Trump appoints in-law to bring Middle East peace

There is a special relationship between a doting parent and his kid’s in-laws—machatunim in Yiddish, consuegros in Spanish. It doesn’t have a name in English. But, all the same, Donald Trump has elevated this unique extended-familial bond during his time in office. In particular, he has helped his daughters’ husbands’ dads.

On Saturday, Trump announced that Charles Kushner—father of his son-in-law Jared Kushner, husband of Trump’s daughter Ivanka—would be appointed ambassador to France. Then, on Sunday, he did it again: on Truth Social, he declared that his daughter Tiffany’s father-in-law would also be given a job. 

Massad Boulos, a Lebanese businessman and current father-in-law, will be appointed Senior Advisor on Arab and Middle Eastern Affairs. Boulos comes from a Greek Orthodox family in Lebanon and spent much of his youth in Texas before moving to Nigeria to become an auto industry tycoon. He has contacts in several political parties in Lebanon, having reportedly run unsuccessfully for parliament. In the United States, Boulos was a major player in Trump’s Arab voter outreach program, painting Trump as a potential peacemaker in the Middle East.

So far, though, the nascent Trump administration doesn’t seem to be brokering that peace they promised. The ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon, signed last week—according to the Washington Post the deal may have been a “gift” to Trump from Israeli officials after the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu staunchly supported the Republican candidate—has now been violated dozens of times by Israel and Hezbollah. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s foreign policy platform remains garbled. Like Biden before him, he’s certainly suggested wanting a ceasefire in Gaza. But on Monday afternoon, he said there will be “all hell to pay” if the remaining Israeli and international hostages held by Hamas weren’t released by his first day in office.

“Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He didn’t mention a ceasefire or any other precondition for the hostages’ release. Boulos, in a Tuesday interview with French magazine Le Point, seemed to agree with his new boss, saying that “the war is practically over,” and therefore the hostage’s fate “should not be linked to other issues related to the Day After in Gaza.”

At least 44,000 people have been killed in Gaza over the past year of war according to official Health Ministry figures, though experts say that the complete death toll is almost certainly actually in the hundreds of thousands. The Israeli Defense Forces have also killed at least 3,000 people in Lebanon. The majority of Gaza’s infrastructure has been reduced to rubble, and almost all of Gaza’s population is facing active starvation. In that context, it is not clear what more “all hell to pay” could mean. 

Trump declared in early October that Gaza “could be better than Monaco.” Jared Kushner, son of the other in-law, has also discussed the idea of a razed and remade Gaza as a boon for industry. Appointing businessmen from his own family to administrative posts might be a step towards that vision of stopping the war, but it also continues to play close to Trump’s family money schemes in the Middle East. Trump’s appointments at least imply that if his administration is pushing for peace, it will not be a peace built in the interest of the people of Gaza, or Lebanon, or even Israel: it will be a peace for those who are his true constituency—real estate developers, business tycoons, and members of his very own family.