On the night before the hostages came home, special US envoy Steve Witkoff stood in Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square plaza, where for two years Israelis had been calling for the captives’ release. As Witkoff read the names of the people who had made the deal possible, the crowd cheered the US president and the Arab mediators. Then Witkoff reached the name of Israel’s prime minister, and the booing went on so long that he had to stop and wait for it to die out.
Jared Kushner spoke next. He thanked Witkoff and the US president. He did not mention Benjamin Netanyahu at all.
Eleven months later, Tal Meir, an anchor on TV’s Channel 14, the right-wing channel loyal to the prime minister, told viewers that peace envoys Kushner and Witkoff had become confused about who they were. That they are part of this people. That Israel is their real home, and that Israelis are guarding it for their grandchildren. Then she called them losers, and the program went to the break.
The distance between those two events is why Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, sit at the top of this year’s list. It is also a story about Israeli memory, which can retrieve what a minor politician said during a coalition fight in 1996, yet cannot reliably recall who was instrumental in bringing the hostages home last autumn.
We have not forgotten, exactly. We have moved on, which we do faster than anyone, on the way to the next crisis. A man can be applauded in the square on a Saturday night and be cast as a traitor by Passover, and nobody will feel they have changed their mind.
Kushner, 45, did not want the Special Envoy for Peace job.
He had served his term during the first Trump administration, built a private-equity firm in Florida and a life around it, and, people close to him say, decided that he was finished with the Middle East. In private, he describes the work the way people describe an illness: intense on the mind, intense on the body, a burden you carry. Business, he has told associates, is about dreaming about the future. This is about untangling other people’s old problems. It is not fun.
What changed his mind was the same thing that changed everyone’s. He and Ivanka were at a wedding in Colorado on October 7, 2023; he has said publicly that he sat up through the night watching and weeping what had been transpiring that day, and that he has not been the same since. The antisemitism that followed began with Gaza, he has argued behind closed doors, and cannot recede until Gaza is resolved, because whatever Israel does lands on every Jew everywhere.
Then the president asked him to get operational. In that family, one does not decline.
Two things about Kushner need holding at once, and Israelis tend to hold only the first. He is a Jew who cares about his people; he has written at length about his grandmother Rae, who escaped the Novogrudok ghetto through a tunnel. He is also, in exactly equal measure, an American. He works for the president of the United States, and when American and Israeli interests diverge, he is not free to pretend otherwise. Israelis who expect him to think like one of them are asking for something impossible.
The record is not in dispute, however inconvenient. The last 20 living hostages came home in October 2025. Over the following months, with no intelligence and no obvious pathway, the bodies came back too; the last, in January 2026, was police officer Ran Gvili. For the first time since 2014, there was no Israeli hostage in Gaza, breathing or otherwise. Twenty living, 28 dead: an outcome that, as Kushner points out in private, almost no one in Jerusalem thought possible – the prime minister included.
In August, Kushner flew to Cairo, at his own expense, and sat across a table from the men who had ordered the October 7 Hamas-led attacks, pressing them to give up their weapons. His logic, as he has laid it out to those around him, is cold and simple. Hamas still holds one hostage, and it is called Gaza. Leave it as it was, and nothing stops them from taking one more. So he sits with them.
He flew back to Florida and learned that the Jewish homeland had decided he was a traitor.
The night at Hostage Square, by Kushner’s own account to associates, was not a celebration for him; there was no trust between the sides, and the possibility of miscalculation was enormous. He and Witkoff went to the Western Wall that evening. He prayed for peace and for the strength to save lives, which is either a photo opportunity or a Jew doing the only thing available at that hour, depending on what you had decided about Kushner before he arrived.
Witkoff is the heart. He is the one who tells a crowd that the hostage families touched him like nothing in his life has, and means it, and cries. Kushner is the brain. He speaks last, says less, and leaves having arranged the next room. People who have worked with them say Witkoff makes people want to say “yes,” and Kushner works out what “yes” actually means. Kushner has told associates that Witkoff is one of the finest people he knows.
Before they spoke at Hostage Square, the two envoys met the families of the hostages at a hotel. The mood in the room varied. Some could not believe that what they had wanted for two years was about to happen. Others knew that they would be receiving the bodies of their loved ones. And some families did not yet know whether their child would be coming back at all.
Ivanka stood on the podium at Hostage Square too, telling the families that she was in awe of their strength and conviction, in spite of their suffering. Dignitaries say such things. It means something else from a woman who chose this people rather than inheriting them.
Two days later, addressing the Knesset, her father interrupted his own speech to thank someone who loves Israel so much that she converted, adding, to laughter, that he hadn’t known he would say that. Raised Presbyterian on the Upper East Side, Ivanka converted under Rabbi Haskel Lookstein of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun before her 2009 wedding, took the name Yael, and has raised three children in an observant home. She kept Shabbat throughout the four years she served in Trump’s first administration, when it was noticed; and four years in Florida, when it was not.
Ivanka is the only convert on The Jerusalem Post’s Top 50 list
She is the only person on this list who became a Jew by choice.
Then, at the David Kempinski hotel on the Tel Aviv seafront, nine released hostages came to see Kushner and Witkoff: Omri Miran, the twins Gali and Ziv Berman, Yosef-Chaim Ohana, Matan Angrest, Bar Kupershtein, Segev Kalfon, Nimrod Cohen, and Eitan Horn. They sat together, and as the hostages talked about their captivity, there was a great deal of hugging and crying. Before it ended, the nine asked the US special envoys not to stop their efforts to release the remaining hostages until the 15 still held in Gaza came out too.
People who have heard Kushner describe that afternoon say he does not hedge – it was one of the most emotional and beautiful things he has been a part of.
The months after were less photogenic. The special envoys had promised to bring all the hostages back. When they made that promise, nobody knew where all the bodies were. Only the promise, made to people who could not bear to be told twice that it hadn’t worked out. It took until this past January.
The gratitude expired at roughly the same time.
That month, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir attacked what he called the naivety of Witkoff and Kushner. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich pressed for military rule in Gaza. Neither mentioned the hostages, which had become an awkward subject, the way a debt becomes awkward.
Then came Iran. In June, Washington signed a memorandum with Tehran that ended the fighting and reopened the Strait of Hormuz but deferred what Netanyahu had demanded be settled first: the uranium enrichment, the missiles, the proxies. In Israel, disagreement became excommunication.
Yaakov Bardugo, a Channel 14 anchor close to the prime minister, said the two envoys had chosen the economic world over the existential one; Israelis, he noted, are the ones who live here. Yinon Magal, a former Knesset member turned broadcaster, accused them of operating under Qatari influence.
Meir’s version was the purest, and it had nothing to do with uranium enrichment. She said Kushner had forgotten whose side he was on. Having established he was family, she cast him out of it.
Sources told CNN that Netanyahu privately blames Kushner and Witkoff for steering the president toward ending the war, while the TV commentators closest to the prime minister do the shouting. The man who was booed at Hostage Square now directs the fire at the man who was cheered there.
Asked in private whether the hostility hurts, people who have put the question to Kushner say he reaches for a line that is affectionate, and distancing, and true: Jews are complicated people.
Then, they say, Kushner explains the rupture without hearing how it sounds. Israelis, in his account, cannot see what he sees. Israel has become insular; few of its people can travel in the Arab and Muslim world, and it pairs a real lack of understanding of its neighbors with great confidence about what is possible.
Visions of peace in the Middle East
He can see a region that wants this: a warmer peace with Egypt, a real opening with Saudi Arabia, and something even with Syria and Lebanon. And then the admission underneath it all, offered almost in passing: they haven’t fully communicated it.
A man whose method is persuasion has moved four Arab governments and a terror organization and cannot move an Israeli taxi driver. He is convinced he is right, cannot explain why, and has concluded the problem is everyone else’s field of vision. That, more than Iran, is why they turned on him.
None of which makes Kushner right. He may be wrong about Gaza, and if the Israelis’ warning that this ends badly is proved correct, this page will not age well.
Skepticism is the correct Israeli posture, and Kushner does not dispute it. Behind closed doors he calls the enterprise a one-in-a-zillion shot and cannot blame anyone for refusing to believe in it. What he asks for is narrower: some latitude, and some credit for why he keeps getting on the plane.
He wants, people close to him say, an Israel that his children and grandchildren can live in securely, and that is not a global pariah. His blessing, he has told people, is his family. When his children ask what it is all for, he tells them about Hillel, asked to teach the whole Torah while standing on one foot: What is hateful to you, do not do to another; the rest is commentary. The rest of it he is doing for theirs.
There is a clock on it, and in private Kushner is open and honest about that: Israel has this president for two more years and cannot rely on being protected forever. The language of the new Middle East, he keeps telling Jerusalem, is economic: the Emiratis and the Saudis arrive in Washington with a hundred businessmen and sign deals. Israel arrives with a threat assessment.
The day after the agreement was signed, before a single hostage had come home, Kushner told the prime minister and the heads of Israel’s security services that they were going to fix Gaza. According to people familiar with the meeting, the people in the room looked at him as if he were mad. If you don’t believe it’s possible, he told them, you will fail; if you do, you at least have a chance. Then he reached for a quip by David Ben-Gurion: In this country, to be a realist you have to believe in miracles.
We put Jared Kushner first because influence is not approval, and because a list published on the eve of a new year ought to record what happened in the old one, including the parts we have begun to forget.
Shana Tova. Try to remember it past the holidays.
Amichai Stein contributed to this column.
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