‘We’re good to go.’ The diplomatic push to release Kushner’s Mideast peace plan
Jared Kushner was supposed to take a short helicopter ride from Davos to Zurich. He planned to fly from there to Jerusalem, where he would sit down with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and leading opposition figure, Benny Gantz, to formally brief them for the first time on details of the most closely guarded policy portfolio in Washington.
It was to be a critical moment for President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who, after three years of quiet research and planning, had come up with a vision for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. It nearly missed the light of day.
Just two weeks before, Gantz’s centrist party, Blue and White, had warned the Americans that releasing Kushner’s plan would amount to interference in Israel’s third election in a year, scheduled for March 2. Yet failing to release the U.S. plan now – when the White House believed the next Israeli election would likely produce similar, deadlocked results – could shutter it for good.
A bad weather call that day, January 22, forced Kushner on a three-hour drive to the Swiss financial capital – ample time to call U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, to finalize how to proceed.
Friedman was tasked with briefing the two Israeli leaders himself, and both gave him clear signals they would endorse the Trump administration’s long awaited plan – an 85-page document that had been held in print form in a single office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House for three years.
It was not the first time Netanyahu and his team had learned of contours of the plan. “We kept them in the loop” throughout the final months of its drafting, said one senior administration official. But it was the first time they were given sufficient details to ask for an endorsement.
Kushner had seen a statement from Gantz spreading through Israeli press in which he suddenly reversed course, now calling on Trump to release the plan “very soon.”
“Where are we with Bibi and Gantz?” Kushner asked Friedman by phone, in the presence of senior staff.
“We’re good to go,” Friedman replied.
Kushner rerouted, flying home instead on Air Force One with the president.
The plan, titled a “Vision for Peace” by the Trump team and released in full on Tuesday, marks an historic departure from past American efforts to set forth parameters for a direct negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians. This plan, instead, offers detailed proposals on the thorniest issues of the conflict – ultimately endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state on Israeli terms.
Under the Trump vision, Israel would apply its laws and likely annex roughly 30% of West Bank territory occupied since the Six Day War in 1967, where Israeli settlements have grown in size year by year.
A future Palestinian state would be surrounded by Israel on all sides, and its eastern flank along the Jordan Valley would become Israel’s permanent border. Its capital would be outside the Old City of Jerusalem, afield on the city’s eastern outskirts.
While Palestinian and Jordanian leaders reacted harshly to the plan, roughly ten days of diplomacy softened other international reactions.
After a series of critical principal meetings on the timing of the plan’s release between Trump, Kushner, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence in December, Trump’s “peace team,” as it is referred to within the administration, decided to gauge international support for the plan.
Kushner met with U.K. Foreign Minister Dominic Raab during his visit to Washington the second week of January and began feeling confident the British would support the plan, according to two senior administration officials briefed on the conversation.
He had also reached out to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair – two prominent politicians who still generate controversy over their support for the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, respectively – for final guidance and support, which two U.S. officials said Kushner received.
A week and a half before the launch, the classified draft of the plan was shared with an expanded circle of aides to prepare for its declassification and digital release. The map published alongside the document was still under review even at this late stage.
Kushner then saw the gathering at Davos as an opportunity to begin briefing additional world leaders.
“In the last week or so, a few people were brought in from other countries – nobody was actually able to read through the entire plan, but enough so where they weren’t surprised by the details,” one senior administration official said.
Kushner and his team also recruited Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser, to reach out to his counterparts in Europe and the Middle East to help generate “supportive responses” to the plan’s release. And two days before launch day, Kushner spoke by phone with over a dozen foreign ministers to prepare them for its contents.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers were briefed by Kushner at the White House on Monday morning. Also that day, in the same office in which the draft copy had long been stashed, senior current and former White House officials who had worked on the plan gathered to strategize one more time on the public rollout.
Only then did the team reach out to the Palestinians.
Trump did not call the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, directly. But an intermediary channel that a second administration official described as “active” was used by American officials to relay one final message to Abbas on Monday, the day before Trump announced the plan before a crowd of political supporters, religious leaders, and donors.
“The message was the plan is serious, realistic, and you should be interested in engaging on it,” one administration official said. “We advise you to read it.”
The Palestinians did not respond.
