When US President Donald Trump announced his plan for America to take over the Gaza Strip, everyone was stunned. That includes the man standing next to him, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. President Trump says everyone he’s spoken to loves the idea. But who has he spoken to?
In his first term as president, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner led efforts to broker peace in the region, and his approach makes this latest announcement make a lot more sense.
This week on If You’re Listening, how Kushner and Trump turned geopolitics into property development. Matt Bevan takes a look.
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In his first term as president, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner led efforts to broker peace in the region, and his approach makes this latest announcement make a lot more sense.
This week on If You’re Listening, how Kushner and Trump turned geopolitics into property development. Matt Bevan takes a look.
Watch all episodes of If You're Listening - in our playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq
Subscribe: https://ab.co/3yqPOZ5
Welcome to ABC News In-depth, where you'll find our long-form journalism and other videos to help you understand what's going on in the world around you.
Watch more ABC News content ad-free on ABC iview: https://ab.co/2OB7Mk1
For more from ABC News, click here: https://ab.co/2kxYCZY
Get breaking news and livestreams from our ABC News channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/NewsOnABC
Like ABC News on Facebook: http://facebook.com/abcnews.au
Follow ABC News on Instagram: http://instagram.com/abcnews_au
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Note: In most cases, our captions are auto-generated.
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00:00Last week, Donald Trump stood next to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu at the White House
00:05and made a shocking announcement.
00:07The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too, we'll own it.
00:13What exactly does do a job with it mean?
00:16Level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an economic development
00:22that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area.
00:29Do a real job.
00:30Okay, so it's a property development. Unexpected but very Trumpy.
00:35But what happens to the 1.8 million people who live there?
00:39Well, he wants to work with neighbouring countries with humanitarian hearts to...
00:44Build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million
00:49Palestinians living in Gaza.
00:51The people will be able to live in comfort and peace
00:54and we'll make sure something really spectacular is done.
00:59Now this announcement, it stunned everyone.
01:03Even Netanyahu.
01:05Trump bulldozing Gaza and turning it into an American enclave was not on anyone's 2025 bingo card.
01:12Trump only warned Netanyahu of the announcement moments before they began the press conference.
01:18He hadn't spoken to anyone at the State Department or the Pentagon, yet he said...
01:22Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea.
01:24Who has he been speaking to though?
01:26Well, it seems like one guy he'd been speaking to was his son-in-law.
01:30In Gaza's waterfront property, it could be very valuable to
01:33if people would focus on kind of building up, you know, livelihoods.
01:37That's Jared Kushner 10 months ago and here's Trump.
01:40You know, Gaza's interesting. It's a phenomenal location.
01:43On the sea.
01:46Best weather.
01:47Back to Jared.
01:48It's a little bit of an unfortunate situation there,
01:50but I think from Israel's perspective,
01:51I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.
01:55And back to Trump.
01:56I have a feeling that the king in Jordan and the general in Egypt will
02:01open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done.
02:06In Donald Trump's first term as president,
02:08his son-in-law Jared pursued deals in the Middle East that he hoped would bring about peace.
02:13And when you look at how all that came about,
02:16this explosive announcement from second term Trump is way less surprising.
02:21This is just a demolition site.
02:23Today, how Kushner and Trump turned geopolitics into property development.
02:29I'm Matt Bevan.
02:31And this is If You're Listening.
02:35The stalemate between Israel and Palestine has frustrated US presidents
02:39for well over half a century now.
02:41But those presidents weren't legendary deal makers like Donald Trump.
02:46When he got into the White House in 2017,
02:48he was confident that he could sort this mess out.
02:51And I think we're going to make a deal.
02:53It might be a bigger and better deal than people in this room even understand.
02:56Right now, there isn't an international consensus over where Israel ends and Palestine begins.
03:03For decades, both sides have been trying to figure out a way to settle this,
03:08either by uniting both entities as one multicultural state,
03:12or by agreeing to clearly defined borders separating two states.
03:17I thought for a while the two states looked like it may be the easier of the two.
03:21But honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians,
03:25if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I'm happy with the one they like the best.
03:31Easy peasy.
03:32Before he even got to the White House,
03:34Trump put son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner on the case.
03:38Kushner wasn't qualified in any way for the job,
03:41but he did have a stack of 25 books he was planning to read on the issue.
03:46But before Kushner could make his first move in the Middle East, Donald Trump had a visitor.
03:51It's a great honour to have President Abbas with us.
03:55We'll be having lunch together.
03:58Trump invited Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority,
04:02to join him at the White House for lunch.
04:04We'll be discussing details of what has proven to be a very difficult situation
04:10between Israel and the Palestinians.
04:13And let's see if we can find the solution.
04:15Abbas hadn't been invited to the White House in 11 years,
04:18but now he was eating lunch with Trump, who was sure that a deal was on the menu.
04:23It's something that I think is frankly,
04:27maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years, but we need two willing parties.
04:33In Palestine, folks on the street thought that finally something might be going their way.
04:38One thing about President Trump, he's very much about himself
04:41and about his abilities to make a deal.
04:44He wrote a book, The Art of the Deal.
04:47Bibi Netanyahu was extremely unhappy.
04:50Jared had been charged with negotiating peace in the region,
04:53but this lunch date had been organised without him,
04:56presumably while he was busy reading all those books.
04:59So what was going on here?
05:01Why was Trump being so friendly with the Palestinians?
05:05Well, unbeknownst to Netanyahu and Kushner,
05:07a couple of weeks before his arrival at the White House, Trump had a visitor.
05:12Ronald Lauder, the head of the World Jewish Congress
05:16and the heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics company.
05:19First, I want to thank Ronald Lauder, not only for his many years of friendship,
05:24and he truly has been my good friend, but also for his leadership of this organisation.
05:30Lauder told Trump that the Palestinian president,
05:33Mahmoud Abbas, is ready for peace negotiations,
05:35but Bibi Netanyahu is trying to get in the way.
05:39Lauder then went about organising this meeting with Abbas
05:42and even went to Palestine to help Abbas prepare.
05:45I would love to be a mediator or an arbitrator or a facilitator,
05:50and we will get this done.
05:51By the time Abbas had left the White House, Trump was extremely fond of him.
05:55He later told Axios' How It Happened podcast their relationship was a really good one.
06:00And it was almost like a father.
06:03He was so nice. Couldn't have been nicer.
06:06Before I met with both of them, I thought it was the exact opposite.
06:11I thought the Palestinians were impossible
06:14and the Israelis would do anything to make peace and a deal.
06:20I found that not to be true.
06:22He had a trip to the Middle East lined up for three weeks after the Abbas chat,
06:26and he was hopeful that he could force Netanyahu to make a deal then.
06:29Next, I'll travel to the ancient city of Jerusalem
06:32to talk with my good friend, Prime Minister Netanyahu.
06:37While I'm there, I'll also meet with President Abbas
06:40of the Palestinian Authority in Bethlehem.
06:42Both sides knew it was a potential game changer.
06:45Palestinian authorities had signs printed up ahead of Trump's visit to Bethlehem, saying
06:50the city of peace welcomes the man of peace, with Trump and Abbas's faces side by side.
06:58Israel was preparing too, in a very different way.
07:01Kushner and Bibi were extremely annoyed with how everything had been going so far.
07:06Ron Lauder, entirely behind their back,
07:09had orchestrated a huge shift in President Trump's opinion.
07:13In just months, Trump had gone from being an unquestioning supporter of Netanyahu
07:19to calling Bibi's rival a father figure.
07:22Kushner and Bibi hatched a plan.
07:24A plan that all came to a head in Jerusalem.
07:28A very warm welcome to Israel.
07:32When Trump arrived in Jerusalem, he was a bit tired and grumpy.
07:35It wasn't his first stop, and Kushner had stuffed his schedule full of events that
07:40involved dancing with swords and touching orbs in Saudi Arabia.
07:45He'd had no downtime.
07:47But Bibi Netanyahu had some stuff that he wanted to talk about.
07:50I have no doubt that as we work together, you and I,
07:54the alliance between our countries will grow ever stronger.
07:59This event, this meeting, is one of those moments that really shifts history on its axis.
08:05I've read six different accounts of it in six different books.
08:08Yes, I, like Jared Kushner, have read many books.
08:12The scheme appears to have begun in the brain of Trump and Jared's bankruptcy lawyer,
08:17David Friedman, who they'd appointed to be the US ambassador to Israel.
08:21Friedman told Jordan Peterson on his podcast that his idea was to make a video.
08:26And I said, well, look, if you want to convince the president,
08:30what I would suggest you do is let's make a two minute video
08:33of some of the worst things that Mahmoud Abbas has said.
08:37I don't know quite what the job of an ambassador is, but I'm not sure that it's this.
08:41Let's put together a film, nothing out of context, only the other,
08:45the actual statements he's made about how, you know,
08:48the blood of every terrorist is holy and that one will never stop
08:53helping our holy terrorists.
08:55And we won't give up one inch of Israel and we're going to take all of Jerusalem.
08:59Trump was astonished.
09:01And he said, this is the guy.
09:02Is this the same guy that I met with in Washington?
09:04This is the guy that everybody's telling me is ready to make peace.
09:07Trump's team was split.
09:10Kushner and Friedman were thrilled
09:12they had conspired with Netanyahu to set this whole thing up.
09:15Other White House aides were horrified.
09:18Secretary of State Rex Tillerson accused Netanyahu of doctoring the footage,
09:23cutting together different snippets of Abbas's words.
09:26I haven't been able to get a copy of this video,
09:29so I can't confirm whether or not the footage is doctored.
09:32But the following day, Trump met with Abbas and Abbas didn't know what hit him.
09:39There was no more talk of him being a father figure.
09:42Trump called him a murderer and a liar and accused Abbas of tricking him.
09:47By the end of 2017, Trump and Abbas were no longer speaking.
09:51Netanyahu told Trump that he should focus on more achievable goals,
09:55like creating peace deals between Israel and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates.
10:00One of Netanyahu's aides offered a golf metaphor.
10:04Mr. President, he said, peace with the Emirates is a five foot putt.
10:09Peace with the Saudis is a 30 foot putt.
10:11And peace with the Palestinians is a hole in one through a brick wall.
10:16Don't bother. Stick to putting.
10:19So all this happened at the start of Trump's first presidency.
10:23And this messy false start of a peace negotiation, it's basically forgotten now.
10:29It wasn't even the most memorable thing that happened on that overseas trip.
10:34That would have been the glowing orb that he touched with the king of Saudi Arabia.
10:38But that first visit to Israel shaped Donald Trump's approach to the conflict.
10:43And it planted the seed for this.
10:45The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We'll own it.
10:51Because it seems to have taught Jared Kushner an important lesson.
10:55In Trump's mind, respect is everything.
10:59China has total respect for Donald Trump and for Donald Trump's very, very large brain.
11:06Trump divides the world into people he dislikes and people he respects.
11:11Do you respect Putin?
11:13I do respect him.
11:14Do you? Why?
11:15Well, I respect a lot of people.
11:17And if someone Trump respects tells him something, it must be true.
11:21Ronald Lauder was a respected person.
11:24He vouched for Mahmoud Abbas as being respectable and said that Bibi Netanyahu was not.
11:29It looks like Kushner realised that success in his Middle East peace mission
11:33came down to controlling which of the respected people got to talk to Trump.
11:39Kushner contacted Ron Lauder and told him never to talk to Trump about Israel and Palestine again.
11:45Lauder talked to Trump about the US maybe acquiring Greenland instead.
11:50Amazing idea. Great job, Ron.
11:53Then Jared got to work on setting up the putts.
11:56Israeli peace with the Emirates and peace with Saudi Arabia.
11:59He sank the Emirates putt, but not the Saudi one.
12:04But he was also trying to figure out how to set up the hole in one through the brick wall.
12:08Peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
12:11See, the most substantial part of the brick wall is the fact that if you ask the Israelis
12:16and the Palestinians to draw a map showing borders that they would be happy with,
12:20the maps look totally different.
12:23Later, at an event recorded for Harvard Kennedy School,
12:26Kushner described how he went about solving this problem.
12:29So what I did was, since both parties were doing that,
12:32I just went and started drawing my own map.
12:34And I basically said, OK, I don't really care what happened before.
12:38Because if you think about the Middle East,
12:39a lot of it's just arbitrary lines drawn by foreigners anyway, right?
12:43Right. So here's some more arbitrary lines drawn by foreigners and endorsed by the US president.
12:48On Sunday, I delivered to Prime Minister Netanyahu my vision for peace,
12:54prosperity and a brighter future for Israelis and Palestinians.
13:00The map is extraordinary. It's Jared Kushner's masterpiece.
13:04It's the cartographic equivalent of this buzz wire game where you guide the loop over the wire.
13:17You guide the loop over the wire without touching it.
13:20Jared had drawn a line through Palestinian territory without touching any Israeli settlements.
13:30He'd taken a map of all the Israeli settlements inside the West Bank and just drawn a line around
13:36them. So I said, let me just say, if I want to give the Palestinians a state, let me figure out
13:40how can I draw a line and just take all the places where there are settlers and just make a new line
13:46here and then figure out how do you swap land here and there.
13:48It's impossible to do this and create a single uninterrupted shape for a Palestinian state.
13:54What he created was like a chain of Palestinian islands separated by oceans and rivers
14:00of Israeli territory. But Jared had a solution for that, too.
14:05Whatever's not contiguous, contiguous. Today, you got tunnels, you got bridges,
14:09all these different things.
14:09Tunnels and bridges so that Palestinians could get between the islands
14:14without setting foot on Israeli soil.
14:17This obviously meant that Palestinians would be getting a lot less land than had been
14:21previously proposed. But never mind. Jared had an idea for that, too.
14:26In this plan, whatever amount of land they lose in the West Bank,
14:31they're given roughly the same amount of land in the middle of the Negev Desert.
14:35Land is land, right? Even if the land you're losing has crops on it and your family has
14:41lived there for centuries and the land that you are being given as a trade is in an inhospitable
14:46desert. By the way, this is not a story about who has the right to live in what part of the West
14:52Bank. It's a story about a guy trying to find a way to get everyone to agree on a way to live
14:59together without killing each other. Kushner had drawn the lines, but they were lines that
15:05Netanyahu could get behind. Kushner hadn't spoken to the Palestinians about the plan.
15:11Instead, he tasked the CIA with handing a copy of it to Abbas just before it was announced at
15:16the White House. Mr. President, your deal of the century is the opportunity of the century.
15:23And rest assured, Israel will not miss this opportunity.
15:28Mahmoud Abbas hadn't spoken to Trump in years by this stage, but he made a very angry statement.
15:35After the nonsense that we heard today, we say a thousand no's to the deal of the century.
15:40Four years on from the deal of the century, Jared Kushner was out of the White House and had lost
15:46access to the CIA postal service. Bibi Netanyahu had lost power and then got it back again,
15:53and he was now embroiled in a horrific war in Gaza following the Hamas attack on Israel
15:59on October 7th, 2023. Peace seemed as far away as it had ever been. That's when Kushner spoke
16:08all about this at Harvard, his plan and everything that had happened since. He told the crowd that
16:14the only solution to the destruction of Gaza was his Negev desert plan. In Gaza's waterfront
16:19property, it could be very valuable. I would just bulldoze something in the Negev. I would try to
16:23move people in there. I know that won't be the popular thing to do, but I think that that's a
16:27better option to do so you can go in and finish the job. Finish the job. And we will do a job
16:32with it too. We'll own it. Do a real job. I genuinely think that at the beginning of his
16:37first term, Donald Trump didn't have a particularly strong opinion about how he would like the Israeli
16:43Palestinian conflict to be solved. So I'm looking at two state and one state and I like the one that
16:51both parties like. I'm very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one.
16:56Kushner and other advisors who understand Trump well have controlled the flow of information he
17:02receives. To them, this plan for Gaza won't have come as all that much of a surprise.
17:08For years now, Trump has been hearing about how much of a terrible shame it is that Gaza has been
17:13so thoroughly destroyed. And wouldn't it be great if we could just move all the people out and turn
17:18it into something really nice? The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have
17:26no alternative. They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety. So shift
17:34them somewhere else. Where? We'll figure that out. I don't want to be cute. I don't want to be a wise
17:39guy. But the Riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so bad. This
17:43could be so magnificent. This idea did seem to come out of nowhere, though. Netanyahu wasn't in
17:49on it. Arab countries weren't consulted. And of course, nobody has spoken to the Palestinians.
17:54And yet, everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.
18:01Who has he been speaking to? As Jared Kushner well knows,
18:05that's all that matters when it comes to Donald Trump.
18:54Transcribed by https://otter.ai