Jared Kushner doesn’t look like his father-in-law, Donald Trump, he’s quiet, he listens more than he talks. It is believed that he was the brains behind the first election campaign, in which his victory was a surprising event. Of course, Trump lacks tact and official and social decency, but he does not lack argument, electoral rhetoric, and charisma, which is why he won the first elections even though he is a stranger to politics, and he came from outside the Republican Party.
I read chapters from Kushner’s book, “Breaking History,” which is about his biography during the Trump presidency, specifically related to our region. The importance of the book is that its author was Trump’s right arm and his mind.
Immediately after the announcement of Trump’s victory, there was concern among Arab governments for various reasons. In the Gulf, his repeated attack on Saudi Arabia and his threat to withdraw his forces from the Gulf were surprising. His talk about Muslims as enemies, and his threats against some governments of Islamic countries made some link them with the prophecy of “the clash of civilizations” by Samuel Huntington.
The son-in-law, the president’s daughter-in-law, amazes us with what he mentioned in his biography, how he worked to fix what was spoiled by Trump’s election statements. The irony here is that it was the young Jew, Jared Kushner, who persuaded the elected president to rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, the leader of the group of Islamic countries, and to correct his political rhetoric. Riyadh took a step forward with Kushner, suggesting that instead of antagonizing one billion Muslims and fifty Islamic countries in the world, why not communicate with them, for the benefit of both sides? Thus, in Riyadh, the Islamic American Summit, the first of its kind, was held. The Saudi capital became Trump’s first stop outside America as president. Never before have so many leaders of the Muslim world met with an American president under one roof. We read in his book how former Secretary of State Tillerson warns Kushner that he is against visiting Saudi Arabia and against the summit project, saying: Be careful not to trust the Saudis, they don’t keep their promises. The summit was one of Trump’s most prominent foreign policy actions.
There is no doubt that Trump’s opponents are many in the American arena, who have made him a subject for jokes and criticism, accusing him of racism, chauvinism and aggression. The truth is, Trump is unlike any of the forty-four presidents who ruled America. He has his flaws, such as his general ignorance of politics, his method of dealing with controversial issues and his emotional language. However, Trump remains one of the most popular presidents, and the most powerful person, and remains to this day a difficult political figure, despite the attempts of his party and his opponents to close the fund on him. Muzzling Trump is a difficult task. The broad-shouldered, hoarse voice, defiant of the media, who wrote 57,000 inflammatory tweets and forced Twitter to suspend his account, cannot be silenced. Some of what is said against him is true, and some of the news about him is false. What is being promoted against him, with racism and hostility to others, is denied by his relations with the old African Americans, and alliances with them, and the husband of his eldest daughter is a Jew by religion, and the husband of his other daughter is a Lebanese, and his wife Melania is a Yugoslavian. As for his relations with white supremacists, they appear to be part of the imperatives of political alliances.
In another chapter, Kushner recounted his adoption of a peace project between the Arabs and Israel. And how he tried to market the project to both sides. His idea combines “rights” and interests. The main drawback is that Kushner did not read the history of the failure of previous peace projects. First, peace is a suspicious and hated word for a section of the Palestinians, Arabs and Israelis, and that is why they killed the two most important leaders involved in peace, Sadat and Rabin. The Palestinians squandered all opportunities for two main reasons, deeming the “right” sacred, and allowing others to use them as a pawn against negotiation for their own ends. Saddam exploited them, as did Hafez al-Assad and Gaddafi.
Before Kushner started his project, they attacked and aborted him, and he died, as did the projects that preceded it, in favor of the agendas of the Iranians and extremist religious groups “ISIS” and the “Brotherhood.”