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WASHINGTON (TND) — Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and former senior advisor to former President Donald Trump, is facing a wave of scrutiny over remarks he made about the Gaza Strip.
Kushner, who was placed in charge of the Trump administration’s Middle East peace planning efforts by his father-in-law, spoke at an event in February hosted by Harvard University’s Middle East Initiative, the Ivy League school’s policy forum and academic center focused on the Middle East and North Africa.
Kushner was interviewed by Middle East Initiative Faculty Chair Professor Tarek Masoud as part of the forum’s “Middle East Dialogues” series due to his role in crafting that administration’s foreign policy in the region, his part in creating the Abraham Accords, and in some small part due to his status as a Harvard alumnus.
From nearly the outset of his commentary, Kushner was wading into controversy, prominently advocating that Israel should evacuate the remaining Palestinian civilians in Rafah and forcibly resettling them in an area of the Negev Desert that spans most of the country’s south.
“What I would do if I was Israel is, number one: get as many civilians out of Rafah as possible. I think that you want to try and clear that out,” Kushner explained. “Maybe with diplomacy, you get them into Egypt. I know that that’s been refused but with the right diplomacy I believe it would be possible.”
“In addition to that, the thing I would try to do if I was Israel right now is try and bulldoze something in the Negev; I would try to move people in there. 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.”
While this comment was made with skepticism, noting that the Negev is a desert wasteland, the true outrage was reserved for Kushner’s later comment praising the economic viability and potential of the Gaza Strip’s coastal areas.
“Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner said later in the talk. He also stated earlier in the conversation that “from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” While he admitted Israel has not explicit stated it will not allow Palestinians to return to Gaza if there is a mass exodus, he qualified that saying “I’m not sure there’s much left of Gaza at this point.”
This comment was met with stark criticism from figures online, like Dylan Williams, vice president of government affairs at the Center for International Policy, a left-leaning think tank, who claimed Kushner was openly promoting the ethnic cleansing of Gazan Palestinians.
“Just days after the @ADL’s @JGreenblattADL gave him an award for “his record of policy work,” Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner openly advocates for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza,” Williams wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Here he was referring to the Anti-Defamation League recently lauding Kushner for his “vital and deeply impactful work on the Abraham Accords.”
Other uses offered similar if not harsher criticism with X users like Jeffrey Evan Gold, a legal analyst for the likes of both CNN and Fox News, writing, “So, he wants Gaza flattened, all the Palestinians deported, Israel to annex the land, and build condos on the waterfront…
Kushner insisted his comments were taken out of context, highlight in a post on X that he “expressed my dismay that the Palestinian people have watched their leaders squander decades of Western aid on tunnels and weapons rather than on improving their lives.”
However, his comments have stoked the fears of Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists, who believe that Israel’s “over the top” — to quote President Joe Biden — military operations in the Gaza Strip that have displaced over 85% of the population amount to an attempted land-grab by Israel.
Others are concerned Kushner’s comments represent a potential indifference by U.S. lawmakers towards possible ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, with episodes featuring Tennessee Republican Reps. Andy Ogles and Chuck Fleischmann. The latter told a Palestinian activist “goodbye to Palestine” during an interaction earlier this month and Ogles said he thinks “we should kill them all” in a similar confrontation.
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