Part two: How Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff put Hamas in checkmate
How do you get a terrorist organization to sign a ceasefire agreement and release hostages?
The below reading highlights, building on yesterday’s piece, also here from Sir Niall Ferguson – a brilliant piece in The Free Press last week (subscribe + read in full here)…
The following provides a play-by-play of how Jared Kushner and Ambassador Steve Witkoff orchestrated the peace agreement with partners, over the past eight weeks, to pull off the seemingly impossible…
The real purpose of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks was to derail the next phase of that [Abraham Accords] process, which would have established a new relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia. If that process is back on track, it constitutes a remarkable feat of diplomatic salvage.
…whereas Kissinger favored small steps because he dreaded failure, Kushner and Witkoff are accustomed to taking big risks on low-probability deals with potentially high payoffs—and if they fail, that’s just business.
Polymarket suggested, on October 2nd, that the likelihood of success so rapidly was 5%:
So: you could have 20X’d your money in 8 days, betting on this outcome. (Nvidia is “only” up 13.8X over three years.)
How it was done…
[Tony] Blair encouraged Kushner to seize the moment to produce a new peace plan, combining elements of the U.S. ceasefire plan and a peace plan Blair and Powell [UK National Security Advisor] had been working on. Kushner and Witkoff then met with the Qataris in New York, using the September 9 air strike [by Israel on Qatar] to pressure them to sign on to their 20-point plan, which effectively became a joint U.S.-Qatari plan, with UK co-authorship. It was this plan that Trump then pitched at a September 23 meeting—which he and the Emir of Qatar co-hosted [held at the United Nations HQ in New York]—with the leaders of eight Arab states, along with members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
Lesson: Perhaps important for other players to feel a sense of ownership, and blend plans so everyone feels a little involved (not simply mandated by the US).
Netanyahu did not like the plan. He did not like withdrawing from Gaza. He did not like releasing 250 Palestinians serving life sentences. He did not like amnesty for Hamas members. He especially did not like point 19: “While Gaza redevelopment advances and when the PA reform program is faithfully carried out, the conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”
Lesson: If the Ukraine conflict is to be solved: Zelensky’s not going to like the plan. Putin’s not going to like every element of the plan... (Though of course very different power dynamics, and Putin has more leverage than any party had in the Middle East.)
But this was where Trump’s relationship with Netanyahu and his record in the region allowed him to succeed where Biden could not. “You’re doing it,” Trump told the Israeli prime minister. After an 11-hour meeting, Kushner and Witkoff told Netanyahu: “You don’t have a choice. You’re coming to the White House on Monday.” It was there, on September 29, that Netanyahu made the call to his Qatari counterpart, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, murmuring an apology through gritted teeth for the air strike on Doha.
Lesson: You need a relationship with the leaders and a quality plan. (President Trump, arguably, has been trying to deal with Putin to date with only a relationship. A quality plan hasn’t yet been incorporated.)
The next crucial step was to get Hamas to agree to the 20-point plan. There were elements of the plan that they, too, hated—notably the proposed disarming of Hamas and its exclusion from the future governance of Gaza. But Kushner and Witkoff were undeterred. Although Hamas’s official response was essentially to accept only parts of it, the Americans acted as if they had accepted all of it—a Trumpian move that (according to a source close to the negotiations) took Hamas by surprise, but didn’t cause them to withdraw.
Very, very interesting. Pushing the envelope of what was agreed.
To me: the thought of negotiating with Lavrov and Dmitriev would be (vastly) less challenging than negotiating with Hamas.
The final phase of the process took place in Egypt on October 8. The Americans still had work to do. They had to hammer out exactly how far the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would withdraw from Gaza—a hard-fought compromise that left the Israelis in temporary control of about half of the Strip. The Americans also had to squash an Arab proposal to add a 21st point on the West Bank. And they had to work out, during an all-night session with Dermer, precisely which Palestinian prisoners were to be released in exchange for the hostages.
A key moment came when Kushner and Witkoff held a brief meeting with Hamas’s chief negotiator Khalil al-Hayya, to reassure him that Israel would adhere to its commitments—that the return of the hostages wouldn’t simply be followed by an all-out IDF assault in Gaza.
This is the bit I really would not have expected to work, and I can’t commend Jared and Steve enough for succeeding with it. I can only attempt to explain it as: they truly left Hamas with no other option, and bereft of allies. (Hence my title here: “checkmate”.)
But in those last, fraught hours, the decisive factor was surely the pressure on al-Hayya [Hamas’s chief negotiator] from not only the Qataris, but *also the Egyptians and Turks*—hence Trump’s unexpectedly kind words about the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, during the Gaza Peace Summit in Egypt on Tuesday.
Lesson: Get an adversary’s allies/neutral parties on your side…
The second phase is harder to visualize. Point 9 seems especially far-fetched, with its “temporary transitional governance” of Gaza by a “technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” under the supervision of a new “Board of Peace,” supposedly chaired by Trump and with Blair as a member. Equally hard to imagine is a successful revitalization of the Palestinian Authority. But it is doubtful that Kushner and Witkoff worry too much about those castles in the air. Their main goal was just to “get it done”—the hostages out, the war stopped. And they succeeded.
One step at a time. It’s already a success, for the near-impossible it’s achieved in freeing the hostages. Let’s see, in time, on later-stage elements.
…one must give credit where it’s due. Real estate-ism turns out to be the ultimate realism. Not only are the hostages home, Jared Kushner’s grand design for peace in the Middle East has taken a Trumpian leap—not a Kissingerian step—closer to being realized.
Indeed.
Closing with a play on a line from Hamilton:
“Deal guys: They get the job done.”