By Rich Lowry
Friday, September 18, 2020
Over the past several years, a new certainty was added to
death and taxes: Jared Kushner would fail in his role as the administration’s
Middle East point man.
It caused considerable merriment among President Donald
Trump’s critics (and even some of his well-wishers) when he put his son-in-law
in charge of brokering peace in the Middle East at the outset of his
administration.
It was assumed to be ridiculous that Trump had tapped the
39-year-old Kushner, not a diplomat nor an expert in the region, for this role
and assumed that everything he did afterward was ridiculous, if not nefarious.
Rarely has so much mockery been directed at an approach
that, in the event, was methodical and creative, and ultimately achieved a
breakthrough.
Kushner did not make peace between the Israelis and
Palestinians, but no one else has, either. What he did was find a path for
historic deals to normalize relations between Israel and the United Arab
Emirates and Bahrain, with perhaps other Arab countries to follow. The deals
could transform the strategic environment of the region, isolating and reducing
the influence of Iran and of a feckless and corrupt Palestinian political
leadership.
If you’ve followed the commentary on Kushner’s efforts
the past few years, you’d be truly shocked at this outcome.
It wasn’t just that his detractors were skeptical. They
took it as a given that Kushner is an idiot and the entire thing was going to
be an embarrassing debacle.
One of the administration’s projects was crafting a $50
billion economic plan for the Palestinians, then holding a conference in
Bahrain promoting it. A piece in the progressive publication Mother
Jones was titled “Highlights From Jared Kushner’s Bizarre and
Fantastical Middle East Peace Conference.”
When the administration prepared to follow this up with a
peace plan, an expert warned in Foreign Policy: “Trump Must Not Let
Jared Kushner’s Peace Plan See the Light of Day.” When the plan was released,
another expert wrote an analysis for The
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “I’m a Veteran Middle East
Negotiator. Trump’s Plan is the Most Dangerous I’ve Ever Seen.” A column in the
Washington
Post declared, “The Trump administration’s new Mideast ‘peace’ plan is
absurd.”
Vox opined, “Jared Kushner, architect of Trump’s
Middle East peace plan, still doesn’t get it.”
Vanity
Fair ridiculed a Kushner criticism of the Palestinian leadership as
“Jared Kushner: Palestinians Have Never Done Anything Right in Their Sad,
Pathetic Lives.” It noted there was video: “Don’t worry, there’s footage of
Kushner making this statement, so it can be played back for all eternity.”
It seems pretty unlikely that anyone is going to go back
to it now.
The critics took great umbrage at Kushner’s admonishing
the Palestinian leadership, not realizing that they were beholden to an
out-of-date conventional wisdom. The tectonic plates were shifting such that
the only path to peace no longer ran through the Palestinians, if it ever did.
The frustration that Kushner was expressing was shared by Arab leaders.
Of course, since Kushner had been intensely engaged in
the region, he understood this when most of the journalists and advocates
portraying him as a hopeless ignoramus had no idea. He knew what he was talking
about when they, by and large, didn’t.
Trump’s fans call Trump a disrupter, too often simply to
excuse anything he does. But in the case of the Middle East, he overturned the
policy he inherited, did things no other president would (especially the move
of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem), and then was in a position to capitalize
when something shook loose.
This is an undeniable achievement and one that was
intelligently conceived. With honorable exceptions, very few Trump critics have
been willing to give credit where it’s due.
For them, as ever, it’s on to the next thing, but the
record will show who got this one right and who marinated in their own
self-righteous disdain.
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