d allow construction materials to go into Gaza, they’d use them to build tunnels, not homes. You would have equipment that would come in to build pipes, they’d turn it into bombs. It was very, very hard to figure out how do you get the resources into Gaza to help people live a better life while at the same time the leadership in Gaza was taking all those resources and turning it into military equipment to attack Israel. What role does Iran play in this war, in this connection to Hamas? Can you speak to the connection between Hamas and Iran that’s important to understand, especially as this most recent attack unfolds?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.