Israeli-Saudi Normalization

We did a lot of this conversation before the Hamas attack on Israel, and we decided to sit down again and finish the discussion to address the current situation which is still developing. If I may allow me to summarize the situation as it stands today, it's morning Monday, October 9th. On Saturday, October 7th at 6:30 AM Israel time, Hamas fired thousands of rockets into Southern Israel. The rocket attacks served as cover for a multi-pronged infiltration of Israel territory by over 1000 Hamas militants. This is shortly after at 7:40 AM. The Hamas militants went door to door in border towns killing civilians and taking captives, including women and children. In response to this, Israeli Air Force began carrying out strikes in Gaza, also fighting on the ground in Israel to clear out Hamas militants from Israel territory and preparing to mobilize Israeli troops for potential ground attack on Hamas and Gaza. Now, of course, this is what it appears to be right now, and this along with other things might change because the situation is still developing. The IDF is ordering civilian residents of Gaza to evacuate their homes for their safety. Benjamin Netanyahu declared war in several statements and warned Israelis to brace themselves for a long and difficult war. Just today, Israeli ministers ordered a "complete siege of Gaza interrupting supplies of electricity, food, water, and fuel from Israel to Gaza." As of now, October 9th, the death toll is over 1200 people and over 130 hostages taken to Gaza by Hamas. As I said, the events are rapidly unfolding, so these numbers will sadly increase, but hopefully our words here can at least in part, speak to the timeless underlying currents of the history and as you write about the power dynamics of the region. For people who don't know, Gaza is a 25 miles long, six miles wide strip of territory along the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Israel on the east and north and Egypt on the southwest. It's densely populated, about 2.3 million people, and there's been a blockade of Gaza by Israel and Egypt since 2007 when Hamas took power. I could just summarize that Hamas is a Palestinian militant group which rules the Gaza Strip. It originated in 1988, and it came to power in Gaza in 2006. As part of its charter, it's sworn to the destruction of Israel, and it is designated by the United States, European Union, UK, and of course Israel as a terrorist group.

Given that context, what are your feelings as a human being and what is your analysis as the former senior advisor to the president under the Trump administration of the current situation in Israel and Gaza? I think you did an excellent job of summarizing a lot of the context, but watching what's unfolded over the last 48 hours has been truly heartbreaking to see. We're still in the early stages of what's developing, but seeing the images on X of militants, terrorists going door to door with machine guns gunning down innocent civilians, seeing beheaded Israeli soldiers, seeing young 20 year olds at a rave, a dance party to celebrate peace with militants flying in and then shooting machine guns to kill people indiscriminately, seeing young children captive and held prisoner, seeing 80-year old grandmothers, a Holocaust survivor also being taken captive. These are just images and actions that we have not seen in this world since 9/11. This is a terror attack on the scale of which we have not seen, and it's been incredibly hard for a lot of people to comprehend.

I have a lot of questions to ask you about the journey towards this historic progress towards peace with Abraham Accords, of course. But first on this situation to step back and some of the history, is there things about the history of Hamas and Gaza that's important to understand what is happening now? Just your comments, your thoughts, your understanding of Hamas. I think you did an excellent job, Lex, of really giving the summary. Just a couple of things, maybe I'll add to it, is that Hamas was originally founded from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is a group that's caused a lot of issues in the region. They've attacked Israel many times in the past. There's a lot of discussion about how Israel is an occupying power. Well, in Gaza, in 2005, they withdrew from all the land, and then they say, Israel's an apartheid state. Well, Israel then gave governance of the region to the Palestinians, and then what's happened is the Palestinian people's lives have now gone down, not up since then. I will say that under Hamas' leadership in Gaza, the people who have suffered the most are the Palestinian people and I see and I've watched cries throughout my time in government from people saying we want to see the Palestinian people live a better life. I agree with those people. I think that the Palestinian people in Gaza are essentially hostages.

What role does Iran play in this war, in this connection to Hamas? Can you speak to the connection between Hamas and Iran that's important to understand, especially as this most recent attack unfolds? Sure. The correlation, there's reports that Iran is behind the attack. Hamas has thanked Iran for their support, and it's been very well known that Iran supports the destruction of the state of Israel. I won't say Iran as a country. I'll talk about Iran in the leadership. There's actually a beautiful thing I saw on the internet where at one of the soccer games in Iran, they were trying to rally support for the Hamas terror attacks and a lot of people in the crowds were chanting FU to the regime because I think the Iranian people, the Persian people generally are peace-loving people who don't want to see this focus on destruction and annihilation. But you saw this in 2015, 2016, when the Iranian government had resources, the region was less safe.

The name of this operation, of the Hamas operation is Al-Aqsa Flood, referring to the Al-Aqsa Mosque. How much of this attack is about the Al-Aqsa Mosque? In actuality, I don't think any of it is, but the Al-Aqsa Mosque is something that all of the Shia Jihadists have used for years in order to justify their actions that are aggressive towards Israel. This is something, I'll maybe even take a step back and go through when I was working initially in my first year on the Peace Plan, I was doing a lot of listening. Quite frankly, a lot of what people were saying to me didn't make sense. The reason why I was trying to figure out, they were talking about sovereignty over Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is a mosque that's built in the Holy of Holies, the Haram al-Sharif in Israel, where the [Foreign language 00:15:49], the Holy temple was built in a very religious place after the Temple was destroyed. Then there was a big mosque built there, and it's one of the more holy places in Islam now.

As you said, you helped make major strides towards peace in the Middle East with the Abraham Accords. Can you describe what it took to accomplish this, and maybe this will help us understand what broke down and led to the tragedy this week? Yeah. I always believed in foreign policy. I learned very quickly that the difference between a political deal and a business deal is that in a business deal, you have a problem set, you come to a conclusion, and then if you buy or sell something, you either have more cash or you have a company. More to do, less to do. Political problem set is very different, where the conclusion of a problem set is essentially the beginning of a new paradigm. When I would think about how do you move pieces around the board, you couldn't say let me just solve the problem. You have to think about what happens the day after the signing, and how do you create a paradigm that has positivity to it.

I would love to ask about leadership, especially on the side of the United States. What has the current administration, the Biden administration, done different than the Trump administration, as you understand, that may have contributed to the events we saw this week. All I can talk about are where we left them. We left them a place where they had tremendous momentum in the Middle East. I met with them during the transition and said, "Look, we even got the Qatar-Saudi conflict done, which was a big... No peace between Israel and Saudi would've been possible without that so we even got that done in our lame duck period. They came in and they said, "Look, we want to focus on the three Cs, which is Covid, climate change, and China." I said, "That's great, but the Middle East we have in an amazing place right now. It's stable, there's momentum. Iran is basically broke." We put such crippling sanctions on Iran that they went from about, I think it was 2.6 million barrels a day of oil they were selling to about 100,000 under Trump. Their foreign currency reserves were basically depleted and they were broke.

We talk quite extensively about the value of trust in negotiation and just working with leaders, which I think is a fascinating conversation. And you've taught me a lot about that. Let me ask you about the end here. What are the various trajectories this war can take, in your view? What are some of the end states, as you've said, which are desirable and are achievable? I mentioned this earlier, but whenever I would get a problem set in government, I'd always think through from a first principle's perspective, what's the logical outcome? And forget about all the reasons why it can't happen. That's what everyone in governments always rush to talk about. But I do think here, number one, Israel has to have a secure environment where they don't feel threatened from Gaza. And number two is, the people in Gaza need to have an environment where they feel like they can live a better life and have opportunities. That's the end state. So I think that the international community should come together. I do think that the people who are usually putting blame on Israel should now realize that maybe they've been a little bit harsh here, and that Hamas has been as big a threat, if not an even bigger threat than Israel has been saying.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Bibi, somebody you've gotten to know well in negotiation, in conversation. He has made statements, he has declared war, he has spoken about this potentially being a long and difficult war. What have you learned about the mind in Benjamin Netanyahu that might be important to understand here in this current war? Bibi is definitely a historic figure. I'd meet with a lot of different world leaders, and some of them, I would say, they're very, very special, transformational figures. And some, I would say, how the hell is this person running a country? Bibi is somebody who has done a lot for the state of Israel, he has a tremendous understanding of the security apparatus. He has tremendous global relations. So for a crisis like this, I think Bibi's the leader you want, if you're Israel, to be in that seat. I think he's ambitious in what he's going to look to achieve. He understands his role in history as somebody who's helped strengthen Israel economically, militarily.

Let me switch gears here and just zoom out and look at our society and our public discourse at the moment. What do you make of the scale and nature of the Palestinian support online in response to this situation? This is something I've observed over the years since I got involved with the Israeli-Palestinian issue with a lot of interest. I think a lot of the people who are pledging support for the Palestinian people, I think that they want to see the Palestinian people live a better life. And I actually agree with them in that regard. Unfortunately, I think many of them are incredibly ill-informed as to the facts on the ground. I think all of the people who are advocating online for the Palestinian people, who are going to these marches in support of them, I think they'd be best served if they really care about effectuating the outcome of joining with Israel right now and directing their anger towards the Hamas leadership.

Pragmatic question about the future. Do you hope Donald Trump wins in 2024? And how can his administration help bring peace to the Middle East? When Donald Trump was president, we had a peaceful world. Everyone said if he was elected, we would have World War III. Meanwhile, he gets elected, and he not only is the first president in decades to not start any wars, he's making peace deals. He's making trade deals. He's working with our allies, getting them to pay their fair share in NATO. He's having a dialogue with China, with Russia. He's weakening Iran. So I do think that the job he did as a foreign policy president was tremendous. I think now more and more people are starting to recognize that. Again, under President Biden, this is the second war that's broken out in the world. And when you have a weak American leadership, the world becomes a less safe place. So my hope and prayers are that President Trump is reelected and that he's able to then restore order and calm and peace and prosperity to the world .

What is the best way to defeat hate in the world? Hate is a very powerful force, and it's much easier to hate people you don't know. It's funny, when I was working on prison reform, one of the most interesting people I met was a reverend, actually down in Texas, who negotiated the first truce between the Bloods and the Crips. Two of the notorious gangs in America, in prison. And I was very excited to meet him. When I met him, I said, "Well, how'd you do it?" And he said, "It was very simple." He says, "I got all the guys together and I had a tremendous amount of barbecue brought in." He says, "And I got the meeting." He says, "No drinking." He says, "Drinking sometimes gets people a little bit more against each other." He says, "But I got a meeting and they started sitting down together and they started saying, 'You know what? You're just like me.'" And all of a sudden, they started finding areas where they were more together.

If I look back on the different negotiations I had when I was in government, either with leaders of countries, with representatives of leaders, or even with members of Congress to pass legislation. The most important thing I would draw back to would be trust. I think getting to know each other, understanding what was motivating the other party to get to the outcome. And making them feel like you weren't going to use whatever information they gave you to benefit yourself at the expense of them is probably what I would call table stakes to have a shot at accomplishing anything that was hard in negotiation. After that, I would say taking maybe a first principles approach to what the outcome of whatever problem you're looking to solve should be. Now, you have different kinds of negotiations. I always tried to create a framework in the negotiation where it wasn't me against you. It was always, let's agree on what the outcome is that we're trying to accomplish. Let's all sit on the same side of the table and say, "We want to get to this outcome. How do we get there?" Really trying to create a roadmap. So once you understand the destination you want to, get to the endpoint, then you'd have to work backwards and really try to put-

First of all, you're incredibly well-read. I've gotten to know you and I've gotten to know Ivanka, and the book recommendation list is just incredible. So first of all, thank you for that. You told me about The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. It's a book on World War I, and I went down a whole rabbit hole there. She's an incredible historian. But anyway, there's a bunch of stuff you learned from that, but one of the things you told me is it influenced your general approach to diplomacy of just picking up the phone and giving it a try. So as opposed to planning and strategizing, just pick up the phone.

Anyway. This conversation quickly turned to the ridiculous. But to do another book reference, you mentioned the book Thirteen Days in September by Lawrence Wright, in discussing all the work you've done in Israel and the Middle East. I just want to ask you sort of the interesting aspect of that book, which is the influence of the personalities and personal relationships on these negotiations. You kind of started to allude to that with the trust, but how much do the personalities matter in this? So going from North Korea to the Middle East here, to within Congress and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, completely in every way. That's an incredible book, and it's a very entertaining read. It has obviously a lot of good historical context on some of the key players, whether it was on Anwar Sadat or Menachem Begin or Jimmy Carter and Cy Vance, and a lot of the others who were involved with those negotiations.

Is that the biggest thing you took from your business background, is that just be really results focused? It was just the only way to be. If I was giving up a nice life in New York, and if I was giving up the stuff that I really enjoyed, the company that I'd helped build and the life that I was enjoying in order to do government, I was going there to make a difference and we had to focus on it.

Let's go to some difficult topics. You've wrote in the book about your experience with some very low points in government. You've been attacked quite a bit. One of the ones that stands out is the accusations of collusion with Russia. And you tell in the book, in general, this whole story, this whole journey, on a personal level, on a sort of big political level. Can you tell me some aspects of this story? Sure. So to give the listeners some context, and people remember this now, it's been kind of swept away because it turned out not to be true, was that after President Trump won the election in 2016, instead of the media saying, "Oh, we were wrong," because again, everyone thought he had zero chance of winning. They said, "Okay, well, we couldn't have been wrong. It must have been the Russians who worked with him."

Yeah. You said that you and Ivanka, this intense time brought you two together and helped you deal with the intensity, with the chaos of it all. So I think it was just number one, knowing that you had a partner and knowing that you had somebody who loved you and believed in you. I think that was definitely by far the biggest of anything. And-

And every time I travel across the world, there's always to meet somebody from New Jersey and you give a nod of a deep understanding. It's the cradle of civilization in many ways. Okay, so back, I don't know how we got there. Oh, all right. Going back to the low points, you mentioned your father, if we could just return there. Even just the personal story of your father that you write about, all the betrayal that happened in his life and then how he responded to that betrayal and he was after that arrested. Can you just tell the story? Sure. So my father is an amazing person and we grew up in New Jersey. My father was a big developer, a great entrepreneur, built an amazing business. He got into a dispute with two of his siblings and through that dispute, they basically took all of the documents in his company, went to the US attorney's office and turned from a civil dispute into a real public dispute. My father did something wrong in that process. And when he got arrested for that, he basically said, "You know what? What I did was wrong." And he took his medicine and he did it like a man. And he said, "I'm going to go to prison." And he did that for a year. And so for me, that was a very challenging time in the family. Obviously, it was a shock. It was a total change.

Your father was betrayed, perhaps over money by siblings. Is there some deeper wisdom you can draw from that? Have you seen money or perhaps power cloud people's judgment? Oh, 100%. 100%.

So you mentioned the importance of trust at the very beginning of the conversation. From the outsider perspective, just maybe a dark question, which is, how much trust is there in Washington? The flip side of that, how much backstabbing is there? Can you form long-term relationships with people on a basic human level where you know you're not going to be betrayed, screwed over, manipulated for again, going back to the old money and power? The answer is yes, and the answer is no. So I made some incredible friends, lifelong friends through my time in Washington, but the way I think about it from politics and I think in geopolitics as well, is I would say that politicians really don't have friends. Politicians have interests. And as long as you follow that rule, you should be able to know how to rate where your relationship with a given person falls in the spectrum. But I do think I was the exception. I did make some tremendous friends. And again, I'd go back to what I said about negotiation where, when you're in a situation where there's really nothing in it for any of you personally, but you're in a foxhole together and nobody in Washington can get anything done by themselves. So you have people coming from all different backgrounds, all different experiences, all different geographies coming together, agreeing on an objective, creating a plan, and then every day rowing together in order to get it done. It's a beautiful thing and you really learn what people are about.

I'd love to go back and talk to you about the Middle East, because there's so many interesting components to this. Let's talk about Saudi Arabia, and first let me ask you about MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince. So you've gotten to know him pretty well, you've become friends with him. What's he like as a human being? Just on a basic human level, what's he like? So for the listeners, Mohammed bin Salman is now the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. He has risen to that position over the last couple of years and he's been a tremendous reformer for the country. He's gone in and he's really modernized the economy. He's put a lot more investment into the country. He's marginalized the religious police and he's really done a good job to bring modernization, a lot of reform. So he is been a great reformer. What he's like as a person is he's very high energy. He's got tremendous candor power, very, very smart, incredibly well-read.

If we can go back to the incredible work with Abraham Accords and Israel and the Middle East, first, the big question about peace. Why is it so difficult to achieve peace in this part of the world between Israel and Palestine and between Israel and the other countries in the Middle East? Or any sort of peace like agreements? If I had to give you the most simple answer, I would say that it's structural. If you go back to the incentive structure of different leaders, this whole peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, and again, I've gotten criticized for saying this, but it's what I believe, so I'm going to say it, is that the incentive structure was all wrong. When I went before the United Nations Security Council to discuss the peace plan that I proposed, which again was more of an operational plan, and it was a pragmatic plan, it was over 180 pages in detail. In politics, people don't like putting forward detail because it just gives a lot of places for you to get criticized on. Nobody actually criticized the detail of my plan. They just criticized the fact that it was coming from us and didn't want to debate the merits of the operational pieces of it.

And there is a big foundation on which that framework can succeed, which I think is, in general, the idea of Arab Israeli normalization. So that's where Abraham Accords come in. Can you tell the story of that? Sure. So it's an amazing thing. And I sit here today, somebody not in government, and every day I see another flight that goes between, or I see an Israeli student studying at a university in Dubai or a new synagogue opening up in Abu Dhabi. And it just gives me such... Or Bahrain. It gives me such tremendous pride to see all of the progress that's been made.

Maybe this is a good place to ask. In working closely with Donald Trump, what, in your sense, looking into the mind of the man, what's the biggest strength of Donald Trump as a leader? I would say his unpredictability. I think that, as a leader, he consumes a ton of information. He doesn't like to be managed or have his information filtered. So he'll speak to a lot of people to draw his information himself. He's very pragmatic. I don't see him as terribly ideological. I see him as somebody who's about results. I think he wants to deliver results. And I think ultimately, he's an incredible fighter. He's a big counter puncher, but he also wants to get along with people. And that's probably the biggest surprise that people found with him. I mean, you look at even situations like... I would always tell people, "If you disagree with him, don't go on television and criticize him. Just pick up the phone and call him, and go see him, and he'll talk to you about it." He may not agree with you.

Like you said, no new wars. This makes me think if Donald Trump won the presidency, what the current situation in Ukraine would look like. But let me just ask you, zoom out and ask you broadly, do you think the war in Ukraine could have been avoided? And what do you think it takes to bring it to an end? I think 100%, it would've been avoided. Not 99%. President Trump, for four years, had no problems with Russia. We were arming Ukraine, but we were working with Russia. And again, the first two years, we had a little bit of issue working with Russia because they were accused of colluding with us since we had to go through that investigation. But in the second two years, we were trying to focus Russia on what are the areas where we can collaborate together. I think Russia, we thought it was in their strategic advantage to play US and China against each other because of the way that everything was done before. They were stuck with China, but not getting a lot for it. Under Bush, they took Georgia. Under Obama, they took Crimea. Under Trump, there was no problems. And then under Biden, unfortunately, I think they misplayed a couple of things, which I think provoked Russia to go forward. Still no excuse to do what they did. I think that the invasion was a terrible thing and should not have occurred.

Let me ask, since you helped set up phone calls between Donald Trump, Putin, and the King of Saudi Arabia, if I were to interview Putin, what advice would you give on how to get a deep understanding of the human being? So I didn't deal with Russia a ton, but in my interaction with Putin and with Russia, I would kind of point out a couple of things. Number one is, when America was hit with COVID and New York was looking like we were going to run out of ventilators and masks, Russia was the second country that sent us a planeload of supplies. And they didn't send that because they hate America, they sent that because we were starting to make progress together as countries, and they thought that they wanted to show goodwill to figure out how can we start working together.

I have to ask on several aspects of China. First on the president, the meeting: you helped set up a first call and first meeting between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Can you tell the story of that? Because that's also interesting, again, that first phone call, the reaching out, the forming the human connection, which ultimately leads the connection between nations, and the possibility of collaboration. During the transition, President Trump took a call from the head of Taiwan and that sent the Chinese into a real tailspin, and he didn't do it, I think to be provocative to them as much as just as a businessman, he felt, you answer your call: if somebody wants to speak to you, you speak to him, you want to have conversations, hear their point of view. But it was taken as a very big insult and it was against tradition and norm. And so, that was something that set us off in a wrong direction. My view at the time was that we are entering a G2 [inaudible 03:21:47] world, whether people want to admit it or not, and that a lot of these countries in what I call the middle market countries, when China was being aggressive with their One Belt, One Road, they were basically playing the US and China against each other. And I thought that by the two leaders coming together, there were some things they wouldn't agree on, but there was a lot that they probably could agree on, which could lead to resolutions to a lot of issues in the world. That was my most optimistic view. My more pragmatic view was that President Trump had very big issues on trade that he wanted to get to with China. He felt like China, their trade practices were unfair, they weren't following all the global rules of trade, he was a little bit nervous that they would be provocative with Taiwan, and I felt like the two of them getting together would be the best way to try and resolve that.

Let me ask you, you have a very interesting life. If you were to give advice to young folks on how to have such an impactful life, what would you say? Career and life, how to have a successful career and a successful life? Number one is I would say you just have to work hard at everything you do. Number two, I would say never stop learning and always try to say yes more than you should, go out of your comfort zone. And I think just, you've got to work hard at everything you do. And if you're going to take something on, do it the best you can. One of the lessons I write about in the book from my father was I remember I was going for a job interview and he asked me, he says, "Well, what time are you leaving to the job interview?" It was at nine o'clock. I said, "I'll leave at eight o'clock." He says, "Well, what if there's traffic?", I said, "Dad, I've done this drive 1,000 times. There's never traffic." He said, "What if there's an accident?", I said, "I can't control that." He said, "Jared, the only excuse you ever have for being late is that you didn't leave early enough."

When you zoom out and look at the 21st century from a human history perspective, across the timescale of many decades, maybe centuries, what gives you hope about human civilization? Everything you've seen: you've traveled the world, you've talked to some of the most powerful and influential people, and you look at the future, what gives you hope about this little planet of ours? What gives me the most hope is that anything's possible. If there's one lesson that I took from my time in government, it's that people coming together to try to make tomorrow different than yesterday can succeed. And if the right people in the right places focus on the right ideas, I think the advancement that we can have for human history and for society can be tremendous. And I think that right now, I see we're at a place in society where there's a lot of what I call squabbles between countries, which are really man versus man issues. And those are as old as time, right? We've been fighting about borders or religion or who wronged somebody 100 or 1,000 years ago. And these are what I call more tribal battles. But I do think that as we advance with artificial intelligence, as energy becomes cheaper and it's more readily available, I think we're going to have massive industrialization, I think we're going to have massive advancement.