Jared Kushner, a senior White House advisor and son-in-law to U.S. President Donald Trump, is traveling through the Middle East this week reportedly to gauge support for an American attempt to strike a deal in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
According to one expert on the region, however, Kushner is likely to face a challenge in getting Gulf nations to support such an agreement.
"Politically, there is just not a lot of daylight, there's not a lot of hope for something to happen, economically is where there is some chance, and I think that that's really the focus of Jared Kushner's trip this week — it's trying to get some economic buy-in from these Gulf states to try and help shore up the Palestinian economy," Emily Hawthorne, Middle East and North Africa analyst at geopolitical intelligence firm Stratfor, told CNBC's "Capital Connection" on Monday.
Kushner's trip was set to include visits to Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, according to Al Jazeera.
Little is known about the Trump administration's plan for a potential Israeli-Palestinian deal, but Hawthorne noted that that has been an intentional strategy on the part of the U.S. officials.
"We know that Jared Kushner and others ... have been working on this for two years and have really been working to try and keep any leaks from going to the press — they clearly want the stakeholders of the deal, which include the Arab Gulf states, to be sort of the first to really see the plan," she said. "They want to have regional stakeholders really buy into the plan so that they can make sure if the plan is going to even fly at all."
Whether the regional stakeholders can get on board with the Trump plan remains to be seen, but Hawthorne noted that any reported details of Kushner's work have elicited condemnations from both Israeli and Palestinian quarters.
"It's very difficult, any time that there is any sort of tiny little leak that comes out of the process over the last two years, we see Palestinian and Israeli sources say, 'I don't think this is going to work,'" she told CNBC.
In December of 2017, Trump announced he would move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, breaking with decades of U.S. policy and officially recognizing the city as the Israeli capital, a move met by swift criticism from the international community. The embassy's inauguration in May saw violent clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli troops, with more than 50 Palestinians killed.
Multiple reports suggest that details of the Trump administration's plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be revealed only after Israel's April elections.
—CNBC's Natasha Turak contributed to this report.
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