This is not the first time Mr. Kushner has tried to drum up billions of dollars for economic development in the Middle East. Last year, he and Mr. Greenblatt gathered foreign ministers and development organizations for a White House conference on rebuilding Gaza, reasoning that making peace would be harder without easing its humanitarian crisis.
But a fresh outbreak of violence between Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, and Israeli troops doused their enthusiasm. Mr. Kushner concluded that private investors would not pour money into a place where the government was targeting Israeli soldiers and civilians with rockets and flaming kites.
While the administration has revealed little about the plan, it has offered glimpses. Mr. Kushner said it would address thorny issues like Israel’s borders and security, the status of Jerusalem and the future of Palestinian refugees. But crucially, it will not explicitly call for an independent Palestinian state.
“If you say ‘two states,’ it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to Palestinians, and we said, ‘Let’s just not say it,’” Mr. Kushner said at a recent forum with Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
In an essay afterward, Mr. Satloff said the administration’s determination to demolish the status quo raised the risk not only that the plan would be rejected by the Palestinians, but also that good ideas in the plan — including in the economic initiative — would be discredited for future American administrations.
“The only way to protect the long-term viability of the best aspects of the Kushner plan,” he wrote, “is to kill the plan.”
The administration disagrees, noting that its predecessors failed and that therefore a different approach was worth trying. But the sequencing, experts said, gives the administration a chance to further delay or even shelve the political plan.
Mr. Kushner has insisted that the administration will roll out the full plan within weeks. But the administration has said this before — Mr. Trump himself promised nine months ago that the plan would be out in three or four months — and the White House has seized on repeated excuses to delay it, most recently the Jewish and Muslim holidays of Shavuot and Ramadan.
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