WASHINGTON _ Jared Kushner hopes that a landmark peace agreement announced last week between Israel and the United Arab Emirates will spawn even greater diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East.
But the Palestinian cause may still be an obstacle to achieving similar pacts between Israel and the Arab world, Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, told McClatchy in an interview Monday.
Kushner helped mediate the Israeli-UAE negotiations that successfully concluded last week in the Abraham Accord, a peace agreement that will fully normalize relations between the two countries.
Israel has entered only two other peace agreements with Arab nations in the past, with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994.
Kushner has now set his sights on securing additional agreements between Israel and other Arab and Muslim nations, possibly including Oman, Bahrain, Sudan and Indonesia.
But the most symbolic of all would be an agreement between Israel, the only Jewish state, and Saudi Arabia, the custodian of Islam's two holiest sites in Mecca and Medina.
The Israel-UAE agreement is a significant diplomatic victory for an aide who weathered years of criticism for his approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians cut off contact with the Trump administration in 2017.
Kushner said that a decision by Palestinian Authority leaders to swiftly reject his Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, released in January, precipitated the UAE negotiations.
"When you look at the peace plan that we put out, the Palestinians rejected it before they saw what was in it. They were expecting it to be a one-state solution. But the reality was that it was a two-state solution," Kushner said, referring to a diplomatic plan that proposed a map for a future Palestinian state in Gaza, parts of southern Israel and roughly 70% of the West Bank. "It just showed the leaders in the Arab and Muslim world that the Palestinian leadership wasn't curious about accepting a pathway forward."
To secure its deal with the UAE, Israel agreed to temporarily shelve plans to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank _ territory that Palestinians claim as their own and insist is integral to a future, independent and cohesive Palestinian state.
"The urgency of going forward with the application of Israeli law (in the West Bank) was the catalyst for this breakthrough," Kushner said. "But I do think with Israel holding off now, they realize that by offering a Palestinian state, by agreeing to negotiate on the vision for peace, and by now showing that they could make peace, they now have put themselves in a position where they're not an international pariah.
"In fact, they have the higher moral ground, and I think the Palestinian leadership will have to decide what they want to do," Kushner continued. "They no longer have a block on what else is going to happen in the region. And I do think there will be a lot of exciting steps that will be taken."
Still, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had to make a politically challenging compromise for the UAE agreement in suspending annexation.
Experts say that even greater concessions may be necessary from Israel if it wants to normalize relations with Riyadh _ especially given the position of Saudi Arabia's king, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
"The king is very supportive of the Palestinian position," Simon Henderson, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said. "The kingdom sees itself as being the center of the Muslim world, and the king would not want to jeopardize that."
While Trump has established a relationship with King Salman, visiting Riyadh on his first foreign trip as president, Kushner has forged close ties with his son and heir, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known by the acronym MBS.
That relationship will only take the negotiations so far, Kushner said.
"Look, I believe the relationships matter, because it allows you to have free-wheeling discussions and wide-ranging discussions around a whole bunch of issues," he said. "It allows you to do joint brainstorming around unconventional topics knowing that things will stay private, and knowing that, if you give your commitment to something, you're not getting ahead of yourself _ you're only committing to things that can get done.
"With that being said, countries will only do things that are in their interests to do," Kushner added.
Kushner would not say whether he believed that Israel will have to compromise further than it did in the UAE agreement for a deal with Saudi Arabia, potentially offering a more definitive commitment not to annex parts of the West Bank.
After the deal was struck, Netanyahu said that he remains committed to applying Israeli law in West Bank territory in the future.
"I'm not sure you're looking for concessions from Israelis. I think that Israel is a very attractive country for people to have relations with," Kushner said. "It's just been, for whatever reason, historically, the international community has given a veto to the Palestinians on this progress."
But he acknowledged that a generational gap, in Saudi society and leadership, might make for unique challenges in the negotiations.
"Every deal is different," Kushner said, "but the reality is the older generation still romanticizes the Palestinian conflict through a very obsolete lens, and they're not very motivated to change their thinking, because the conventional thinking around this becomes so ingrained in a very unhealthy way.
"The younger generation sees it much more objectively for what it is," Kushner added. "They're more interested in how they can create economic opportunity for themselves and for their country."
