Kushner, Jared
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This episode was recorded in two parts: an original conversation on October 5, 2023, and a newly recorded opening segment on October 9, two days after the Hamas attack on Israel, addressing the unfolding war directly. Kushner calls the October 7th attack a terror event on a scale unseen since 9/11, expresses grief for Israeli victims and hostages, and argues (as his own assessment) that Hamas's strategic goal was to provoke a maximally aggressive Israeli response that would rally global Muslim sympathy for the Palestinian cause. He argues Gaza's roughly 2.2 million residents are effectively "hostages" of Hamas's roughly 30,000 fighters, distinguishes sharply between Hamas's leadership and ordinary Palestinians (whom he says have suffered most under Hamas rule), and states that lasting peace requires Hamas be "eliminated or severely degraded" militarily, since — in his view — no economic development plan is viable so long as resources sent into Gaza get diverted into military infrastructure rather than civilian use. He attributes much of the recruitment narrative around Hamas and allied groups to claims about restricted Muslim access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which he says his own commissioned focus groups (in Amman, Cairo, Dubai, and Ramallah) identified as the most common perceived grievance, while asserting Israel's actual policy since 1967 has been to allow open access for peaceful worship — tracing the "mosque under threat" narrative back to 1920s Jerusalem Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who Kushner says used the same framing (and later allied with Hitler and Mussolini) to raise funds and recruit before mass media existed.
On the Abraham Accords, which he helped negotiate, Kushner describes the strategic logic as sequencing normalization between Israel and Arab/Muslim-majority states (UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, plus a Qatar-Saudi-UAE-Egypt-Bahrain reconciliation) ahead of, rather than contingent on, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute — a deliberate break from decades of prior diplomatic convention that had treated Palestinian statehood as a precondition. He frames the accompanying "Peace to Prosperity" economic plan (a costed, roughly $27 billion, 181-page proposal modeled partly on Saudi Vision 2030) as demonstrating that Gaza's poverty could be dramatically reduced given adequate governance, arguing the binding constraint on Palestinian economic development has been Hamas's leadership and diverted aid rather than Israeli restrictions, and criticizes the international community's aid to Palestinians as "entitlement money" disbursed without conditions or accountability, contrasting this with a "conditions-based" approach he says he favored. He argues the Biden administration inherited a historically favorable, sanctions-weakened Iran and a momentum-filled region, but reversed course by resuming Palestinian funding without conditions, easing Iran sanctions enforcement (which he says increased Iranian oil revenue roughly tenfold), and pursuing Saudi-Israeli normalization talks more publicly than his own team's deliberately quiet approach — developments he argues emboldened Iran and its regional proxies and were, in his assessment, avoidable contributors to the current crisis. He states unequivocally that in his view this war "never would have happened" under a Trump administration.
On broader negotiation philosophy, drawn from experience across the Abraham Accords, USMCA trade negotiations, North Korea back-channel diplomacy, and bipartisan criminal justice reform (the First Step Act), Kushner emphasizes trust-building as foundational, reframing negotiations so both sides sit "on the same side of the table" toward a shared outcome, mapping and closing off leaders' "escape routes" from a deal, and building a "golden bridge" that makes the desired outcome the path of least resistance and greatest self-interest for the other party. He describes politicians as generally driven by the imperative to retain power rather than personal friendship, while arguing genuine trust and lasting friendships are still achievable when people work together toward a shared, low-personal-stakes objective under pressure — citing his direct work with Mohammed bin Salman (whom he describes as a bold-goal-setting reformer, business-minded rather than Western-educated, trained by his father to report weekly on assigned books) as a case where listening rather than lecturing built rapport, illustrated by a Emirati leader's remark that Kushner was the first American envoy who came only to ask questions rather than to make a case or read from talking points.
Kushner offers a detailed personal account of his father's arrest and imprisonment (following a family business dispute that escalated into a federal prosecution), describing his own anger giving way to a deliberate shift toward "focusing on what I can control," his father's post-arrest remark that "in life sometimes we get so powerful that we believe we're the dealer, but we're not the dealer, God's the dealer," and how that period shaped his approach to later crises, including the roughly two-year Trump-Russia collusion investigation, which he says cost him millions in legal fees and dozens of hours of testimony despite (in his account) no wrongdoing, and which he processed by focusing energy only on what he could control and leaning on family support (naming his wife Ivanka and Donald Trump specifically). He extends this into reflections on money and power's corrupting potential ("money just makes you more of what you already are," quoting a Death Row Records co-founder), on the value of assembling politically diverse dinner conversations (citing a memorable Feinstein/Meadows dinner on Iran and a Durbin/Graham/Miller dinner on immigration reform) as models for finding unexpected common ground, and on why he believes "the aggressively and passively independent-minded" (per a Paul Graham essay he cites) — those who enjoy or are simply indifferent to breaking established rules — are often better positioned to solve long-stalled problems than credentialed experts invested in prior approaches.
On Russia, Ukraine, and China, Kushner argues the Ukraine war was avoidable and would not have occurred under a Trump administration, frames NATO's eastward expansion as a long-standing red line for Putin, and — while stressing he is not excusing the invasion — argues effective mediation would require a trusted broker who can offer Zelensky (whom he praises for personal courage in staying in Kyiv) a private "off-ramp" incompatible with public wartime rhetoric. He recounts helping broker the largest oil production cut in history (a multi-day, multi-party negotiation involving Trump, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and eventually Mexico during COVID demand collapse) as illustrative of how personal relationships enabled crisis diplomacy, and frames the U.S.-China relationship through Michael Pillsbury's The Hundred-Year Marathon thesis — that China has pursued a long-term strategic project to reclaim global leadership by 2049 — describing how the Trump administration used tariffs and public pressure to shift global awareness of Chinese trade practices, while stating he'd still prefer American-led to Chinese-led global leadership. He closes with optimism that AI, cheap energy, and scientific/medical advancement could give humanity "a dawn... that could be incredible" if political energy shifts away from recycled "man versus man" tribal conflicts, crediting his own experience — entering high-stakes diplomacy without traditional qualifications and still achieving results once thought impossible — as evidence that ambitious, previously stalled problems are more solvable than conventional wisdom assumes.
Excerpts
On the strategic logic he attributes to Hamas's October 7th attack, and where responsibility for Palestinian welfare lies:
“The goal of Hamas was to provoke an overreaction from Israel... In Gaza, you have basically 2.2 million people that are being held hostage by 30,000 Hamas terrorists. That's really the problem, and I would just encourage people to push their attention and energy in this moment and their anger towards Hamas... those are the people who have held back the Palestinians from having a better life.”
On his father's remark after being arrested, which Kushner says reshaped his own outlook:
“In life sometimes, we get so powerful that we believe that we're the dealer... But we're not the dealer. God's the dealer. And we have to come down to earth to understand [that]... I think that's where he made a mistake... I do respect the fact that he took responsibility himself and said, 'I can't control the actions of other people... I can just control my actions.'”
On his approach to earning trust with foreign leaders, illustrated by a comment from the ruler of the UAE:
“You're the first person who's ever come here and has just asked questions. Why have you done that?" ... "I said, 'Because I figure this problem's been going on for a long time, you live here, I'll be gone at some point. You're going to have to live with the consequences of whatever my work is... What would you do if you were me?'”