President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, faced plenty of skepticism heading into a two-day conference last week in Bahrain focused on transforming the Palestinian economy. The gathering was a precursor of and complement to the Trump administration’s much-awaited peace plan, which seems to have been postponed in light of a new round of Israeli elections in September. The Palestinian Authority boycotted the Bahrain conference, charging that Kushner’s economic plan would seek to buy off Palestinian political aspirations by financial means. Given the circumstances, the Arab states in attendance thought it was not wise to invite Israeli government officials. Some Arab countries, in a sign of their ambivalence, did not send their finance ministers, relying instead on deputies. He added that by inviting finance ministers, not foreign ministers, and members of business communities, he would be working with people who see the problem “the same way that I do, which is that it actually is a solvable problem economically.” Kushner’s point was that the traditional way of looking at the Israeli-Palestinian issue is to zoom in to the core policy matters known as “final status” issues such as borders, Jerusalem and refugees, while treating economic issues as an afterthought. But on closer inspection, Kushner’s approach is more like the old paradigm than he may realize. The Trump administration and its critics share a common all-or-nothing approach to the Middle East, and when it’s all or nothing in the Middle East, it’s nothing.
The administration has sequenced its peace plan so the economic dimension was unveiled in Bahrain. It chose to roll out the less-controversial economic and quality-of-life ideas first, but the administration insists that these economic proposals hinge on accepting the political part, which is why their plan may hit a wall. There is a reason that Kushner cannot veer from the straitjacket of the all-or-nothing approach, which has been tried at least three times before in Israeli-Palestinian relations and failed repeatedly. The Trump administration’s method in this conflict, as it is to others, is to apply maximal pressure: You get nothing unless you agree to their deal. The White House’s inflexible approach means that if the final-status ideas offered by the political portion of the plan don’t gain support, the economic package goes down the tubes. The linkage is almost certainly doomed. If Kushner in Bahrain had instead suggested a few immediately achievable, no-strings-attached, direly needed economic projects for the Palestinians, he would have signaled a new focus — and the arrival of a new paradigm for the Trump administration.
