Andrew Harnik/AP
Amid the catastrophic bombing and imminent famine that overwhelms Gaza, Jared Kushner apparently sees something entirely different: desirable properties.
Kushner—ever the aspirational foreign policy expert with a penchant for a good conflict of interest—told Harvard University earlier this month that Gaza’s beachfront locations “could be very valuable.” His remarks come as Israel and Egypt look for long-term solutions to the war, which has killed at least 30,000 Palestinians in five months.
“Gaza’s waterfront property,” Kushner said in footage first reported by the Guardian. “It could be very valuable to—if people would focus on kind of building up, you know, livelihoods. You think about all the money that’s gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions—if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done.”
Kushner also suggested displacing Palestinian civilians from Gaza, moving them, at least temporarily, to Egypt or to the Negev Desert in southern Israel, supposedly to enable Israel to “finish the job” in its war against Hamas.
“The thing that I would try to do if I was Israel right now is I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there,” Kushner said. “I know that won’t be the popular thing to do, but I think that that’s a better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.”
The interviewer seemed taken aback by Kushner’s Negev proposal. When he asked the former president’s son-in-law if this was something that was seriously under consideration within Israel, Kushner shrugged. “I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now,” Kushner replied. “I’m looking at this situation and I’m just thinking: What would I do if I was there?”
The interview comes on the heels of recent reports that Kushner, who had been relatively quiet since Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, is pursuing billion-dollar real estate deals in the same Balkan areas that Trump has previously expressed interest in developing. (Kushner told the New York Times that he “had no idea” about Trump’s past interest in the region.) Taken together, Kushner’s comments offer something of a blinking red warning about what we can expect in a second Trump term—and Kushner sure seems to be salivating over it.
