My guest yesterday was Joel Rubin, former senior State Department official under President Obama, expert on the Middle East, author of The Briefing Book, here on substack, and much else
Joel stressed how vital it is that the US continues to apply pressure on both sides to hold the line that was defined and signed at Sharm-el-Sheikh.
After the recent bombing on Gaza by Israel, followed by a “resumption’ of the ceasefire, it’s also imperative, Joel says, that the arbiters of the agreement, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, spend as much time in the region as possible. (So far, they have).
We talked about the roles played by Kushner and Witkoff in getting us to this point.
When it comes to Kushner, I believe two things can be true simultaneously. I stand by my reporting in Kushner, Inc. on the appearance of Kushner’s conflicts while conducting foreign policy in the first Trump administration.
But ironically, without those conflicts, would he have been able to pull off first the Abraham Accords and now this ceasefire?
Lesley Stahl asked Kushner a question about his apparent conflicts on Sixty Minutes (a great get by the way, for the new CBS chief, Bari Weiss) and his answer was essentially that those deep business ties are exactly what enabled him to pull off what many of us consider a miracle.
So, that’s thought-provoking. Do the ends justify the means? Well, in this case, maybe.
And, as for the reported conversation between Kushner, Witkoff and Khalil al-Hayya, the lead negotiator for Hamas? Well, Joel and I got into how completely unprecedented that was.
The fact that Witkoff found a way to connect with al-Hayya through the fact that they’d both lost their sons – Witkoff’s to a drug overdose, al-Hayya in the recent Israeli attack on Doha – is both poignant – and of course, tactically smart.
Figuring out how to connect with someone on the other side of the table about something that seems beside the point of the talks, is something many politicians think they know how to do, but it’s an essential skill for real estate developers in competitive markets like New York where both Kushner and Witkoff have worked.
Joel and I also talk about how Trump’s tariff policy has given him a reason to engage with world leaders with a velocity that perhaps he might not otherwise have had.
We move on to discuss the mayoral election in New York. Joel was the Jewish director for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2020, so I was very curious to get his thoughts on the candidacy of Zohran Mamdani.
Joel explains that Mamdani’s sweeping primary victory means that there’s a complete recalibration going on in Democrat politics about the issue of Israel-Palestine.
“[If you a Democrat candidate and] if you’re, you know, to the right on Israel-Palestine, it will cost in the primary,” he says, adding: “We’re in a new baseline right now.”
I’ll say.
Watch our conversation above!
