Jared Kushner’s involvement in Trump’s Board of Peace is not his first foray into Middle East diplomacy. During Trump’s first term, Kushner was a central architect of the Abraham Accords — normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states that reshaped regional diplomacy and are widely considered one of the Trump administration’s most significant foreign policy achievements.
The Abraham Accords established that Arab normalization with Israel was possible without resolving the Palestinian question — a premise that many had assumed was impossible. They changed the regional strategic landscape and created new economic and security partnerships. They also left the Palestinian question unresolved, in ways that some analysts see as a contributing factor to the conditions that made October 7 possible.
Now Kushner is attempting to apply his dealmaking approach to a far more difficult problem: a post-war Gaza that requires not just diplomatic agreement but physical reconstruction, governance transition, security deployment, and Hamas disarmament. His Davos slides showed a rebuilt Gaza with coastal tourism, data centers, and industrial zones — achievable, he suggested, in three years.
The UN, EU, and World Bank estimate reconstruction at $70 billion and a far longer timeline. Hamas has not disarmed. The governance committee is in Egypt. The stabilization force has not deployed. These are obstacles that the Abraham Accords — which involved willing partners seeking normalization — did not need to overcome.
Kushner’s approach works best when all parties see more to gain from agreement than from resistance. In Gaza, Hamas has not yet been brought to that calculus — and until it is, the dealmaking tools that worked in the Abraham Accords may not be sufficient.