Jared Kushner 'Out of the Spotlight'—But Not Out of Mideast Politics, or Out of the Money

Belén Fernández

President Donald Trump dispatched his son-in law Jared Kushner and the United States’ Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to Egypt last weekend to sort out the remaining details of the president’s so-called “peace plan” for the Gaza Strip, much of which territory has been obliterated over the past two years of Israel's US-backed genocide. The official Palestinian fatality count has surpassed 67,000, although some scholars suggest the real death toll may be more in the vicinity of 680,000.

Kushner’s inclusion in the Egyptian expedition may have come as a surprise to those who haven’t been following the news—and perhaps to many of those who have, given the dearth of reporting on the continuing Middle Eastern machinations of nepotism’s favorite poster boy.

'Focus on my firm'

Stories like NBC's (2/13/24) that stressed Jared Kushner distancing himself from his father-in-law's White House helped Kushner avoid scrutiny of his many conflicts of interest.

A senior adviser in the first Trump White House, Kushner was a driving force behind the Abraham Accords, the normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. He was also the brains behind the 2019 “Peace to Prosperity” plan that was meant to resolve the pesky seven-decades-long Israeli/Palestinian conflict—an undertaking for which Kushner famously felt qualified on account of having read 25 whole books on the subject.

The current “peace” that the US is now endeavoring to inflict on Gaza sounds suspiciously similar to Kushner's 2019 plan, which was basically structured around the idea that all the Palestinians really need in order to prosper is “foreign direct investment,” “private-sector growth,” “free trade agreements” and other exciting neoliberal solutions that magically excise Israel’s key role in annihilating any prospect for peace. The new plan promises “many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas [that] have been crafted by well-meaning international groups” and a “special economic zone… with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.”

In his first administration, Trump had additionally tasked his son-in-law with dealing with an assortment of other crises, including the coronavirus pandemic, prompting even the New York Times to go so far as to run an op-ed (4/2/20) originally headlined “Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed”—although it was subsequently revised to “Putting Jared Kushner in Charge Is Utter Madness.”

Fast forward to February 2024 and the NBC News headline “Jared Kushner Says He Would Not Join a Second Trump Administration” (2/13/24), which quoted him: “I’ve been very clear that my desire at this phase of my life is to focus on my firm…. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity as a family to be out of the spotlight.”

'Significant backing in the Gulf'

Noting that the Saudis poured billions into Kushner's firm against their financial advisors' advice, the New York Times (4/10/22) reported that "ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House."

Now that the second Trump administration is in full swing, the Western corporate media appear largely content to allow him to remain “out of the spotlight,” even as he remains up to no good—and as his investment firm Affinity Partners remains a beneficiary of US diplomatic initiatives shepherded by Kushner himself. For example, Affinity has used backing from Gulf investors to acquire a roughly 10% stake in Israel’s largest insurer, Phoenix.

Of the sporadic reporting on Kushner’s activities that has taken place since Trump resumed office, much of it has focused on just how out of the spotlight he is. In May, for example, a CNN article (5/9/25) announced that Kushner was “quietly advising” the administration ahead of the president's big Middle East trip that month, “informally advising administration officials on negotiations with Arab leaders.”

Underlining that Kushner “does not have, nor want, a formal role in Trump’s second term,” CNN cited sources affirming that he “has continued to be a crucial player behind the scenes on Middle East talks.” Crucially, he had been “heavily involved in discussions with Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, about signing agreements that would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel”—an expansion of the Abraham Accords that would both effectively legitimize genocide and bulldoze remaining obstacles to investment.

Of course, like other corporate media outlets, CNN is not in the business of connecting the dots, and the article offered only the rather noncommittal observation that “Trump critics and some former diplomats have noted that Kushner has business interests in the region, which complicates his involvement.” There followed a brief mention of the fact that Affinity Partners has “received significant backing from sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf,” and that Kushner enjoys a “close personal relationship” with homicidal Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Indeed, part of that “significant backing” was a $2 billion investment in Affinity Partners from a fund led by bin Salman, which, as the New York Times (4/10/22) reported, was secured by Kushner, despite his lack of “experience or track record in private equity,” shortly after leaving the White House. Kushner did, however, have experience in brokering $110 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, and in helping “protect those and other weapons deals from congressional outrage over the murder of [Saudi journalist Jamal] Khashoggi and the humanitarian catastrophe created by the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen,” as the Times put it.

As Forbes magazine reported (9/15/25), Kushner is now a billionaire, thanks in part to his “knack for raising funds from high-profile Middle Eastern backers.” Translated into non-euphemism, Kushner has literally been utilizing US foreign policy as a vehicle for his own personal enrichment. In addition to his dealings with Saudi Arabia, Kushner also raised $1.5 billion for Affinity just last year from backers affiliated with the royal families of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

At an October 1 White House press briefing on the Gaza peace plan, one journalist posed the rare question to Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt: “How did the White House decide that it is appropriate for Jared Kushner to be working on matters that involve Qatar and the UAE, Saudi Arabia, three countries that combined have given him more than $2.5 billion for his investment firm?" Leavitt snapped that “I think it's frankly despicable that you're trying to suggest that it's inappropriate” for someone to be so nobly “donating his energy and his time to our government, to the president of the United States, to secure world peace.” And that was that.

Meanwhile, in August 2025, CNN (8/27/25) was back with an update on the man who has still “quietly advised administration officials on Middle East issues,” and who reportedly attended a meeting at the White House, along with war criminal and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “about a plan for post-war Gaza.” This time, CNN decided not to mention Kushner's financial conflicts of interest, and ended its intervention with a nonjudgmental nod to Kushner’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ringleader of the present genocide, “with whom he has close family ties dating back decades.” (As Time (6/1/17) magazine revealed in 2017, Netanyahu even “once spent the night” at the Kushner family home in New Jersey.)

'Move the people out'

Kushner (Reuters, 2/5/25) once described the Arab/Israeli conflict as ""nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians." 

In short, there are so many conflicts of interest swirling around the figure of Kushner that it should be nearly impossible for journalists to avoid covering them—and yet they manage to do so remarkably well. The New York Times writeup (8/27/25) of the same August meeting at the White House remarked that, while Kushner has “never been fully gone from Mr. Trump’s orbit,” he had taken a “behind-the-scenes role in recent years.” Its brief mention of Kushner's entanglements seemed to present them as a qualification rather than a problem:

During the first Trump administration, he led the way on Mr. Trump’s biggest diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and three Arab states, and has his own business and other ties to the region.

In its own writeup, Reuters  (8/27/25) alluded to Trump’s previous “re-development idea to turn Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East,’” a plan that “echoed an idea that Kushner floated a year earlier to clear Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants and turn it into a waterfront property.” It’s not just any highly influential person who can casually advocate for unrestrained ethnic cleansing and hardly be taken to task for it. But such is the beauty of being “out of the spotlight.”

An earlier Reuters dispatch (2/5/25) headlined “Trump’s Gaza ‘Riviera’ Echoes Kushner Waterfront Property Dreams” went as far as to quote Kushner’s dreams of ethnic cleansing in genocide-stricken Gaza: “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel's perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” Instead of underscoring the inherently diabolical content of said pronouncement, the news agency offered the following semi-justification: “Kushner was himself a property developer in New York prior to Trump's first term.”

'What regulator is going to say no?'

As Kushner now strives to be the unaccountable architect of the Palestinians’ definitive demise, one would have expected a bit more noise from the media as he simultaneously met with Netanyahu in Washington and presided over the biggest-ever leveraged buyout in history—in partnership with Saudi Arabia—of the videogame giant Electronic Arts.

The Financial Times (9/30/25), never one to speak truth to plutocracy, immortalized the momentous events with the headline “Jared Kushner’s Art of the Deal.” The article detailed how, while Crown Prince bin Salman “is a keen gamer, and he’s put aside $38 billion for investments in videogame companies as part of the kingdom’s Savvy Games unit,” it was really “Kushner who opened the doors to this week’s takeover.”

The FT went on to warn that “it’s the kind of deal—with a large foreign buyer—that could attract scrutiny from regulators in Washington.” But at the end of the day, all’s well in the land of democracy, because as one “person close to the inner workings of the White House put it: ‘What regulator is going to say no to the president’s son-in-law?’”