Jared Kushner

Jared Kushner served as Senior Advisor to President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2021 and is the primary architect of the Abraham Accords — the normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco announced in 2020 — representing the most significant shift in Arab-Israeli relations since the Egypt and Jordan peace treaties of 1979 and 1994, and achieved without requiring Israeli concessions on the Palestinian question. Born January 10, 1981, in Livingston, New Jersey, Kushner graduated from Harvard University in 2003 and New York University School of Law in 2007, converted to Orthodox Judaism upon his marriage to Ivanka Trump, and managed the Kushner Companies real estate portfolio before his father-in-law's election produced his White House appointment.

The Abraham Accords required years of back-channel diplomatic work, a willingness to bypass the Palestinian Authority rather than treat its consent as a precondition for regional diplomacy, and the strategic insight that Arab Gulf states' fear of Iran had made their shared interests with Israel more powerful than the political cost of normalization. Kushner pursued this framework with the Emirati, Bahraini, Sudanese, and Moroccan governments despite strong institutional State Department skepticism that normalization was achievable without Palestinian state-building progress. The agreements were signed on the White House lawn in September 2020, with additional normalization agreements following in subsequent months. The Accords produced flights, tourism, trade, and security cooperation between Israel and its new Arab partners at a pace that exceeded most projections.

Post-administration, Kushner launched Affinity Partners, an investment firm that has raised capital from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds including a reported $2 billion from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund — a financial arrangement that has drawn substantial congressional scrutiny and ethical criticism given the overlap with his government Middle East portfolio. He is the author of "Breaking History" (2022), an account of his White House tenure. At Rank 39, Kushner is ranked here on the strength of the Abraham Accords alone: a diplomatic achievement that permanently restructured the Middle East political landscape in Israel's favor and which represents the most consequential pro-Israel diplomatic outcome of the past twenty-five years.