Cold Water on the Bahrain Conference

As Jared Kushner convenes the Trump administration’s Palestinian-investment conference in Bahrain, analysts have showered cold water on his approach. It’s not clear that a political plan will ever emerge, Muriel Asseburg and Hugh Lovatt write at Foreign Policy—and “without a firm political marker to guide international investments, there is no guarantee that the Trump administration will seek to fund and support projects that genuinely help Palestinians or bolster a two-state solution.”
Past efforts to inject cash into Palestinian territories have not produced results, Amira Hass writes in Haaretz—they’ve amounted to charity, to “mitigate the economic disasters that Israel has caused”—deeming Kushner’s investment plan a “ship in the desert.” The Middle East Institute’s Gerald Feierstein goes so far as to suggest that attendees in Bahrain are mostly there to curry favor with the Trump administration—not to help solve Palestinians’ enduring predicament.
Amid all this criticism, Kushner’s approach does have its supporters, from The Jerusalem Post, which criticizes Palestinian leadership for boycotting the conference, to Israel’s UN ambassador.