I'm not saying they don't exist. But I'd like to think that few people see financial opportunity in human suffering. One of those few seems to include Jared Kushner.
As I wrote, Kushner—ever the aspirational foreign policy expert with a penchant for a good conflict of interest—appears to see something desirable amid the catastrophic bombing and imminent famine that overwhelms Gaza. Here's what he told Harvard recently:
"Gaza's waterfront property. It could be very valuable to—if people would focus on kind of building up, you know, livelihoods. You think about all the money that’s gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions—if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done."
Despicable, no? Kushner's comments—which you can watch in full here—later included a recommendation to "bulldoze something in the Negev" to relocate Palestinians, are a blinking red warning of what we could expect if Jared's daddy-in-law returns to the White House.
As for the current White House, my colleague Noah Lanard spoke to a former Israeli peace negotiator about what the Biden administration could do if the president were truly committed to ending the devastation. It's a great read, one that offers real policy solutions. But this quote is staying with me today:
“We need to stick to our own values," Robert Ford, a former US ambassador to Algeria and Syria who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, said. "If our values say, ‘Starving children is way beyond the pale,’ then we need to react to that and take stern action, whether or not it changes Israeli policy."
—Inae Oh