WASHINGTON (Middle East Eye) – Jared Kushner’s new private-equity fund is planning to invest millions of dollars of Saudi Arabia’s money in Israeli startups, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), who cited people familiar with the investment plan.
Kushner’s Affinity Partners has already selected the first two Israeli firms to invest in, the sources said, in what would be the first known case of money from the kingdom’s sovereign wealth fund - the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) - being directed to the occupied territories.
A spokesman for the $600bn PIF declined to give a comment to the WSJ about Saturday’s report.
Last month, Middle East Eye reported that Kushner, who previously acted as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former U.S. president Donald Trump, had secured a $2bn investment from the PFI for Affinity Partners, despite objections from the PIF’s advisers about the potential benefits of the deal.
Objections cited by the panel included: the “inexperience” of the fund’s management; a proposed asset management fee that seemed “excessive”; and “public relations risks” arising from Kushner’s previous role as Trump’s senior adviser, according to the minutes of the panel’s meeting in June.
The report said the investment is “the first known instance that the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s cash will be directed to Israel, a sign of the kingdom’s increasing willingness to do business with the regime, even though they have no diplomatic relations.”
The American paper added that the investment “could help lay the groundwork for a breakthrough normalization pact between the two regimes.”
In talks with Saudi leaders, Kushner and his team warned them that Riyadh could lose out on access and opportunities in what they called “the Silicon Valley of the Middle East” to neighbors who had signed a normalization deal with the regime, the people said.
Kushner, who founded Affinity Partners after leaving the White House in 2021, played a significant role in advancing the normalization of ties between the occupation regime and some Arab countries while serving as a senior adviser.
Kushner developed strong relations with Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and was one of the leading defenders of the prince in the Trump White House after U.S. spy agencies determined that he had ordered the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and a vocal critic of the Saudi government.
Even though the occupying regime and Saudi Arabia do not have formal diplomatic relations, Riyadh has taken a number of steps recently toward normalizing relations with the Zionist regime.
Saudi authorities were said to have given a behind-the-scenes green light to the UAE forging ties with the occupying regime in 2020 and have since allowed the occupying regime’s aircraft to use the kingdom’s airspace for direct flights to Dubai and Abu Dhabi.