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In this mailing:
* Khaled Abu Toameh: Trump is Right: Laws Across the Middle East to Prevent Normalization with Israel are 'Crazy' - and Poisonous
* Ahmed Charai: Judge Jared Kushner by What He Changed


** Trump is Right: Laws Across the Middle East to Prevent Normalization with Israel are 'Crazy' - and Poisonous ([link removed])
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by Khaled Abu Toameh • April 27, 2026 at 5:00 am
* So long as Arabs and Muslims are taught by law, religion and social pressure that contact with Israelis is forbidden, the prospects for peace and coexistence will remain out of reach.
* If [Lebanese President Joseph] Aoun... were to accept Trump's invitation to meet Netanyahu at the White House, he would effectively be violating Lebanon's own anti-normalization law, which prohibits all economic, professional, cultural, or social relations between Lebanese nationals and Israeli citizens and entities.
* Countries such as Syria and Iraq have long maintained sweeping prohibitions on contact with Israelis, with penalties that have included life imprisonment and even death.
* In Kuwait, similar laws – backed by parliamentary legislation and Islamic religious rulings – criminalize normalization with Israel and treat it as an act of treason.
* Even Egypt, which signed a peace treaty with Israel more than four decades ago, has a law that authorizes the revocation of Egyptian citizenship if a national is "qualified as Zionist." The Egyptian government has used this law, passed in 1975, to revoke the citizenship of Egyptians who marry Israeli nationals.
* Another prominent Islamic body, the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), has issued a fatwa (Islamic ruling) forbidding normalization with Israel. The ruling came in response to the normalization agreement signed between Israel and the United Arab Emirates more than five years ago. According to IUMS, normalization agreements are "not reconciliations or truces... rather, they are a concession of the holiest and most blessed of lands and a recognition of the legitimacy of the occupying enemy [Israel]."
* The purpose of these laws and religious rulings is clear: to deter, punish, and stigmatize any form of coexistence with Israel. By criminalizing people-to-people engagement, Arab and Muslim leaders and institutions send a powerful message to their populations: peace with Israel is not merely undesirable, but a crime. This message is reinforced through media campaigns, professional blacklisting, and public accusations of "treason" against those who dare to engage with Israelis.
* Where peace is illegal, peace is impossible.
* Washington has diplomatic, economic, and political leverage with many of the countries that enforce these laws. The question is whether it is willing to use it.

If Lebanese President Joseph Aoun were to accept US President Donald Trump's invitation to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, he would effectively be violating Lebanon's own anti-normalization law, which prohibits all economic, professional, cultural, or social relations between Lebanese nationals and Israeli citizens and entities. Pictured: Aoun (R) meets with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi in Baabda, Lebanon, on January 9, 2026. (Photo by Courtney Bonneau/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

US President Donald J. Trump recently said that he has never heard of a Lebanese law banning contact with Israel. "I never heard of that, but... I'm pretty sure that'll be ended very quickly," Trump told reporters. "I know Lebanon doesn't want that... That's crazy."

Trump is right. These laws are "crazy." They are also poisonous.

So long as Arabs and Muslims are taught by law, religion and social pressure that contact with Israelis is forbidden, the prospects for peace and coexistence will remain out of reach.

There can be no real stability in the Middle East while anti-normalization laws and campaigns persist. Such laws and campaigns only empower extremists and terrorists who seek Israel's and the region's destruction.

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** Judge Jared Kushner by What He Changed ([link removed])
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by Ahmed Charai • April 27, 2026 at 4:00 am
* Kushner recognized that a younger generation of Arab leadership was increasingly focused on investment, innovation, security cooperation, connectivity, logistics, and economic diversification. In such an environment, diplomacy could no longer be conducted solely through the vocabulary of grievance and procedural delay. It had to be tied to incentives, interests, and outcomes.
* He was willing to challenge an entrenched orthodoxy... to produce a different outcome. And he delivered one.
* Washington has always known how to absorb conventional failure more comfortably than unconventional success.
* The American Dream — the dream of achievement — has always been renewed by generations of builders and innovators who widened the horizon of the possible.
* [T]he deeper compass of the American idea... success measured not only by wealth, but by contribution.
* In foreign policy, results matter. And so does the ability to recognize them when they appear.

Pictured: Jared Kushner speaks during the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace on February 19, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Any serious assessment — or judgment — of Jared Kushner should begin not with the controversy his political rivals now seek to place at the center of the discussion, but with the strategic question at the heart of his record: what has he actually accomplished? What, precisely, has he changed in the Middle East, and why has it mattered?

These questions go to the heart of Jared Kushner's record. He did not simply take part in Middle East diplomacy — he helped change its direction by treating Arab-Israeli normalization not as the end of a process, but as the starting point for a new regional dynamic.

This shift reflected a deeper reading of the region as it was becoming, rather than as many analysts still preferred to describe it. A new Middle East was already emerging: more pragmatic, more transactional, more technologically ambitious, and more attentive to power, opportunity, and national transformation than to the rhetorical comforts of inherited political language.

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