President-elect Donald Trump‘s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is anticipated to play a vital role in the Trump administration’s Middle East efforts — in an advisory capacity.
The Trump transition team has been hard at work this week pulling together the Trump administration. The Middle East team has also been taking shape, with Trump selecting former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee and real estate developer and good friend Steve Witkoff for key roles. However, the relationships Kushner made with Middle Eastern leaders during his time as an adviser to Trump will be hard to ignore.
Kushner was asked to develop a Middle Eastern peace plan by Trump during his first term, bringing together the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco in a peace agreement with Israel. He has also maintained the relationships he built over four years ago, making an appearance at the Saudi Future Investment Initiative in 2023 and keeping in contact with Israeli officials and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Kushner and Salman were close enough to communicate over text throughout Trump’s first term, frequently keeping national security officials in the dark regarding the messages’ context. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, traveled with then-President Trump during his first trip to Saudi Arabia in 2017. The trip led to Kushner making multiple visits to the kingdom for discussions with Salman.
Backed by sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf, Kushner went on to found his own investment fund, Affinity Partners, shortly after leaving Washington. In recent years, the fund received $2 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, causing critics to highlight that he has financial interests in the region.
Nonetheless, if Trump hopes to halt tensions in the Middle East as quickly as he promised he would, he might have to lean on Kushner’s relationships, focusing on wrapping up the Israel-Hamas conflict in a sudden manner. On the campaign trail, Trump said Israel needed to “finish what they started” in Gaza and “get it over with fast.”
Kushner also made comments about Gaza this year, saying, “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods.”
“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner said. “But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.”
Kushner also has a relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, having known him since he was young. Kushner recently had a meeting with Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s minister of strategic affairs, showing how close he has remained with Israeli officials since Trump’s first presidency.
The war in Gaza is causing a rift between Israel and Saudi Arabia, but many in the Trump administration believe that Kushner’s peace plan lays the groundwork for how the Middle East team could move forward in amending that relationship.
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Kushner published Breaking History in 2022, a book that reportedly many of Trump’s nominees have read to understand the region’s dynamics and power players better. But where some are reading the book, others are going straight to the source.
Weeks before Trump announced Witkoff as his special envoy to the Middle East, Witkoff called a meeting with Kushner to review the next steps for meeting the leaders in the Middle East, cementing Kushner as a sought-after informal adviser for some Trump administration appointees.