Middle East Insider · Issue 068 · Friday, October 23, 2026

The Backroom

Good afternoon. A book excerpt about Jared Kushner and Gulf money leads today, with his denial beside it, and then eighty years of what Washington, Jerusalem and the Arab capitals have done out of sight, from Golda Meir’s night in Amman to the night Jordan’s jets flew against Iran’s drones. Then the Hebron attack and Israel’s vote at four days, Iran and the strait, the Gulf, Gaza, Lebanon and Europe.

A new book says President Trump’s son-in-law held Gulf money in secret accounts; he calls it “outrageous and categorically false.” The secret diplomacy the book treats as a plot is eighty years old, and it has kept the region from worse.

Vanity Fair published an excerpt on Thursday from Matthew Cole’s “Princes and Thieves,” which says that the UAE’s Mohamed bin Zayed and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman put “at least $2 billion into at least two bank accounts for Kushner,” one at First Abu Dhabi Bank with Kushner as a signatory, one at the Bank of Israel, and a third “something like a rainy-day defense fund” for Israel’s defense of the UAE against Iran (Vanity Fair). Jared Kushner, who negotiates for President Trump as an unpaid envoy (AP), answered the same day on X: the allegations are “outrageous and categorically false,” and “No bank statements, wire transfer records, account numbers, transaction dates, or other verifiable details were provided”; his lawyer promised legal action (Jerusalem Post). The excerpt names no documents, and no wire service or American newspaper had confirmed any of it by this morning.

On November 17, 1947, twelve days before the United Nations partition vote, Golda Meir met King Abdullah of Transjordan at Naharayim, on the Jordan, and he told her he would not enter the territory assigned to the Jewish state (Avi Shlaim, Oxford). On the night of May 10, 1948, four days before independence, she went to Amman in a black dress and veil, posing as an Arab woman, with Ezra Danin, an Arabist, posing as her husband; Abdullah told her he was no longer alone but “one among five,” she told him the Jews would fight, and her note to Ben-Gurion read “We met in friendship” (Hadassah Magazine).

King Hussein met Israelis in secret from September 1963, when Yaacov Herzog, adviser to Israel’s prime ministers, saw him at a London clinic (Halban). On the night of September 20, 1970, with Syrian armor inside Jordan, Hussein cabled Washington, “I request immediate intervention, both air and land to safeguard independence of Jordan,” and Secretary of State William Rogers, Henry Kissinger and Joseph Sisco agreed to tell Israel that Washington would look favorably on a strike; Rogers: “I don’t think we have any choice. Let’s go ahead” (FRUS 285). Israel mobilized (FRUS 316), and by September 23 the Syrian regulars had withdrawn (FRUS 327). On September 25, 1973, Hussein flew to a guesthouse of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, north of Tel Aviv to warn Golda Meir that Syria’s army was in “pre-jump positions”; Israel’s Military Intelligence rated the warning vague, and the war came eleven days later (Brookings).

On September 16, 1977, Moshe Dayan met Sadat’s envoy Hassan Tuhami at King Hassan II’s residence in Rabat, where the king said “the U.S. should not know about them until a basic agreement is reached” (Israel State Archives, CIE translation). On November 9, Sadat told his parliament he was “ready to go to the Knesset itself” (FRUS 144); on the evening of November 19 he landed at Ben Gurion Airport (FRUS 152), and the treaty was signed at the White House on March 26, 1979 (Library of Congress).

Yitzhak Rabin visited Aqaba in secret at the end of September 1993 to explain the Oslo agreement with the PLO to Hussein; on the night of October 16 to 17, 1994, in Amman, the two men settled the border and the water themselves, the disputes their teams could not, and the treaty was signed in the Arava on October 26 (Israel State Archives). Its test came in September 1997, when Jordanian police caught two Mossad agents in Amman after they poisoned Khaled Mashaal of Hamas; Hussein said the agents would die if Mashaal did, Israel sent the antidote, Netanyahu agreed to free Sheikh Ahmad Yassin at Efraim Halevy’s urging, and Jordan soon expelled Hamas’s leaders (Times of Israel).

Egypt’s president let Israel fly more than 100 strikes against jihadists in northern Sinai over two years, the New York Times reported in February 2018, “a quiet reconfiguration of the politics of the region” (JTA). The CIA tracked Qassem Soleimani’s flight to Baghdad on January 3, 2020, and “Intelligence from Israel helped confirm the details” (NBC News). The Abraham Accords began with an op-ed: Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador in Washington, ran a front-page piece in Yedioth Ahronoth in June 2020 that read “Normal is not annexation,” and the talks among Otaiba, Kushner and Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s adviser, ended on the South Lawn on September 15, 2020 (Times of Israel, State Department).

On the night of April 13, 2024, Iran’s drones and missiles met a defensive line that ran from Gulf radars through an American operations center in Qatar to fighters over Jordan and Israel’s batteries: Saudi Arabia and the UAE passed intelligence, Jordan’s jets shot down drones over the kingdom, and about 99 percent was downed (Times of Israel). This year the channels are in use: the commander of U.S. Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, said on October 17 that the Strait of Hormuz “is controlled by the United States and our regional partners, not Iran” (Times of Israel).

I draw one conclusion from eighty years of these meetings. The region’s quiet work has run through Amman, Cairo, Rabat, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Manama, with Washington and Jerusalem at the table, and it turned back Syria’s tanks in 1970, brought Sadat to Jerusalem, saved the Jordan treaty in 1997 and stopped Iran’s barrage in April 2024. The channels through Doha and Ankara have carried Hamas: Qatar has hosted its political bureau since 2012 (Times of Israel), and Erdogan received its leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Saleh al-Arouri in Istanbul in August 2020 (Middle East Forum). The excerpt shows no documents; the denials are the only first-hand statements in the story so far. I take no side in Israel’s vote on Tuesday.

MEF Online, The Fragile Keystone: Egypt’s Mismanagement, Israel’s Security, and the Post-Election Middle East (Oct 22): Amine Ayoub: the 1979 treaty has been “the indispensable bedrock of Middle Eastern stability,” and Sisi depends on Israeli gas and on “security cooperation that rarely receives public attention” while military-owned companies and a $58 billion new capital leave Egypt a fragile keystone.

MEF Online, The Yemen-Horn of Africa Corridor: Houthi Expansion and the Gap in American Red Sea Strategy (Oct 22): Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: the Houthis hold about 115 kilometers of Yemen’s Red Sea coast and are training al-Shabaab in explosives and drones; “Iran’s proxies now have proxies of their own.”

MEF Online, Sanction Foreigners Purchasing, Developing Land in Occupied Cyprus (Oct 22): Michael Rubin: an apartment in occupied Nicosia costs about 1,352 euros a square meter against 15,500 in Tel Aviv, which is why Europeans, Israelis, Iranians and Russians buy there; he wants Brussels to apply its Crimea rule.

Two gunmen wound five at a checkpoint near Hebron and are killed, Netanyahu closes Hebron and prepares a West Bank lockdown, the last polls before tonight’s blackout keep the blocs close, and the army chief sees no need to strike Iran before the vote.

The attack. Two gunmen from Hebron, Mohammad and Firas Jaaba, both 27 (Times of Israel), opened fire at about 7:30 this morning at a temporary army checkpoint at the Judea Junction, the exit from Hebron, and wounded five, two of them critically, before three officers shot them dead; the army believes the checkpoint stopped a mass-casualty attack on civilians on Route 35 (Times of Israel). Netanyahu, after an assessment with Defense Minister Israel Katz and the chiefs of the army and the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, ordered Hebron closed and a full West Bank lockdown prepared: “We will pursue Hamas terrorists and those who send them everywhere and at all times. You have no safe haven” (Times of Israel). Likud canceled its Friday campaign events (Naharnet).

The vote. New polls may not be published from 11:59 tonight until the polls close on Tuesday (Israel Hayom). The last ones: Israel Hayom’s Kantar poll of Thursday gives Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar 23 seats, Netanyahu’s Likud 21 and Naftali Bennett’s Beyachad 14, with the Netanyahu bloc at 50 and the opposition at 56, while Channel 14’s poll of Wednesday gives Likud 30, the Netanyahu bloc 62 and the opposition 44, the only poll in the Media Line’s selection with a majority for him (Media Line); the Forum’s poll of polls has the blocs at 53 each with 14 for the Arab parties. Israel’s Channel 13 reported Thursday that the chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, told a private meeting, “We do not see any indications of a need to strike Iran before the election,” and Eisenkot said the same day that there was “no direct, immediate threat from Iran that necessitates a war prior to the election” (Times of Israel).

President Trump says Iran is “making up fake hits,” the coalition shoots down a missile aimed at Riyadh, Aramco empties its headquarters, Brent reaches $114, and seven foreign ministers meet in Istanbul.

Washington. President Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday that Iran “is doing everything they can to drive up the price of Oil prior to the US Midterm Election” and is “even making up fake hits, mines, and everything else, because more Oil is coming through the Hormuz Strait now than it did even prior to the beginning of the Conflict,” and told reporters that Washington had already inflicted significant damage on Iran and “may do it a little bit further” (Jerusalem Post). Mike Waltz, the ambassador to the United Nations, told the Financial Times that the Navy “can maintain this blockade for the foreseeable future”; Brent crude, $112 on Thursday, reached $114 this morning (CBS News).

The Gulf. The Saudi-led coalition shot down a Houthi ballistic missile aimed at Riyadh shortly after 4 a.m.; its figures for October are at least 14 ballistic missiles and more than 60 drones, 24 dead and at least 374 injured (Arab News). Aramco, the Saudi state oil company, told the staff of its Dhahran headquarters on Thursday to leave and work from home, which Reuters reported would be the first such evacuation since the Iran war began (Reuters). In Istanbul today the foreign ministers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan meet Britain’s, France’s and Germany’s for the first time in that format; Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the three members of the Mecca defense pact, have committed their militaries to Saudi Arabia’s defense (Arab News, Iran International).

The army tells Washington that Hamas is rebuilding and will not disarm, Israeli fire hits more than a dozen villages in south Lebanon, the Justice Department and France’s DGSI break up a Hamas fundraising network, and France bans Saturday’s marches in eight cities.

Gaza and Lebanon. Senior officers have told their American counterparts that Hamas “has no intention of disarming and is instead rebuilding its forces,” with 30,000 to 40,000 operatives and money arriving from Iran and Turkey, Haaretz reported Thursday night (Times of Israel); an Israeli strike killed at least one person in southern Gaza this morning, by the account of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, and the army said it had targeted a Hamas operative (AP). In Lebanon, Israeli artillery, tank fire and explosions struck more than a dozen villages overnight and this morning, Kfar Tibnit and Qantara among them; reports of casualties were unconfirmed, and no ambulance was sent to the Kfar Tibnit blast site because of the danger of approaching it (L’Orient Today).

Europe. The Justice Department indicted Saleem Alzaq, a Hamas official in Gaza, for running a network that raised $2 million for the group as aid, $1.5 million of it after October 7, 2023; France’s domestic intelligence service, the DGSI, arrested two Algerian citizens accused of sending him hundreds of thousands of dollars in cryptocurrency, three men were arrested in Louisiana and Florida, and the United States designated Alzaq, the two French organizers and their two charities as terrorists (The National). France has banned Saturday’s marches in Lyon, Marseille, Nice and five other cities and allowed only the unions’ route from Bastille to Nation in Paris, with 500 soldiers, helicopters and armored vehicles behind the police (Le Courrier de l’Atlas).

Israel votes on Tuesday, October 27. The Forum’s Michael Rubin gives lunch briefings in Philadelphia, November 5; Washington, November 6; Miami, November 18; Boca Raton, November 19; and Palm Beach, November 20. My own, on the midterms, Iran and Israel: Palo Alto, November 9; San Francisco, November 10; Los Angeles, November 13; San Diego, November 16; and in December, Sarasota, December 14; Boca Raton, December 16; Palm Beach, December 17; and Miami, December 18. Benjamin Baird, who directs MEF Action, the Forum’s advocacy affiliate, speaks in New York, December 3. To meet, or to host an evening for the Forum, reply to this email.

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