President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner spoke at the Saban Forum, hosted by the Brookings Institute in Washington DC on Sunday, addressing President Trump’s push for a regional peace deal in the Middle East.
Speaking with Saban Forum founder and media mogul Haim Saban on the last day of the 2017 forum, Kushner expressed optimism regarding the possibility of reaching a comprehensive peace deal between Israel and the Arab world, adding that such a deal was a top priority of the president, who is “personally” invested in the issue.
"The president has a very long career of accomplishing things that a lot of people said was impossible,” said Kushner.
“The most recent example of that is the election, where a lot of people thought that his election was impossible. And the president took a very unconventional approach towards running and was ultimately successful with that."
Despite claims by experts and advisers that the time was not ripe for negotiations, Kushner says, President Trump has pushed the issue, and remains optimistic a deal can be reached.
"When we started looking at the process of making peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the first thing that a lot of people told us was that it wasn't the right time. The conditions weren't right after years of distrust, we were really wasting our time to do it."
"[With] the approach we've taken, Barak Ravid wrote recently, 'the president has injected peace back into the discussions'. And that's something we're very proud of because we do think it is achievable and we think that there is a lot of reasons why this is a time why it should happen."
"When you look at the region, you have several issues that of great concern to people. You have Iran and their nuclear ambitions and their expansive regional mischief. You have ISIS, which this administration has done a really great job of beating back and almost defeating at this point. You have the ideology and the extremism, which you see a lot of the leaders of the Muslim world try to restore the religion to what was...and then you have the Israeli-Palestinian issue. I think that if we're going to try and create more stability in the region as whole, you have to solve this issue. So the president sees this as something that has to be solved, that he very much wants to be solved, and it’s something that he's personally put a lot of time into."