Think about how much time has been spent by officials in the most senior offices of the

American government, and by presidents themselves on the conflict between the Arab states and

Israel. It is an enormous amount of time, team after team, administration after administration,

year after year.

And when you zoom out from the White House and its National Security Council staff

and look at the different parts of the executive branch, the departments of state,

defense, commerce, treasury, the intelligence

community. Then look at Congress and its committees. Then zoom out even more, look at the hundreds

of professors, analysts, researchers, and specialists who spend their days and nights thinking about

how to break the logjam between the Arab states and Israel. When you look at all of that,

you're talking about on a weekly basis, thousands and thousands of hours of working time

dedicated to this one particular political conflict. The Abraham Accord that brings Israel and

the United Arab Emirates into normalized relations is perhaps the most

significant breakthrough in that conflict in the past quarter century, and it did so by ignoring

a great deal of conventional thinking about the Middle East, about the ordered priorities of

Arab nations, and by abandoning some of the most entrenched maxims of international politics.

The Abraham Accord was arrived at in an unconventional way, and the effort was led on the American

side by someone who, up until five years ago, had almost no experience in politics.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. This week,

I sat down with senior advisor to the President of the United States, Jared Kushner. In our

conversation, I don't ask particular questions about policy, about Turkey, or the sale of F-35s.

Instead, my goal in this conversation was to try and understand Kushner's worldview, how he

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