Kushner Should Recuse Himself From Pressuring Israel

There is something deeply troubling about the spectacle now unfolding in the Middle East.

On Saturday, an IDF tank drove over a Hamas-planted explosive near the “Yellow Line” in southern Gaza. No soldiers were hurt. In a separate incident the same day, Israeli troops shot and killed two Hamas operatives who had crossed the line to sabotage IDF equipment. The IDF labeled both a “grave” ceasefire violation.

The next day, Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and special envoy, sat down in Cairo with Hamas’s political chief Khalil al-Hayya — his first direct meeting with Hamas leadership since the ceasefire was signed last October. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Nickolay Mladenov of the Board of Peace joined him, alongside Qatari, Egyptian, and Turkish officials. Hamas’s public response afterward was not a disarmament pledge — it was a demand that the Board of Peace “compel” Israel to fulfill its own obligations and “halt killings and incursions.” Kushner is now slated to travel to Israel on Monday to press Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on “corresponding steps,” part of an American-backed Gaza withdrawal plan Netanyahu has resisted on security grounds.

That was not an isolated flare-up. IDF monitoring reports from the preceding week documented fourteen separate ceasefire violations — eleven classified as “developing threats,” along with weapons transfers and another planted explosive near the same line. Israeli officials say these reports exist precisely to give Washington a real-time picture of what Hamas is actually doing while Israel is asked to hold its fire. Netanyahu has cited them directly as his reason for rejecting the administration’s proposed withdrawal timeline.

That sequence raises a question Washington should be asking itself: why is Jared Kushner sitting down with Hamas’s leadership — the same organization the IDF says just planted a bomb under one of its tanks — and then heading to press Israel’s prime minister, rather than the other way around?

To be fair, this isn’t a case of pure inexperience. Kushner helped broker the original ceasefire and hostage framework that is currently holding, however imperfectly, and he was central to the Abraham Accords. He has real relationships with Gulf and Qatari officials that a career Foreign Service officer might not have, and Trump trusts him in a way he doesn’t trust the bureaucracy. Those are genuine assets in getting parties to a table.

Getting parties to the table is one skill. Determining whether an enemy has actually been disarmed is another. Kushner has never served in the State Department or in uniform, and has no background in military intelligence, deterrence theory, or the mechanics of monitoring an adversary’s compliance. The Yellow Line reports are exactly the kind of granular, ground-level intelligence that argues for humility from anyone parachuting in to referee the dispute.

Washington Doesn’t Fully Understand the Neighborhood

This isn’t only about Kushner. It reflects a broader, uncomfortable possibility: that Washington still does not fully understand the neighborhood in which it is trying to impose a new strategic order.

American diplomacy tends to run on an assumption of good-faith transaction: what do you want, what do we want, what can we trade? That framework can be dangerously inadequate where power, deterrence, humiliation, and religious and historical grievance often matter as much as the terms on paper.

Iran is the clearest example. The administration entered its confrontation with Tehran expecting that military pressure plus diplomacy would produce a fairly quick resolution. Months later, the war remains unresolved, and Washington has expanded outreach to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey in search of a way out. That outreach may well be necessary. It should also prompt some humility about how well Washington reads this region compared with a country that has spent generations defending itself in it.

None of this means U.S. pressure never works. Sustained American involvement helped produce the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, and even this ceasefire exists because Washington pushed hard for it. But it’s worth remembering what that first treaty actually did with Gaza: Egypt got Sinai back in full, while Gaza’s status was left, in the treaty’s own language, “without prejudice” — unresolved, with Cairo declining any formal role there. If Egypt, which controlled Gaza from 1948 to 1967 and has understood its security implications for generations, has consistently declined to resume responsibility for it, Washington should be cautious about assuming Gaza can be transformed simply by drawing a new political architecture on paper.

Pressure on Israel is not inherently illegitimate; allies lean on each other constantly, and Israel has sometimes needed that push. The question here isn’t whether the U.S. should ever press Israel. It’s whether the person doing the pressing, on this specific question, has the standing and the expertise the moment requires — and whether the pressure is calibrated to what Israel’s own intelligence is showing about Hamas’s actual behavior, rather than to Washington’s timeline.

An Inconsistent Standard for Allies

There’s also a harder-to-defend asymmetry in how the administration treats Israel relative to authoritarian partners in the region.

Consider Turkey. Trump has signaled openness to restoring Turkey’s access to the F-35 program, over Netanyahu’s explicit and public objection. Netanyahu warned that Turkey is “not exactly a model ally” and that arming it would upset a regional balance ultimately underwritten by Israeli air power. Trump dismissed the concern outright: “Nobody tells me what we should be selling.” Separately, his own State Department has told Congress that Turkey doesn’t currently meet the statutory conditions for such a sale, given its unresolved Russian S-400 air-defense system — so nothing is final, but Trump has made clear he wants it done, Netanyahu’s objections notwithstanding. Israeli defense officials worry Turkey’s technical sophistication would let it work around the safeguards that constrained Gulf states from acquiring the same aircraft.

Set that alongside the increasingly close engagement with Saudi Arabia, where Israeli strategic concerns are treated as one more item to be managed rather than a red line.

Israel’s own political calendar supplies a further illustration. Netanyahu faces re-election on October 27, and Trump has pointedly withheld an endorsement, reportedly telling associates that Netanyahu is “his own worst enemy” amid frustration over Iran, Lebanon, and Gaza. That withholding is Trump’s prerogative — no ally is owed a blank check of political support, and Netanyahu’s standing in the polls is his own to defend. But the contrast is instructive: Erdoğan in Turkey, the Saudi crown prince, Egypt’s president — the leaders Washington is simultaneously courting — face no comparable electoral test, and there is no rival for Trump to endorse instead even if he wanted to. Israel is the one government in the region whose leader must actually answer to voters, and that is precisely why Washington has a lever to use against it that it has against no other regional partner. The ally being leaned on hardest is the one where leaning actually works.

None of this means Washington should have no relationship with Ankara or Riyadh — American diplomacy has always required dealing with governments that don’t share American values. But there’s a real tension when warmer engagement with authoritarian governments and regional powers whose political systems and strategic assumptions differ fundamentally from America’s is paired with sharper pressure on the region’s one democratic ally, on the question that matters most to that ally’s physical security. If adversaries conclude that Israel is simply the easier party to lean on, that is a lesson with consequences well beyond this negotiation.

Iran Is the Bigger Picture

Hamas doesn’t exist in isolation. It has long functioned as part of Iran’s network of armed proxies. If Hamas survives this process as an intact military organization, Iran has every incentive to rebuild it: weapons, money, training, and command structure can all flow back in. Israel could end up facing a re-armed Iranian proxy on its southern border, having already surrendered the military leverage that was keeping that proxy in check.

That is difficult to reconcile with Washington’s own stated position that Iran is an existential threat. It’s a fair question — not a settled one — whether the administration’s urgency on Gaza is at least partly shaped by its inability to produce a clean resolution with Tehran; a deliverable Gaza framework would be a real political win at a moment when the Iran track has stalled. That’s a plausible pressure on the administration’s calendar, worth naming honestly as speculation rather than treating it as established fact. What isn’t speculative is the strategic contradiction of recognizing Iran as a major regional threat while contemplating an Israeli withdrawal that could leave an Iranian-backed terrorist organization capable of reconstituting itself.

Let Israel Decide What Is Safe

This is why Kushner should step back from personally pressuring Netanyahu on the withdrawal timeline — not because he has nothing to offer, and not simply because he’s the president’s son-in-law, but because he is not the right person to judge when Israel is secure enough to withdraw.

He won’t be the one deciding whether a suspicious movement near the border is smuggling or the start of rearmament. He won’t send his children to school in rocket range. Israelis will do both, and Israel’s elected government answers to them, not to Washington’s calendar.

The United States has plenty to offer here — intelligence, weapons, reconstruction funding, diplomatic cover — and it can make its case forcefully through people equipped to make it: professional diplomats and military officials who understand deterrence, not envoys whose skill set is closing a deal. Washington should keep demanding Hamas’s full, verifiable disarmament, keep working to stop Iran from rebuilding its proxies, and keep dealing with regional powers without mistaking authoritarian cooperation for democratic partnership.

But it should not substitute its own impatience, or its own political timeline, for Israeli security judgment. This is not about defending Netanyahu personally — it is about whether Israel, not Washington, gets to decide what constitutes acceptable risk. The tank on the Yellow Line was a warning. Washington should listen to it before asking Israel to move the line.