Jared Kushner could be correct that Saudi Arabia still wants relations with Israel
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Fresh off an appearance at the Saudi Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Jared Kushner told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that despite Palestinian attempts to blow up the expansion of the Abraham Accords, the Gulf kingdom is still interested in normalizing diplomatic relations with Israel.
“The people of Saudi Arabia have a lot of care for the Palestinian civilians, and so they would like to see Israel accomplish the mission, to make sure Hamas could be eliminated,” the son-in-law of former President Donald Trump said at first. “They’re against terrorism in the region in general. And quite frankly, there’s a lot of enthusiasm to continue the trajectory that was set under the Trump administration — and that the Biden administration has embraced — to try and bring Israel and Saudi Arabia together.”
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Then Bartiromo doubled down, specifically eliciting Kushner’s confirmation that, yes, Saudi Arabia still wants to move forward with the Abraham Accords.
“I believe they would like to move forward with the deal with America and with Israel,” said Kushner, who was the architect of the accords as a senior adviser to the Trump administration. “The deal that is being discussed isn’t just a partnership with Israel. It’s also deepening their ties with America, which is very important. We have to keep in mind that if America is not close to Saudi Arabia, they’ll go in the other direction to China.”
Kushner’s haters will argue that the first son-in-law is simply trying to preserve his political legacy, or perhaps with more mercenary incentives, shilling for the Saudis, who have invested $2 billion in his investment firm Affinity Partners. But Affinity exists to use wealth to deepen economic ties between its investors and Israeli businesses, not the other way around or just to enrich Kushner, who is already a billionaire in his own right. And more importantly, all the available evidence indicates that Kushner is broadly correct.
Outwardly, Riyadh has sounded old-school in the blame it has publicly placed on Israel. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, has pushed for a ceasefire, which, as Gaza continues to deploy rockets, is tantamount to a national suicide if Israel were dumb enough to concede. And the government, which first said that Israel was responsible for the initial attacks by Hamas, has denounced its retaliatory airstrikes into Gaza.
But behind the scenes, the enlightened despot and de facto ruler of the kingdom seems to be still swaying the nation away from Gaza and toward Israel. Exhibit A: when an anchor on a Saudi state news outlet grilled former Hamas head Khaled Meshaal.
Further, public displays of support for Hamas by prominent Saudis, such as a Twitter post by the soccer team al Hilal, have mysteriously vanished shortly after going online, indicating that the notoriously censorious crown prince is indeed manipulating the narrative behind the scenes.
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Mohammed bin Salman himself has signaled to the ten U.S. senators who visited Riyadh last week that he still wants to advance his country’s involvement with the Abraham Accords, echoing Kushner’s conviction.
And why wouldn’t he? As Kushner correctly alluded to, MBS is angling for a defense deal with the U.S. in exchange for normalizing ties with Israel, and MBS, who has made the Saudi economic transformation the cornerstone of his reign, sees the economic potential of a relationship with Israel that Affinity is angling to capitalize on. While Saudi must pretend to care about the Palestinian project in the abstract, Israel ending Hamas once and for all is as much a boon to despotate as it is to democracy.