Jared Kushner: Israel-Hamas War, paths forward, macro picture, AI

Kushner says Affinity Partners has raised just over $3.1 billion and is deliberately using Gulf capital and his government-era relationships to invest in Israel and the United States. He described the firm as applying White House macro knowledge, connections, and cross-border experience to private equity.

Kushner said Trump’s 2016 campaign was less a master plan than an improvised operation shaped by Washington’s reluctance to work for him. He said that pushed major responsibility onto people personally loyal to Trump, including himself, who built data, advertising, and events operations designed to make campaign dollars go further.

Kushner highlighted two little-discussed 2017 Saudi initiatives: a Gulf counter-terror-finance center working with U.S. Treasury and a Saudi counter-extremism center. He viewed cooperation on bank flows, online radicalization, and clerical influence as essential because Washington could not win the ideological fight alone.

Kushner’s formula for Gaza went beyond removing Hamas: target its leadership, degrade its military capabilities, then build an economy offering young people an alternative to jihadist groups. He explicitly said ideology cannot be killed militarily and warned that decapitating organizations can sometimes fragment them into harder problems.

At Kushner’s 2019 Bahrain conference, investors including Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman and AT&T’s Randall Stephenson wanted to invest in Palestinian areas but found them effectively uninvestable. Kushner blamed weak rule of law, opaque institutions, and governance rather than a lack of capital or human potential.

Kushner illustrated what he saw as Palestinian leadership privilege by contrasting Netanyahu flying commercial El Al with Mahmoud Abbas arriving in Washington on what Kushner called a $60 million Boeing business jet. He also said U.S. aid across the PA, UNRWA, Jordan, and Egypt totaled about $4 billion annually and should be more conditional.

Kushner said a two-state outcome remains possible only if Israel retains overriding security controls while Palestinians gradually gain greater authority and build a viable economy. He also said he was hearing that roughly 250,000 West Bank Palestinians’ Israeli work permits were no longer being renewed after October 7.

In a private tariff discussion, Kushner said Trump told him he had argued for tariffs for 30 years, campaigned on them, won, and therefore had to try them. Trump’s stated fallback was equally revealing: if the policy proved disastrous, Kushner recalled him saying, he could simply remove the tariffs.