Why Jared Kushner's Vision for Post-war Gaza Is So Dangerous - Israel News
As the cease-fire in Gaza enters its second tenuous week, Israeli politics have begun the ritual of chaos and dysfunction that usually marks a government's final months. In a preliminary vote on Wednesday, the Knesset advanced a law that would annex the occupied West Bank to Israel by a vote of 25-24.
Here is the laughable part of an otherwise grim legislative exercise: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party, which would ordinarily support such a law, opposed it, while parts of the opposition, chiefly Avigdor Lieberman and his allies, supported it with the aim of humiliating Netanyahu during U.S. Vice President JD Vance's visit to the country.
Netanyahu, who has vowed never to allow a Palestinian state, denounced the bill on Thursday as "deliberate provocation by the opposition to sow discord."
The Trump administration has repeatedly stated that it will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank – a position that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reiterated before embarking on his own visit to Israel to keep watch over the cease-fire. Vance called the Knesset vote, rightly, "a stupid political stunt."
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On Thursday, Trump used even stronger words in an interview with Time Magazine. "It [annexation] won't happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries," he said. "Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened."
Of course, as a statement issued by Likud in response to the Knesset vote frankly noted, Israel has advanced the de facto annexation of the West Bank on the ground for many years without any U.S. pressure to stop it. This is a process that has accelerated in pace and increased in brutality since the current government took power – and the facts on the ground remain unaltered by both the Trump administration's verbal opposition and the fate of symbolic legislation.
Jared Kushner's remarks on Tuesday, however, during the ceremony inaugurating the new Civil-Military Cooperation Center in Kiryat Gat, were more immediately worrisome.
Standing at the command center the U.S. built to help implement the provisions of the cease-fire agreement, Kushner responded to a question about whether reconstruction efforts might begin in the parts of Gaza under Israel's control. He answered that the matter was being explored.
"There are considerations," he said, "happening now in the area that the IDF controls, as long as that could be secured, to start the construction [of] a new Gaza in order to give the Palestinians living in Gaza a place to go, a place to get jobs, a place to live."
Kushner's words echoed all the notes of the failed "occupation management" paradigm that has defined the approach of successive Israeli governments. His emphasis on employment for Palestinians in Gaza had the stale ring of the debunked idea of "economic peace," the patronizing assumption that Palestinians will be satisfied with jobs despite being deprived of their basic rights.
If Kushner has learned to speak a more dovish language – professing his concern for Palestinian suffering during an interview on "60 Minutes" – his conception of politics, of human flourishing remains an impoverished one, in which weaker peoples must live under the boot of the stronger, and the poor must be grateful for the crumbs provided by the mighty.
Moreover, in Kushner's vision for the future, it seems, the Gaza Strip would remain divided, not just territorially but also administratively, into two areas: one behind the "yellow line," under full Israeli control; the other, effectively under Hamas control, which comprises to less than half the territory of the Strip. That would amount to something like the West-Bank-ification of Gaza – a scenario that has become dangerously more likely since the cease-fire went into effect.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the cease-fire talks' Arab mediators have become increasingly worried that the division of Gaza floated by Kushner would not be merely a stop-gap measure between phases of the agreement but could become a permanent partition of the devastated coastal enclave.
It is easy to see how this might happen. The temporary, interim stage of the agreement becomes permanent reality, while a final status-agreement is indefinitely deferred, ostensibly because consensus about the subsequent stage of negotiations cannot be reached. Israel remains the occupying force in most of Gaza, while aid groups and the vaunted international consortium manage civilian infrastructure and reconstruction efforts under the watch of Israeli guns.
Since the first weeks of the war, some members of Israel's security establishment have called for Gaza to be transformed into Area B of the West Bank, the parts of the occupied territory under Palestinian Authority civilian control but ultimate Israeli military management. In the Kushner plan, the area on the Israeli side of the yellow line would function as Area B, while the areas left under Hamas control would function as a more volatile Area A, under full Palestinian civil and military authority. Were this to occur, it would be a tremendous regression, a disaster for the Palestinians as well as for Israel.
Still, at least for now the re-internationalization of the conflict and the postwar reconstruction efforts – achieved through the Trump administration's brand of coercive multilateralism – stands in the way of this undesirable scenario. The progression of the cease-fire agreement into the next phases does not depend entirely on the United States, and that is a good thing.
It is hard to imagine the Gulf states and the European parties to the Trump-led plan acquiescing to Israel's indefinite reoccupation of more than half of the Gaza Strip. The involvement of these countries in the newly inaugurated CMCC suggests that they are serious about achieving something beyond a return to the status quo ante, whether that be to before October 7, or to before Israel's 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the territory.
The parade of U.S. officials to Israel over the last few days is, to be sure, a reflection of the U.S. government's deep (and entirely justified) mistrust of Netanyahu. It is also a signal to America's other allies that the Trump administration is committed not only to the cease-fire's endurance, but to the larger regional reordering at which it grandiosely, if vaguely, gestures.
Yet the new Middle East order will not be possible without genuine self-determination for the Palestinians and a state of their own. As Israelis themselves ought to understand well, there is no replacement for real sovereignty, for the ability to determine one's fate among one's people. Bromides about jobs, quality of life and economic opportunities are no substitute. If Kushner, Steve Witkoff and the rest of Trump's coterie fail to understand that – and it so far unclear that they do understand – the results of their efforts will fall rather short of their grand aspirations.
Netanyahu, for his part, is now a bind. His government, lacking a majority, has ceased to function. The Haredi parties' refusal to rejoin the coalition has made it impossible to advance any legislation. Sinking in the polls, his extremist ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir are too afraid to bring the government down themselves, but will find it difficult to remain if the cease-fire arrangement does indeed advance to its subsequent phases.
Within Netanyahu's Likud itself, there are more visible signs of discontent. (Yuli Edelstein, the veteran Likud MK and Netanyahu rival, cast the deciding vote backing Wednesday's annexation bill.) These are problems that only new elections can solve. Yet the end of the war and return of the hostages has not boosted Netanyahu as much as he would have liked.
The current Netanyahu government lacks the mandate to make the kinds of decisions that the next phase of the cease-fire agreement will require. The Trump administration surely knows this.
Netanyahu is an expert procrastinator, adept at dragging things out and buying time. He is less Mr. Security than Mr. Status Quo. As long as he remains in power, the situation in Gaza is likely to slide towards the nightmare of reoccupation under the guise of an interim arrangement. But that also means that realization of any different kind of vision will need to wait until Netanyahu is gone.