It has been a tough week for the professional Donald Trump haters. Only the most unhinged among them could not share in the joy of the families of the surviving Israeli hostages as they were reunited on Monday. But there must always be liberal ghosts at any feast where Trump is the host.
“Everyone should be glad that the hostages have been freed” and hope “that this peace process succeeds,” acknowledged Michael Tomasky, editor of *The New Republic*. But? Well, “he’s still the Donald Trump who is destroying democracy and ruining lives here in America.”
“We may grimace in doing so,” wrote Kenneth Roth in *The Guardian*, “but Donald Trump deserves credit for finally ending the U.S. government’s funding and arming of the genocide, and arm-twisting Benjamin Netanyahu into accepting his 20-point plan for Gaza.”
This was more than Guardian columnist Owen Jones was prepared to concede. His commentary yesterday carefully avoided giving Trump any credit for the ceasefire and the return of the hostages, ranting instead that “Israel’s Western-facilitated genocide will boomerang back to the West from the killing fields of Gaza.”
At least Tomasky was prepared to entertain “the possibility that the Trump-Netanyahu worldview got it right this time.” The *New Statesman* went further. Freddie Hayward’s account of the Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal explicitly acknowledged the triumph of “the dealmakers.” But it bemoaned the new world order that this triumph signifies:
> “A world in which Trump rules like an emperor. A world where leaders court the president’s favor to receive his patronage and avoid his wrath. Institutions such as the United Nations are ignored. Diplomacy is personal. Job titles matter less than getting things done. Raw power dominates international law. And protecting capital takes precedence over protecting human rights.”
The key roles played by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—respectively, Trump’s friend and son-in-law—were especially painful for Hayward to acknowledge. But he could not deny it:
> “Trump succeeded in ending the war in Gaza, where Biden and his expert class failed.”
It is excruciating for anyone on the left to admit any of this. For all these authors are in the grip of a pathetic nostalgia for a vanished age in which the United Nations mattered; job titles mattered; international law mattered; and human rights transcended mere economics.
They appear not to have processed that “Biden and his expert class failed” precisely because all those things ceased to work many years ago.
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One analogy doing the rounds is that Jared Kushner is the new Henry Kissinger. (See here for one example, and here for another, though it was David Ignatius who started this hare running eight years ago.) If that analogy held, then it might be some consolation to those yearning for the good old days of the liberal international order—except most of them long ago consigned Kissinger to their secular equivalent of hell.
But the real point is that Kushner is radically different from Kissinger.
What we have seen this year bears almost no relation to the Kissingerian approach to the Middle East. In his 2021 book *Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy*, the late Martin Indyk argued that Kissinger was able to shift Israel and Egypt from full-scale war in October 1973 to the beginning of a lasting peace by taking a “step by step” approach, exemplified by his indefatigable shuttling between Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and other regional capitals.
(From the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War until Richard Nixon’s resignation ten months later, Kissinger made six trips to the Middle East, visited 28 countries, and traveled 196,000 miles.)
> “The gradual, step-by-step peace process that [Kissinger] developed,” Indyk argued, “became his primary mechanism for creating a new regional order in the Middle East,” in which the United States emerged as the dominant player.
Kissinger was always “mightily resistant to more ambitious efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict because he feared that pursuing peace as an idealistic end state would jeopardize the stability that his order was designed to generate.”
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These have generally not been the methods of Witkoff and Kushner.
Kushner has always approached the problem of the Middle East as if it were a giant business deal—or, rather, a complex of multiple deals.
Back in June, I made fun of the Trump version of realpolitik.
> “There’s realpolitik,” I wrote. “And then there’s reality TV politik. There’s foreign policy realism, of the kind associated with Henry Kissinger. And then there’s Donald Trump’s twist: real estate-ism.”
I questioned how far “reality TV plus real estate adds up to a strategy.”
> “Making peace,” I argued, “is historically harder than buying skyscrapers.”
I stand by my critique of Witkoff’s efforts to broker a peace in Ukraine between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. But on the Middle East—well, that crunching sound you can hear is the sound of me eating my words.
For, at least where Gaza is concerned, real estate-ism has delivered.
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To understand why this deal was possible under Trump but not under Biden, you need to look a bit closer at how the sausage was made.
Biden had three major disadvantages when the October 7 massacre happened.
The first was that his national security team, drawn almost entirely from the supposed expert class, had completely failed to see the crisis coming. Just five days before the attack, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan published an article in *Foreign Affairs* with the immortal sentence:
> “Indeed, although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades.”
The second disadvantage was that in 2022, Biden seriously alienated the Gulf Arab states, in particular the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, by publicly condemning the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The third, and perhaps most serious, was Biden’s poor relationship with Netanyahu, and his chronic inability to get the Israeli prime minister to do what he wanted.
By contrast, Trump returned to office with substantially more influence in both the Gulf and Israel—influence based above all on his first-term successes in the Middle East.
Although Jared Kushner did not return to an official advisory role like the one he had played in the first Trump term, he was involved in the new administration’s Middle East strategy from the outset.
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Back in June 2019, I wrote an article praising Kushner’s plan for peace in the Middle East.
Instead of putting “the big constitutional and territorial questions first,” I wrote, “Kushner’s goal is to begin with the small matter of money, which in reality is not so small. Large-scale investment in the West Bank and Gaza, funded in part by the oil-rich Gulf states, stands a chance of weaning at least some Palestinians away from Hamas.
The lesson of the Arab revolutions was that there is a constituency of small businessmen who are as sick of the rackets run by terrorists as they are of the extortions of venal governments.”
This turned out to be the foundational insight of the process that ultimately delivered the Abraham Accords, whereby four Arab countries formally recognized Israel—beginning with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and followed by Sudan and Morocco. The next stage was intended to include Saudi Arabia.
It can be argued that one motive for the October 7 attacks was to provoke Israel into a response that would derail Saudi Arabia’s admission. If that was indeed the goal, it was successful.
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If it’s results you care about, you may be willing to tolerate the constant blurring of public and private interest that is the hallmark of the Trump era.
**Deal guys: They get the job done.**
The liberal media has never ceased to complain that, since Trump’s tumultuous departure from Washington in January 2021, Kushner has exploited his contacts as a former government official to become a billionaire.
His investment firm, Affinity Partners, raised more than $3 billion by the end of 2021, much of it from the Saudi government’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF).
In December last year, Affinity raised an additional $1.5 billion from the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi-based asset manager Lunate.
And, just last month, Affinity and PIF joined forces with private-equity firm Silver Lake to take the video game company Electronic Arts private in a deal valued at $52.5 billion, making it the biggest leveraged buyout in history.
But an alternative interpretation is that Kushner has used his business to deepen his relationships in the region.
Affinity has made a number of investments in Israeli tech companies, acting as a channel for Saudi money to flow into Israeli equity.
And it’s clear that Kushner’s influence with the Qataris has been a crucial variable over the past nine months.
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So, whereas Kissinger favored small steps because he dreaded failure, Kushner and Witkoff are accustomed to taking big risks on low-probability deals with potentially high payoffs—and if they fail, that’s just business.
Instead of sitting Israelis and Arabs in a room and expecting them to negotiate an outcome, their fundamental approach has been to exert leverage through other players in the region.
Their opportunity came on September 9, when Netanyahu authorized strikes on the Qatari capital, Doha, where the leadership of Hamas were discussing a U.S. ceasefire proposal. Kushner and Witkoff had been negotiating the previous day with Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s minister of strategic affairs. They were enraged that Dermer had not forewarned them of the Doha strike.
At this point, a third key player stepped up: the former British prime minister, Tony Blair.
Though it’s been 18 years since Blair left office, he has never ceased to involve himself—both politically and financially—in the Middle East.
Between 2007 and 2015, he was Middle East envoy for the so-called Quartet (the United Nations, European Union, United States, and Russia).
His for-profit advisory firm Tony Blair Associates and his advisory role for JP Morgan have also kept him busy in the region.
And his nonprofit Tony Blair Institute for Global Change was active all summer trying to find a path to peace in Gaza.
The other British player was Jonathan Powell, the current national security adviser to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who served for 10 years as Blair’s chief of staff.
Blair encouraged Kushner to seize the moment to produce a new peace plan, combining elements of the U.S. ceasefire plan and a peace plan Blair and Powell had been working on.
Kushner and Witkoff then met with the Qataris in New York, using the September 9 air strike to pressure them to sign on to their 20-point plan, which effectively became a joint U.S.-Qatari plan, with UK co-authorship.
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It was this plan that Trump then pitched at a September 23 meeting—which he and the Emir of Qatar co-hosted—with the leaders of eight Arab states, along with members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
Netanyahu did not like the plan. He did not like withdrawing from Gaza. He did not like releasing 250 Palestinians serving life sentences. He did not like amnesty for Hamas members.
He especially did not like point 19:
> “While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
But this was where Trump’s relationship with Netanyahu and his record in the region allowed him to succeed where Biden could not.
> “You’re doing it,” Trump told the Israeli prime minister.
After an 11-hour meeting, Kushner and Witkoff told Netanyahu:
> “You don’t have a choice. You’re coming to the White House on Monday.”
It was there, on September 29, that Netanyahu made the call to his Qatari counterpart, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, murmuring an apology through gritted teeth for the air strike on Doha.
The American view was that they had done Netanyahu a favor. He had entirely boxed himself in.
Israel’s international isolation was getting dangerously close to that of apartheid South Africa.
And yet Netanyahu’s planned next step in Gaza was a full-scale Israeli occupation, surely a doomed venture.
Netanyahu did have a choice, but it was a lousy one.
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The next crucial step was to get Hamas to agree to the 20-point plan.
There were elements of the plan that they, too, hated—notably the proposed disarming of Hamas and its exclusion from the future governance of Gaza.
But Kushner and Witkoff were undeterred.
Although Hamas’s official response was essentially to accept only parts of it, the Americans acted as if they had accepted all of it—a Trumpian move that (according to a source close to the negotiations) took Hamas by surprise, but didn’t cause them to withdraw.
The final phase of the process took place in Egypt on October 8.
The Americans still had work to do.
They had to hammer out exactly how far the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would withdraw from Gaza—a hard-fought compromise that left the Israelis in temporary control of about half of the Strip.
The Americans also had to squash an Arab proposal to add a 21st point on the West Bank.
And they had to work out, during an all-night session with Dermer, precisely which Palestinian prisoners were to be released in exchange for the hostages.
Whereas Kissinger favored small steps because he dreaded failure, Kushner and Witkoff are accustomed to taking big risks on low-probability deals with potentially high payoffs—and if they fail, that’s just business.
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A key moment came when Kushner and Witkoff held a brief meeting with Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, to reassure him that Israel would adhere to its commitments—that the return of the hostages wouldn’t simply be followed by an all-out IDF assault in Gaza.
But in those last, fraught hours, the decisive factor was surely the pressure on al-Hayya from not only the Qataris, but also the Egyptians and Turks—hence Trump’s unexpectedly kind words about the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, during the Gaza Peace Summit in Egypt on Tuesday.
The 20-point plan essentially has two phases.
This first phase got the hostages released—and that was its main objective.
In the areas of Gaza still under IDF control, reconstruction and relief will almost certainly proceed more rapidly than in the areas where Hamas has already begun reimposing its reign of terror.
As things stand, there is no clear mechanism for disarming Hamas.
But the IDF has already done a considerable amount of degradation.
And Netanyahu retains the option to resume hostilities if Hamas reneges on its side of the deal.
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The second phase is harder to visualize.
Point 9 seems especially far-fetched, with its “temporary transitional governance” of Gaza by a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” under the supervision of a new “Board of Peace,” supposedly chaired by Trump and with Blair as a member.
Equally hard to imagine is a successful revitalization of the Palestinian Authority.
But it is doubtful that Kushner and Witkoff worry too much about those castles in the air.
Their main goal was just to “get it done”—the hostages out, the war stopped.
And they succeeded.
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In a recent interview, Kushner observed that the people who had previously tried to negotiate peace in the Middle East were “history professors or diplomats.”
His approach was fundamentally different, he said.
> “It’s just different being deal guys—just a different sport.”
He is right about that.
The question is what you make of it.
If you would rather leave peacemaking to the historians and diplomats, then you may wait a long time for wars to end.
If it’s results you care about, you may be willing to tolerate the constant blurring of public and private interest that is the hallmark of the Trump era.
**Deal guys: They get the job done.**
I am enough of a historian to worry a little about where that blurring may lead.
And I share my wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s skepticism of any deal that does not spell out how exactly Hamas gives up its arms and its power, not to mention why Qatar should give up its protection of Hamas—or, for that matter, its influence operations on American campuses.
But one must give credit where it’s due.
Real estate-ism turns out to be the ultimate realism.
Not only are the hostages home, Jared Kushner’s grand design for peace in the Middle East has taken a Trumpian leap—not a Kissingerian step—closer to being realized.