Jared Kushner: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure. This was something I took on. I was working on the political framework between the Israelis and the Palestinians and trying to understand what were the issues. The issues were not very many. It basically was you had a land dispute, so you had to figure out where do you put borders ultimately, you had a security paradigm, which I was much more favorable to Israel’s perspective on. Obviously the events of the past 48 hours have fully justified that bias. Then in addition to that, you had to deal with the religious sites, but I felt operationally that wasn’t actually as complicated as people made it because you wanted to just leave it open for everybody. Then I went through and I felt that the Palestinian leadership was fairly disincentivized to make a deal because there was just this paradigm where they had billions of dollars coming in from the international community, and I think that they feared that if they made a deal, they would lose their relevancy internationally and the money would stop flowing into the country. What I tried to do is to say my approach when I would get into a hard problem, say, how do I understand all the different escape patches? How do I try to eliminate them and then build a golden bridge that becomes really the only, but also the most desirable pathway For the decision makers to walk through. It wasn’t always hard, and sometimes you have to go and hold their hand or you try to pick them up and walk them across. But a lot of these leaders are very reluctant to change, and the dynamics of the Palestinians also were such that I think they were fairly stuck where they were. We developed a business plan for Gaza, the West Bank. We threw in some improvements for Jordan and Egypt as well. I based it off of the vision 2030 that they did in Saudi Arabia, which I thought was a visionary document. I went back through this process and I studied basically every economic project in post-World War II period. We looked at what they did in South Korea, why it was successful with some strong industrial planning. We looked at Japan, we looked at Singapore, we looked at Poland, why it was successful. We spent a lot of time on the Ukraine plan for the country and why it wasn’t successful. That was mostly because of governance and corruption, which actually resembles a lot of what’s gone wrong with the Palestinians where there’s no property rights, there’s no rule of law. What we did is we built a plan to show it’s not that hard in the sense that between the West Bank and Gaza, you had 5 million people. We put together a plan. I think it was about $27 billion. We got together a conference. I had the head of AT&T. We had Steve Schwarzman from Blackstone came, which was very gracious of them. n people. We put together a plan. I think it was about $27 billion. We got together a conference. I had the head of AT&T. We had Steve Schwarzman from Blackstone came, which was very gracious of them. We had all the leading Arabic businessmen, the leading builders, leading developers. The general consensus of that conference was that this is very doable. We think that for Gaza in particular, it would cost maybe seven to $8 billion to rebuild the entire place. We felt we could reduce the poverty rate in half. We can create over a million jobs there. The only thing that people said was holding it back wasn’t Israel. What was holding it back was governance, and people wouldn’t have confidence investing there with the rule that Hamas was perpetuating. I encourage people actually to look at the plan. It was very thoughtful. It was 181 pages. We went project by project. Each project is costed out. It’s a real plan that could be implemented, but you need the right governance and all of the different Arabic countries are willing to fund it. The international community is willing to fund it because they’ve just been throwing so much money at the Palestinians for years that’s never been outcomes based or conditions based. It’s just been entitlement money, and unfortunately, it hasn’t really achieved any outcomes that have been successful. It’s a great business plan. It just shows too rebuilding Gaza could be easy, but like I said, the problem that’s held the Palestinian people back and that’s made their lives terrible in Gaza has not been Israel. It’s really been Hamas’ leadership or lack of leadership and their desire to focus on trying to kill Israelis and start war with Israel over improving the lies of the Palestinian people. The current approach of Hamas, the more violence they perpetrate, the more they can hold onto power versus improving the lives of people. As you said, maybe you can comment on they do not propose an economics plan.…

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