In a February 15 YouTube interview with Tarek Masoud, the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, who serves as Faculty Director of the Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative and the Initiative on Democracy in Hard Places, Jared Kushner, who served as a senior advisor to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021, said, “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods.”
“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner said.
Can you see it in your mind’s eye, Trump Gaza Towers? Trump International Golf Club, Khan Younis? What about Dir Balah Disney?
“I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now,” Kushner explained, “And I’m looking at the situation and I’m thinking: what would I do if I was there?”
Whenever anybody uses Ivanka’s spouse as an example of a success story, especially in real estate, I feel compelled to remind my readers that Kushner Companies purchased the office building at 666 Fifth Avenue in 2007, for a price of $1.8 billion. Then came the bust of 2008 and a huge part of US real estate came underwater, and 666 5th wasn’t generating enough income to cover its debt service. In the end, Kushner had lost more than $90 million on that deal.
In the interview, Kushner told Masoud, “I am not sure there is much left of Gaza at this point. If you think about even the construct, Gaza was not really a historical precedent. It was the result of a war. You had tribes in different places and then Gaza became a thing. Egypt used to run it and then over time different governments came in.”
The man graduated from Frisch Orthodox yeshiva high school and Harvard!
Later on, Kushner suggested regarding the Gaza population that he “would just 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’s a better option to do, so you can go in and finish the job.”
As they say in Modern Orthodox Jersey, If something doesn’t require bulldozing something in the Negev, it’s not worth doing.
