Many of us, passionately following the recent Middle East diplomatic events – culminating on Monday 13 October with the signing of the cease-fire in Sharm – have asked ourselves more than one question about one man.

And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, or Benjamin Netanyahu, or Egyptian President Al-Sisi. The man in question, born in Livingstone 44 years ago, is called Jared Kushner. And he is the secret director of American strategies in the Holy Land and the Gulf.

Childhood between the Torah and ‘The wolf of Wall Street’.

First of four children. Jared grew up in a second-generation Orthodox Jewish family. His grandmother Rae, born in 1923 in Novogrudok (present-day Belarus) suffered Nazi persecution during the Holocaust years, only managing to escape the round-ups through an underground tunnel dug by the Bielski partisan forces in 1943. After a year of hiding in the Naliboki forest, his liberation at the hands of the Soviets arrived. Rae moves to Budapest, where she marries Yossel, a former carpenter she met in hiding. With him, thanks to the help of distant relatives in the States, she moved to New York in 1949 .

Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, is the first-born son of the immigrant couple.

When examining the figure of Jared Kushner, one cannot in any way disregard his family heritage. One could not otherwise understand the yeshiva-like studies complementary to high-level financial studies pursued by the Kushner brothers in their college years and later at Harvard.

For years, the family dominated the New York real estate market through the Kushner Real Estate Company and the Kushner Companies, run by Charles and his brother Murray. Fresh out of college, in 2005 Jared faced thearrest of his father Charles, who had confessed to tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal donations to the Democratic Party.

From then on, at the age of 24, he became the main shareholder in the family business.

The Trump meeting

During those years, in which he maintained the bond with his father, he met Ivanka Trump, the second child of Donald and Ivana.

In 2009 came the wedding – of Jewish ritual – at the Bedminster golf club. It is now known that in the weeks leading up to the ceremony the tycoon’s daughter converted to the Jewish cult according to the Ghiur, adopting the Jewish name Yael.

Marrying the choice is Jared’s father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, not yet politically committed but already a good business partner for the Kushner Company. The two develop a good relationship, differing particularly in only one aspect: the political colour supported economically. Already a staunch Republican Trump, always a Democrat Kushner .

The tycoon’s candidacy and the cyber campaign

In 2015 the turning point. After scenically descending the shiny escalators of Trump Tower, Donald announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. At that point, the tycoon ‘s entire family and business inner circle mobilised in the ‘Make America Great Again’ campaign. And Jared is not to be outdone, indeed.

He spearheaded his father-in-law’s social advertising campaign, creating a sophisticated system that , according to CNN , played a decisive role in the 2016 election victory.

In a secret hub in San Francisco, Kushner together with almost 100 people (engineers, technicians, managers ‘subcontracted’ from Silicon Valley) managed the entire data collection and electorate targeting of the campaign. The main guideline: ‘unify fundraising, messaging and advertising’. What paid off the most was the use of micro targeting on Facebook, in a dynamic process capable of generating effective personalised ads to more than 100,000 users of the platform per day. In the model, machine learning and rationalisation drove the spending choices of the Trumpian election machine. Lean but decisive spending, weighted by software and trend indexes to target swing voters in swing states. Hence one of the keys behind Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, unmatched in the popular vote.

The councillor of the ‘Agreements of Abraham

Once elected, Donald rewarded the efforts of Jared Kushner by appointing him ‘Senior Advisor to the US President’, together with his wife Ivanka. Far from accepting formal political appointments because of the problems that ‘conflict of interest’ laws would create, the couple nevertheless act as key figures in the first Trump administration.

In particular, Jared is assigned the giant task of ‘pacifying the Middle East area’. Faced with the titanic goal, since 2017 Kushner has been activating an important political, business and diplomatic network aimed at creating a channel for dialogue between the State of Israel and Palestinian forces. The efforts come up against the niet of Hamas and ANP to the ‘Peace to Prosperity Plan’ proposed by the Kushner team to regional actors, guilty of moving around an economic and not a political logic.

It was precisely the financial premises that did not work in the Holy Land that guided the conclusion of the watershed treaty of the modern Middle East chessboard: the ‘Abrahamic Accords’.

Signed by Israel, Bahrain, the UAE and the US, the understanding provides for the normalisation of diplomatic relations between the Jewish state and the Arab countries, reciprocated by theopening of favourable trade fronts; all under the auspices of the US.

Private equity between the Gulf, Miami and Tel Aviv

Most critics have described the director of the operation as a ‘peace merchant’, but it is a fact that the Accords were a game-changer eventin Arab-Israeli relations. A factor for stability in the area, but evidently also the main motive for the Hamas terrorist attack on Israeli territory on 7 October 2023.

Following the economicist logic that has always guided his actions, once his father-in-law’s presidential term is over, Kushner founds the private equity firm Affinity Partners. Thanks to the deep network of acquaintances he developed alongside Trump, he managed to gather substantial Middle Eastern investments – above all from the Saudi Arabian Sovereign Wealth Fund – distributing them over a fruitful portfolio of international investments.

The pivot of the group, politically and economically, is the Israeli insurance giant Phoenix, through which Kushner makes himself a vector for the injection of Saudi capital into the Israeli market. A less romantic way of understanding politics, but still political.

Blair and the ‘Gaza affair’

It was precisely from common interests in the Middle East that the relationship between Kushner and Tony Blair was born.

The two met for the first time in 2010 at a private event, but it was during their time in the White House that they intensified their relationship. Indeed, Jared has always relied on Blair’s advice on Arab-Israeli issues, becoming a fellow in the Tony Blair Institute after his tenure .

When in Miami the special envoy for the Middle East of the second Trump administration,Steve Witkoff, asks Kushner for support in the mediation work on Gaza, theintuition to involve Blair is immediate.

So it was that the TBI – generously financed by tycoon Larry Ellison – began work on a plan comprising an initial ceasefire, followed by political transition and economic redevelopment of the area. Stripping it of the President’s real estate extravaganzas, the two presented the first draft in Washington on 27 August. The genesis of the ‘twenty-point plan’ retraces Kushner’s modus operandi: involvement of the Gulf’s top economic partners, rapprochement of Arab and Israeli interests, isolation of terrorists with an ‘honourable’ way out.

Political sirens on the business horizon

The events of the past week represented a real triumph for Trump-Witkoff-Kushner.

The release of the Israeli hostages and the retreat of theIDF into Gaza City seemed a mirage until a few days ago. Instead, mercantilist diplomacy of the ‘Kushnerian’ type, who as mentioned in the incipit is not by chance an orthodox capitalist Jew, has borne fruit.

Now, increasingly loud political sirens are ringing for Jared. A string of Republican donors seems to be forming in favour of his post-Trump candidacy. The scenario would, of course, not displease much of the presidential family either, but at the moment all is silent. And Jared adamantly denies any political interest.

After having succeeded in relocating theAmerican diplomatic epicentre from Washington to Miami, why return to the fray and move?

Its history – family, business, religious – suggests that it just doesn’t make sense. But nothing is set in stone. Can that young Jew who made Arabs and Israelis talk be president one day? Jared will calculate to the millimetre all the possibilities, and rest assured that he will go where logic – not the heart – takes him.