Kushner plan for Palestine

With no experience of governance prior to his stint as Trump’s special adviser

Jared Kushner has been working as a senior Adviser to US President Donald Trump since 2017. The 38-year-old real estate developer has meddled in hot-button domestic and foreign policy matters without any experience of governance prior to his stint as Trump’s special adviser. Perhaps Kushner’s primary qualification for the job is that he is married to Ivanka, President Trump’s beloved daughter and another trusted confidante. No surprise, Trump has been accused of running the White House and the government like a family enterprise.

Interestingly, in the wide assortment of daunting tasks assigned to Kushner, he is also serving as the President’s lead salesman in the Middle East where the foreign policy lightweight recently failed to sell the ‘peace deal of the century’ to the Palestinians. Kushner’s $50bn investment plan, over the next 10 years, for the Palestinians promises opening up the West Bank and Gaza Strip to global markets along with railway links and a high speed 5G mobile network. But the magazine-styled abstract proposal presented in Manama is impotent in the obvious absence of a political dimension that includes an independent Palestinian state.

Unfortunately, the Kushner Club in Washington fails to realise that an economic plan for Palestine can only be implemented after peace has been achieved. With an overwhelmingly pro-Israel agenda, Trump and his son-in-law have been blatantly dismissive of the Palestinians from the beginning. Kushner’s proposal was doomed to fail in Manama primarily because it ignores the idea of an independent Palestinian state. Palestinians have suffered decades of Israeli oppression and the idea that they would give up their hopes for an independent nation in exchange for money was never to succeed. Without doubt, the crisis in the Middle East has dodged more competent individuals than Kushner and his absolute lack of experience is not helping the region.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 30^th, 2019.

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