Jared Kushner, son in law of Trump has the mideast peace plan
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If Jared Kushner has a plan to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict, so far he's giving little away.
In the four months since President Donald Trump took office and gave his 36-year-old son-in-law the job of forging peace between Israel and the Palestinians, Kushner has kept his plans under wraps for a conflict that is nearly twice as old as he is.
The assignment would pose daunting challenges for the most seasoned diplomat, much less a novice. Peace talks have been stalled for years, most recently breaking down in 2014 following disagreements over Israeli settlement-building and a Palestinian move to reconcile with the Islamist group Hamas.
By making the Arab-Israeli conflict the centerpiece of his first trip abroad, and putting such a high-profile figure in charge of it, Trump has jumped headlong in without the usual caution and discretion shown by his predecessors.
Dating back decades, presidents have typically waited until later in their administrations to engage publicly on one of the world's most intractable diplomatic issues. The initiatives that won Nobel Peace Prizes, the Camp David accords in 1978 and the Oslo agreement in 1993, arose from talks begun in secret.
But although Kushner has been given the task with a higher profile and at an earlier stage in his father-in-law's presidency than usual, he has so far brought an understated style to the role, which veterans of Middle East diplomacy say could work in his favor.
"At this stage of an administration, keeping your cards close to your vest is probably not a bad thing," said Dennis Ross, who served as a Middle East peace envoy under President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton.
"To be revealing too much before you know what you can achieve and when you can achieve it ... is probably the best way to undermine your ability to get anything done soon,” he said.
