Jared Kushner recently called Israelis “a little irrational” on Gaza. This and everything else he said points to a troubling conclusion: It is Washington, not Israel, that fails to grasp the reality of Gaza.
Speaking in Kyiv, the White House adviser on the Middle East and son-in-law of the president explained why the Trump administration is struggling to advance its Gaza plan: “We are now starting to understand the scope of the militarization of Gaza. It is beyond your comprehension, and so demilitarizing it is not going to be easy.”
That is a remarkable admission nearly three years into a war during which Israeli soldiers uncovered tunnel networks, weapons depots and terrorist infrastructure throughout Gaza, much of it built beneath hospitals and schools run by the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA. That the American team shaping Gaza’s future is only now grasping the scale of Hamas’s militarization of Gaza calls into question the foundation of their entire plan.
Kushner then made a second admission. “We worked with Hamas for over four months,” he said, describing an agreement in which Hamas committed to demilitarize. Yet he turned his criticism toward Israel. “I think we agree with them on the end state,” he stated. “They just have a crazy election, and that makes them a little irrational in certain regards.”
With genuine respect for U.S. President Donald Trump and everything his administration has done for Israel, Kushner has it backward. Israelis are not the irrational ones. That position belongs to a team that only now acknowledges the problematic militarization of Gaza after months of talks with Hamas, yet faults Israelis for refusing to gamble their children’s lives on a plan the team formulated in such ignorance.
Hamas is not a conventional adversary. It is the armed wing of a 1,400-year-old jihadist ideology whose stated aim is the persecution of non-Muslims worldwide. It carried out a massacre of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, 2023, and its charter calls for Israel’s destruction. Kushner’s team spent four months negotiating with it and now points to a signed document as proof Hamas can be trusted to disarm.
Kushner himself undercut that confidence weeks earlier, acknowledging that Hamas may not honor its commitment and that it is “very, very hard to trust” a group responsible for such atrocities.
That assessment is correct. The question was never whether Hamas would sign a document, but what happens on the ground: who removes the weapons, who destroys the tunnels, who finds the hidden arms caches, and whether Gaza remains capable of another attack once this war ends.
This question has not been answered. Neither has the deeper question of what changes a centuries-old religious and educational culture that still chants Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud, celebrating a seventh-century massacre of Jews.
Declining to repeat the Gaza experiment is not irrational. It has cost too much already.
Israelis ask these questions because we have lived through the consequences of getting the answers wrong. In 2005, Israel withdrew completely from Gaza, forcibly removing 10,000 Jews and destroying 21 thriving communities. Hamas seized control and turned Gaza into the staging ground for Oct. 7. Declining to repeat that experiment is not irrational. It has cost too much already.
Kushner’s comments also help explain a shift now visible in Israel’s election campaign. A growing number of Israelis believe demilitarizing Gaza is not enough, and that the entire premise guiding Israel’s approach has failed.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit Party has unveiled its “Disengagement 7/10” plan, calling for a ministry to facilitate voluntary emigration from Gaza. Former Israeli Defense Forces Maj. Gen. Ofer Winter and politician Moshe Feiglin have built platforms around the same idea. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Minister of Science and Technology Gila Gamliel to lead efforts to encourage Gazan emigration following Trump’s call for that approach in January 2025.
These are not fringe positions. The politicians advancing them represent a majority of Israelis, responding to something real that has taken hold since Oct. 7.
One of the clearest voices making this case is not a politician. Avida Bechar survived the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, where Hamas terrorists murdered his wife and son in their safe room. He does not come from Israel’s ideological right but from the peace-oriented world along the Gaza border, and he once believed in coexistence. Since Oct. 7, he has argued that Israel will not be secure until Gaza is emptied of its population.
This growing debate inside Israel deserves to be understood, not dismissed as irrational. It comes from the survivors of Be’eri, Kfar Aza, Nir Oz and the Nova massacre, as well as from soldiers who fought tunnel-to-tunnel against infrastructure Kushner himself now calls “beyond comprehension.”
For decades, Israel and the West assumed economic opportunity would moderate Gaza. Billions flowed into the territory. Then came Oct. 7. The lesson was not that Gaza needed better monitoring. It was that the entire premise had failed.
Trump has been one of Israel’s strongest allies in the White House, and Kushner’s effort to develop a plan that brings lasting peace and stability to the region is genuine. But friendship requires candor when a friend misreads the situation. If Kushner is only now grasping Gaza’s militarization, the real question is not why Israelis appear irrational, but why they no longer trust Washington’s assumptions.
Any Gaza plan that allows jihadist forces to survive, reorganize and rebuild is destined to fail—whether the reckoning comes in five or 20 years—forcing Israel to send its children to confront a jihadi enemy it has the chance to eliminate now. That has nothing to do with the local election. It is what Oct. 7 taught millions of Israelis about a population educated for 14 centuries in jihad that cannot simply be deradicalized overnight.
If Washington is only now grasping that Gaza’s militarization is “beyond comprehension,” then perhaps it is Washington, and not Israel, that has the harder lesson to learn.
