> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://askablackman.me/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Kushner’s Gaza Role Raises New Conflict Questions - URL: https://askablackman.me/no-salary-no-disclosures-no-problem-kushners-gaza-role-comes-with-a-billion-dollar-side-bet/ - Published: 2026-10-03T15:01:59.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-05T03:21:51.000Z - Description: A CNN investigation traced the president's son-in-law to the top of a Tel Aviv financial group with $456 million riding on the suppliers of Israel's war machine. Every part of the arrangement is legal. That is the actual scandal. - Author: Free Game News - Tags: Finance, Business, Politics Sometime in late July, while the Gaza ceasefire he helped broker staggered through its ninth month and Israel kept striking the enclave on a near daily basis, Jared Kushner's investment firm quietly sold a block of stock for about $343 million. The shares had cost roughly a fifth of that two years earlier. Fidelity lined up to buy them, Jefferies ran the trade, and no law anywhere required Kushner to explain a single detail of it, because technically he does not work for the United States government. The stock was in Phoenix Financial, one of Israel's largest insurance and asset management groups, and the sale was only the cash-out. Kushner's firm, Affinity Partners, still holds a 7.4 percent stake worth more than $1 billion, making it Phoenix's largest shareholder. Between the sale, roughly $74 million in dividends, and the remaining position, the Israeli financial outlet Calcalist calculates the investment has returned about 4.5 times its original cost. Kushner has called Phoenix Affinity's best investment, which, given that he also got in on the record $52.5 billion Electronic Arts buyout, is saying something. Here is where a CNN investigation published October 1 turns a good trade into a genuinely uncomfortable story. Using Israeli financial disclosure rules, CNN traced a slice of Phoenix's portfolio and found at least $456 million parked in nine companies supplying Israel's military. The biggest position, at least $265 million, is in Elbit Systems, Israel's largest weapons manufacturer, whose tank shells and bombs have been identified at the scene of strikes that killed civilians, according to analyses by CNN and human rights groups. Elbit's stock is up more than 165 percent since the war began, and Israel was its single biggest market last year. Other Phoenix holdings include a maker of electronic fuzes for artillery shells, a drone camera company, a shipyard whose fast attack boats have launched missiles at Gaza, and a firm that builds transmissions for Israeli tanks. All nine companies saw their stocks climb last year, with several stating plainly in their own reports that the war had been good for business. Israel Shipyards noted the war had, in its words, positive effects on the business. Kushner's lawyer says he never directed any of Phoenix's investment decisions, and CNN found no indication his diplomacy directly affected the investments. Take all of that at face value. The problem survives intact, because the problem was never a smoking gun. The problem is the architecture. During Trump's first term, Kushner was a senior White House adviser, which meant financial disclosures, divestment questions, and at least the pretense of accountability. This time he took no job, draws no salary, and files nothing. He began informally advising his father-in-law in May 2025, was dispatched to Sharm el-Sheikh to seal the October ceasefire, unveiled a $30 billion reconstruction masterplan for Gaza at Davos complete with a coastal tourism zone and room for 180 skyscrapers, and now sits on the executive board of Trump's Board of Peace, the body steering Gaza's redevelopment. He exercises the influence of a secretary of state with the disclosure obligations of a guy giving free advice at a barbecue. The timing deserves a slow walk. Affinity bought its first 4.95 percent of Phoenix in July 2024 for $128.5 million, mid-war, while Israeli regulators still had to approve any increase. Kushner later recounted on the No Priors podcast that his own investors asked how he would explain the bet if it went wrong, since, as he put it, they believed a war was coming. His answer, in his own words: it's not a bad thing to have them more vested in the economy of Israel now. Regulators approved the doubling in January 2025, five days before Trump's inauguration, though they capped Affinity's voting rights at 5 percent. The stake became Phoenix's largest. Four months later Kushner joined the Gaza effort. Then the portfolio went vertical. About those investors. Affinity is bankrolled by the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund committed $2 billion six months after Kushner incorporated the firm, one day after the first Trump term ended, overruling its own advisers who warned about the inexperience of the management. Qatar's fund and Abu Dhabi's Lunate added $1.5 billion more in 2024\. Which means the deepened financial entanglement CNN documented runs in a circle: Gulf state money flows to Kushner, Kushner's firm becomes the biggest shareholder in an Israeli financial group, and that group holds hundreds of millions in the arms makers supplying a war those same Gulf states have spent two years trying to end. Kushner framed this as peacemaking on that same podcast, saying his Middle East investors now look at Israel and say, wait a minute, maybe there's a benefit to having these wars done. Perhaps. It is also a sentence a person can only say comfortably when nobody can check his positions. Kushner's response to the investigation, posted on X, was that Phoenix is not a defense company, that it is the Israeli equivalent of Vanguard or Fidelity managing roughly $220 billion for millions of savers, that savers do not pick the investments and neither does he, and that the initial purchase was public and predated his return to public service. Parts of that are fair. Phoenix is a diversified, regulated institution, and the military-linked holdings CNN traced are a small slice of its book, from records that themselves capture only part of the portfolio. But the rebuttal skips the inconvenient dates: the doubling came after Trump's reelection, the $343 million profit-taking came in July of this year while Kushner was an active Gaza negotiator and Board of Peace member, and he told Forbes last year he kept a very active dialogue with Phoenix leadership, meeting every few weeks. His attorney confirmed those meetings happened, describing them as discussions about market trends and strategic opportunities that later tapered off. Two of the military-linked positions, including the artillery fuze maker, were opened after Affinity became Phoenix's largest shareholder. Then there is the philosophy, stated openly. Asked about the overlap between his business and his diplomacy, Kushner told 60 Minutes Overtime last October: what people call conflicts of interest, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships. In February, at the Board of Peace's inaugural meeting, he assured the room that people are not personally profiting from this. His firm had already booked its five-fold win by then, but under American law, none of it counts as anything at all. Watch what happens next. Democrats have promised investigations, and Rep. Jamie Raskin put Kushner on notice in April, calling the dual role completely irreconcilable and unethical. Those probes have subpoena power only if the House flips in the midterms. Meanwhile the Board of Peace says more than $5 billion has been pledged for reconstruction, and Kushner has been telling private investors that amazing opportunities await in Gaza. The man who proved that proximity to this White House can turn $300 million into $1.4 billion in two years is now handing out the map to the next gold rush. The strangest part of the whole affair is where the light came from. Washington's ethics regime, built on the quaint assumption that powerful people hold titled jobs, saw nothing. The only reason any of this is known is that Tel Aviv makes public companies file quarterly reports. America got its window into its own Gaza policy from the transparency laws of another country. ## Free Game Takeaway Three concrete things to track from here. First, the midterms: if Democrats retake the House, Raskin's promised Judiciary Committee investigation gains subpoena power, and Affinity's books, its Gulf investors, and the Phoenix trade timeline become fair game. Second, the Board of Peace money: over $5 billion is pledged and Kushner is openly recruiting private capital into Gaza reconstruction, so watch who wins contracts and whether Affinity-adjacent firms or Phoenix's capital appear in the deal flow. Kushner has already said he wants Phoenix deploying into Saudi and Emirati infrastructure. Third, for anyone watching Israeli defense and financial names: Elbit and its peers have been priced as war trades, with Elbit up more than 165 percent since October 2023 on war-driven demand, and Phoenix itself re-rated five-fold during the conflict. A ceasefire that actually holds shifts the demand story from munitions restocking toward reconstruction and regional normalization, which is a different set of winners entirely. The broader lesson costs nothing: this arrangement only became visible because of Israeli disclosure rules. When a policymaker takes an unpaid, untitled role, assume the absence of scandal is an absence of reporting requirements, and weigh that information gap before trusting any market or policy signal coming out of this orbit.