Jared Kushner: evaluation

Transcript context

…If we can go back to the incredible work with Abraham Accords and Israel and the Middle East, first, the big question about peace. Why is it so difficult to achieve peace in this part of the world between Israel and Palestine and between Israel and the other countries in the Middle East? Or any sort of peace like agreements? If I had to give you the most simple answer, I would say that it’s structural. If you go back to the incentive structure of different leaders, this whole peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, and again, I’ve gotten criticized for saying this, but it’s what I believe, so I’m going to say it, is that the incentive structure was all wrong. When I went before the United Nations Security Council to discuss the peace plan that I proposed, which again was more of an operational plan, and it was a pragmatic plan, it was over 180 pages in detail. In politics, people don’t like putting forward detail because it just gives a lot of places for you to get criticized on. Nobody actually criticized the detail of my plan. They just criticized the fact that it was coming from us and didn’t want to debate the merits of the operational pieces of it. So I created a slide where I showed from the Oslo Accords till the day I was there, all the different peace discussions. I put a dove in the slide for those, and then I put a tank for every time there was a war, because there was always skirmishes between Hamas and Hezbollah and the Palestinians. And then I showed two lines, and they both went from the bottom of the page all the way up like this. One of the lines was Israeli settlements. So every time a negotiation failed, Israel was able to get more land and then the other one was money to the Palestinians. I said every time a negotiation failed, the Palestinians would get more money. The problem with that money though, was that it wasn’t going to the people. Some of it would make its way down, but most of it was going to the politicians. You had leadership of the Palestinians who was basically, I think at that point it was in the 16th year of a four-year term, so it wasn’t democratically elected. A lot of what I tried to show was that there was no rule of law, there was no judicial system, there were no property rights, and there was no opportunity or hope for the people to live a better life. And so all of the envoys to date were basically trained to go and do the same things. Again, I got massively criticized by all the previous envoys for not doing it the same way they did, but I thought the problem structurally just didn’t make sense and so I felt like the incentive structure was all wrong, and I took a different approach. And so what’s the different approach?…

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