The president’s son-in-law floated the idea of moving Gazans out in order to rebuild the coastal enclave a year ago.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Jared Kushner is reportedly the man behind the idea floated by President Donald Trump last week, after meeting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White Houe, to rebuild Gaza and move its current residents to other countries.
Citing an anonymous source, subscription platform Puck News reported at the time that the president’s son-in-law and one of the architects of the Abraham Accords had helped prepare the statements Trump had made at the subsequent press conference.
His remarks included calling for permanently resettling Palestinians outside Gaza, saying that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” and that he sees it as “a long-term ownership position” that he claimed would bring “great stability” to the region.
It could also turn Gaza one day into “the Riviera of the Middle East,” he said.
While not providing a timeline as to what had occurred first, Axios reported Monday that Netanyahu had “met last week” with Kushner in Washington and they talked about the president’s plan for Gaza
Kushner is receiving credit now because although Trump’s idea caught almost everyone by surprise, he had already mentioned at least part of it a year ago.
When speaking at a “Middle East Initiative” forum at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government only four months into the Israel-Hamas war, Kushner said he didn’t think there was much reaason for Palestinians to remain in Gaza, as he “wasn’t sure there is much left of Gaza at this point.”
“From Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” he said, adding quickly that he didn’t think Israel would want to remove the population permanently.
The former real estate developer also said that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable if people would focus on building up livelihoods.”
Trump also questioned why anyone would want to stay in a place full of rubble and “unexploded bombs.” He has also since doubled down on the idea that the Gazans should not necessarily have the right to return, although he has also said their new homes and lives would be so much better that they would not want to go back.
Kushner’s interlocutor at the forum, Prof. Tarek Masoud of the Kennedy School, clarified to CBS News after Tuesday’s bombshell that his guest had been speaking specifically about the Arabs in Rafah before the anti-Hamas IDF operation began in the southern town.
Egypt had turned down the idea of letting Gazans into the Sinai to protect them from the upcoming battle, he said, and “Kushner was proposing another option, which was to create a safe zone in the Negev desert, which is part of Israel, and he ended that discussion by saying that nobody was saying that the people of Gaza would not go back.”
Netanyahu has praised Trump’s plan for Gaza and his “willingness to think outside the box” and “puncture conventional thinking,” which, he noted, has not helped solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even after decades of trying.