Where Trump’s plan to ‘clean out’ Gaza came from

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You know when you're a kid and someone comes to visit for the weekend and you have to give up your bed and sleep somewhere else?

This happened to Jared Kushner about 25 years ago.

He was home from Harvard for the weekend, staying at his family's beachfront mansion.

But instead of his room, he'd been forced to sleep on a pull-out couch in the basement alongside a small contingent of security guards.

The visitor who was sleeping sleeping in his bed was former and future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a friend of Jared's dad.

Despite the bed, Bibi Netanyahu didn't sleep well.

He was jet-lagged and spent the night reading a book he'd found on Jared's bookshelf, Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens.

In the morning, Bibi asked Jared if he could borrow the book.

He was only halfway through.

Jared said no, it was a gift from his girlfriend.

Bibi smiled and graciously left it behind.

Now, spoiler alert here for great expectations, but the book is about a young man who lives the life of a gentleman, thanks to a benefactor who turns out to be a criminal and then ends up marrying a wealthy and beautiful heiress.

Jared, with the help of his criminal father's money, lived the high life and married Ivanka Trump.

He then became senior advisor to her father, U.S.

President Donald Trump.

Last week, Donald Trump stood next to Bibi Netanyahu at the White House and made a shocking announcement.

The U.S.

will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too.

We'll own it.

But what exactly does do a job with it mean?

Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.

Do a real job.

Okay, so it's a property development.

Unexpected, but very trumpy.

But what happens to the 1.8 million people who live there?

Well, he wants to work with neighboring countries with humanitarian hearts to

build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza.

The people will be able to live in comfort and peace.

And we'll get sure, we'll make sure something really spectacular is done.

Now, this announcement, it stunned everyone, even Netanyahu.

Trump bulldozing Gaza and turning it into an American enclave was not on anyone's 2025 bingo card.

Trump only warned Netanyahu of the announcement moments before they began the press conference.

He hadn't spoken to anyone at the State Department or the Pentagon, yet he said...

Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea.

Who has he been speaking to, though?

Well, it very much seems like he has been speaking to one of those sleepover buddies from the story I just told you.

And it's not the person you'd expect.

And Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable too if people would focus on kind of building up livelihoods.

That's Jared Kushner 10 months ago, and here's Trump.

You know, Gaza is interesting.

It's a phenomenal location.

On the sea.

The best weather.

Back to Jared.

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.

And back to Trump.

I have a feeling that the king in Jordan, that the general in Egypt will open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done.

In Donald Trump's first term as president, his son-in-law Jared pursued deals in the Middle East that he hoped would bring about peace.

And when you look at how all that came about, this explosive announcement from second term Trump is way less surprising.

Today, how Kushner and Trump turned geopolitics into property development.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is if you're listening.

Just before we get into it, just quickly, Adelaide, I'm coming to the Torrens Parade Ground for a live show on the 1st of March, and tickets are selling very quickly.

In fact, they're almost gone.

So if you want to come along, grab one now, like right now, while you listen to this episode.

There is a link in the show notes.

It's going to be a great show with entirely new, really incredible stories.

Okay, back to Jared Kushner and the Riviera of the Middle East.

The stalemate between Israel and Palestine has frustrated U.S.

presidents for well over half a century now.

But those presidents weren't legendary deal makers like Donald Trump.

When he got into the White House in 2017, he was confident that he could sort this mess out.

And I think we're going to make a deal.

It might be a bigger and better deal than people in this room even understand.

Right now, there isn't an international consensus over where Israel ends and Palestine begins.

For decades, both sides have been trying to figure out a way to settle this, either by uniting both entities as one multicultural state, or by agreeing to clearly defined borders separating two states.

I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two, but honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians, if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I'm happy with the one they like the best.

Easy peasy.

Before he even got to the White House, Trump put son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner on the case.

Kushner wasn't qualified in any way for the job, but he did have a stack of 25 books he was planning to read on the issue.

He knew one major player, of course, his dad's friend Bibi Netanyahu.

But before Kushner could make his first move in the Middle East, Donald Trump had a visitor.

It's a great honor to have President Abbas with us.

We'll be having lunch together.

Trump invited Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, to join him at the White House for lunch.

We'll be discussing details of what has proven to be a very difficult situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

And let's see if we can find the solution.

Abbas hadn't been invited to the White House in 11 years, but now he was eating lunch with Trump, who was sure that a deal was on the menu.

It's

something that I think is frankly maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years, but we need two willing parties.

In Palestine, folks on the street thought that finally something might be going their way.

One thing about President Trump, he's very much about himself and about his abilities to make a deal.

He wrote a book,

The Art of the Deal.

Bibi Netanyahu was extremely unhappy, as was his sleepover buddy, Jared Kushner.

Jared had been charged with negotiating peace in the region, but this lunch date had been organized without him, presumably while he was busy reading all those books.

So what was going on here?

Why was Trump being so friendly with the Palestinians?

Well, unbeknownst to Netanyahu and Kushner, a couple of weeks before his arrival at the White House, Trump had a visitor, Ronald Lauder, the head of the World Jewish Congress and the heir to the Estee Lauder Cosmetics Company.

First, I want to thank Ronald Lauder not only for his many years of friendship, and he truly has been my good friend, but also for his leadership of this organization.

Lauder told Trump that the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is ready for peace negotiations, but Bibi Netanyahu is trying to get in the way.

Lauder then went about organizing this meeting with Abbas and even went to Palestine to help Abbas prepare.

I would love to be be a mediator or an arbitrator or a facilitator and we will get this done.

By the time Abbas had left the White House, Trump was extremely fond of him.

He later told Axios's How It Happen podcast their relationship was a really good one.

And it was almost like a father.

I mean, he was so nice.

Couldn't have been nicer.

Before I met with both of them, I thought it was the exact opposite.

I thought the Palestinians were impossible and the Israelis would do anything to make peace and a deal.

I found that not to be true.

He had a trip to the Middle East lined up for three weeks after the Abbas chat, and he was hopeful that he could force Netanyahu to make a deal then.

Next, I'll travel to the ancient city of Jerusalem to talk with my good friend, Prime Minister Netanyahu.

While I'm there, I'll also meet with President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority in Bethlehem.

Both sides knew it was a potential game changer.

Palestinian authorities had signs printed up ahead of Trump's visit to Bethlehem saying, the city of peace welcomes the man of peace, with Trump and Abbas's faces side by side.

Israel was preparing too in a very different way.

The sleepover buddies, Kushner and Beebe, were extremely annoyed with how everything had been going so far.

Ron Lauder, entirely behind their back, had orchestrated a huge shift in President Trump's opinion.

In just months, Trump had gone from being an unquestioning supporter of Netanyahu to calling Bibi's rival a father figure.

Kushner and Beebe hatched a plan, a plan that all came to a head at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

Mr.

President, it's a pleasure to see you again.

When Trump arrived in Jerusalem, he was a bit tired and grumpy.

It wasn't his first stop, and Kushner had stuffed his schedule full of events that involved dancing with swords and touching orbs in Saudi Arabia.

He'd had no downtime.

But Bibi Netanyahu had some stuff that he wanted to talk about.

Of course, not all that I'd like to discuss before the cameras, but I do look forward to our discussions, which I think are

pregnant with possibilities.

This event, this meeting, is one of those moments that really shifts history on its axis.

I've read six different accounts of it in six different books.

Yes, I, like Jared Kushner, have read many books.

The scheme appears to have begun in the brain of Trump and Jared's bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, who they'd appointed to be the U.S.

ambassador to Israel.

Friedman told Jordan Peterson on his podcast that his idea was to make a video.

And I said, well, look, if you want to convince the president, what I would suggest you do is let's make a two-minute video of some of the worst things that Mahmoud Abbas has said.

I don't know quite what the job of an ambassador is, but I'm not sure that it's this.

Let's put together a film, nothing out of context, only the other the actual statements he's made about how, you know, the blood of every terrorist is holy and that will never stop

helping

our holy terrorists.

And we won't give up one inch of Israel and we're going to take all of Jerusalem.

Trump was astonished.

And he said, this is the guy?

Is this the same guy that I met with in Washington?

This is the guy that everybody's telling me is ready to make peace.

Trump's team was split.

Kushner and Friedman were thrilled.

They had conspired with Netanyahu to set this whole thing up.

Other White House aides were horrified.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson accused Netanyahu of doctoring the footage, cutting together different snippets of Abbas's words.

I haven't been able to get a copy of this video, so I can't confirm whether or not the footage is doctored.

But the following day, Trump met with Abbas, and Abbas didn't know what hit him.

There was no more talk of him being a father figure.

Trump called him a murderer and a liar and accused Abbas of tricking him.

By the end of 2017, Trump and Abbas were no longer speaking.

Netanyahu told Trump that he should focus on more achievable goals, like creating peace deals between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.

One of Netanyahu's aides offered a golf metaphor.

Mr.

President, he said, peace with the Emirates is a five-foot putt, peace with the Saudis is a 30-foot putt, and peace with the Palestinians is a hole-in-one through a brick wall.

Don't bother.

Stick to putting.

So, all this happened at the start of Trump's first presidency.

And this messy false start of a peace negotiation, it's basically forgotten now.

It wasn't even the most memorable thing that happened on that overseas trip.

That would have been the glowing orb that he touched with the king of Saudi Arabia.

But that first visit to Israel shaped Donald Trump's approach to the conflict, and it planted the seed for this.

The U.S.

will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too.

We'll own it.

Because it seems to have taught Jared Kushner an important lesson.

In Trump's mind, respect is everything.

China has total respect for Donald Trump and for Donald Trump's very, very large

brain.

Trump divides the world into people he dislikes and people he respects.

Do you respect Putin?

I do respect him.

Ronald Lauder was a respected person.

He vouched for Mahmoud Abbas as being respectable and said that Bibi Netanyahu was not.

It looks like Kushner realised that success in his Middle East peace mission came down to controlling which of the respected people got to talk to Trump.

Kushner contacted Ron Lauder and told him never to talk to Trump about Israel and Palestine again.

Lauder talked to Trump about the US maybe acquiring Greenland instead.

Amazing idea.

Great job, Ron.

Then Jared got to work on setting up the putts, Israeli peace with the Emirates and peace with Saudi Arabia.

He sank the Emirates putt.

but not the Saudi one.

But he was also trying to figure out how to set up the hole in one one through the brick wall, peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

See, the most substantial part of the brick wall is the fact that if you ask the Israelis and the Palestinians to draw a map showing borders that they would be happy with, the maps look totally different.

Later, at an event recorded for Harvard Kennedy School, Kushner described how he went about solving this problem.

So what I did was, since both parties were doing that, I just went and started drawing my own map.

And I basically said, okay, I don't really care what happened, you know, before, because if you think about the Middle East, a lot of it's just arbitrary lines drawn by foreigners anyway.

Right, so here's some more arbitrary lines drawn by foreigners and endorsed by the U.S.

President.

On Sunday, I delivered to Prime Minister Netanyahu my vision for peace, prosperity, and a brighter future for the Israelis and Palestinians.

The map is extraordinary.

Jared Kushner's masterpiece.

He'd taken a map of all the Israeli settlements inside the West Bank and just drawn a line around them.

So I said, let me just say, if I want to give the Palestinians a state, let me figure out how can I draw a line and just take all the places where they're settlers and just make a new line here and then figure out how do you swap land here and there.

It's impossible to do this and create a single uninterrupted shape for a Palestinian state.

What he created was like a chain of Palestinian islands separated by oceans and rivers of Israeli territory.

But Jared had a solution for that too.

Whatever's not contiguous, continuous with, you know, today you got tunnels, you got bridges, all these different things.

Tunnels and bridges so that Palestinians could get between the islands without setting foot on Israeli soil.

This obviously meant that Palestinians would be getting a lot less land than had been previously proposed.

But never mind, Jared had an idea for that too.

In this plan, whatever amount of land they lose in the West Bank, they're given roughly the same amount of land in the middle of the Negev Desert.

Land is land, right?

Even if the land you're losing has crops on it and your family has lived there for centuries and the land that you've been given as a trade is an inhospitable desert.

By the way, this is not a story about who has the right to live in what part of the West Bank.

It's a story about a guy trying to find a way to get everyone to agree on a way to live together without killing each other.

Kushna had drawn the lines, but they were lines that only Netanyahu could get behind.

He hadn't spoken to the Palestinians about the plan.

Instead, he tasked the CIA with handing a copy of it to Abbas just before it was announced at the White House with Netanyahu.

Mr.

President, your deal of the century is the opportunity of the century.

And rest assured, Israel will not miss this opportunity.

Mahmoud Abbas hadn't spoken to Trump in years by this stage, but he made a very angry statement.

Four years on from the deal of the century, Jared Kushner was out of the White House and had lost access to the CIA Postal Service.

Bibi Netanyahu had lost power and then got it back again, and he was now embroiled in a horrific war in Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023.

Peace seemed as far away as it had ever been.

That's when Kushner spoke all about this at Harvard, his plan and everything that had happened since.

He told the crowd that the only solution to the destruction of Gaza was his Negev desert plan.

Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable.

I 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 that's a better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.

Finish the job.

We will do a job with it too.

We'll own it.

Do a real job.

I genuinely think that at the beginning of his first term, Donald Trump didn't have a particularly strong opinion about how he would like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be solved.

I'm looking at two state and one state and I like the one that both parties like.

I'm very happy with the one that both parties like.

I can live with either one.

But ever since that meeting at the King David Hotel, Trump has only been hearing one side of the story.

Kushner and other advisors who understand Trump well have controlled the flow of information he receives.

To them, this plan for Gaza won't have come as all that much of a surprise.

For years now, Trump has been hearing about how much of a terrible shame it is that Gaza has been so thoroughly destroyed.

And wouldn't it be great if we could just move all the people out and turn it into something really nice?

The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative.

They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety.

So, shift them somewhere else.

Where?

We'll figure that out.

I don't want to be cute.

I don't want to be a wise guy, but the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad.

This could be so magnificent.

This idea did seem to come out of nowhere, though.

Netanyahu wasn't in on it.

Arab countries weren't consulted.

And of course, nobody has spoken to the Palestinians.

And yet...

Everybody I've I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.

Who has he been speaking to?

As Jared Kushner well knows, that's all that matters when it comes to Donald Trump.

If you're listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Jess O'Callaghan.

Audio production this week is by Tegan Nichols.

If you missed our episode on tariffs or you haven't watched the video version, I would recommend it.

850,000 YouTube users can't be wrong, surely.

And it feels even more relevant now than it did when we released it two weeks ago.

If you're in Adelaide and want to come to the live show, I hope you've got your tickets.

If you've missed out, you'll have to come to Newcastle and see me do it on the 6th of April.

It's only a 17-hour drive.

Next, Elon Musk is trying to cut $2 trillion out of the US budget by kicking open the doors of various government agencies and rummaging through their drawers.

It's an admirable idea.

The U.S.

government is currently running a $1.8 trillion deficit.

But is it even possible to do what he's trying to do without bringing American society crashing to the ground?

And how did it get so bad in the first place?

That's next week on If You're Listening.

Former Egyptian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Chriska Albanese is the John Lyons is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor,

Ben Saul.

Christopher Barghouti is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

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