Despite the recent settlement, Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner, both of whom have significant financial interests involving Qatar, the state sponsor of Hamas, went on 60 Minutes. They did it because they knew they would find a friendly audience to bash Israel.
Witkoff and Kushner, understandably, condemned Israel for striking Hamas assets in Qatar since that is where their capital is.
Anyone still holding out for the notion that Kushner was friendly, got to listen to him declare that, “The biggest message that we’ve tried to convey to the Israeli leadership now is that, now that the war is over, if you want to integrate Israel with the broader Middle East, you have to find a way to help the Palestinian people thrive and do better.” Because shoving endless billions at them and maintaining their infrastructure just wasn’t doing it. It’s Israel’s job to make the Islamic terrorists trying to destroy it thrive.
Witkoff, pulling out his dead son shtick as often as Biden, spoke of commiserating with Khalil al-Hayya, a Hamas leader, about his dead son. “We expressed our condolences to him for the loss of his son. He mentioned it. And I told him that I had lost a son, and that we were both members of a really bad club, parents who have buried children.”
In 1945, Germany lost its leader and in 1963, America lost its leader, and you would have to be a real Witkoff to equate the two.
But Jared Kushner thought this was just great.
Not mentioned is that Khalil al-Hayya had hailed the Oct 7 massacres as “a source of pride for our people… to be passed down from generation to generation” and vowed to destroy Israel.
Witkoff tried the Biden son routine out on the Israelis and got nowhere, and then whined that they were “playing the victim”.
Things got worse when Kushner insisted that the search for the bodies of the hostages was being conducted by Hamas in good faith. And then claimed that there is “a very intense effort on behalf of our joint center with Israel and with the mediators in order to convey whatever information Israel has on the whereabouts of the bodies to the mediators and to Hamas– in order to retrieve them.”
We know at this point that there is no deal. J.D. Vance has said that there’s no infrastructure in place to disarm Hamas and hopes that at some point, Muslim countries will get around to creating one. For now, Witkoff and Co. are pressuring Israel not to respond to Hamas attacks which means we’re right back to where things were under Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden with calls for Israel not to respond or to respond.
This state of affairs can only last for so long.
