NEW YORK (VINnews) — Former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump, and his deputy, Avi Berkowitz, have been nominated for the Nobel peace prize for their role in negotiating four normalization deals between Israel and Arab nations known as the “Abraham Accords”.
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Kushner and Berkowitz hammered out the deals between Israel and the United Emirates and Bahrain in September and later negotiated the deals with Sudan and Morocco. Kushner also laid the foundations for future agreements with other Arab countries, and engineered a historic meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Saudi crown prince Mohammed Ben-Salman.
The two former statesmen were nominated by prominent American attorney Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law school who is entitled to nominate for the prize. Dershowitz defended former president Trump during his impeachment trial last year.
The nomination does not imply an endorsement by the Nobel committee itself, which has received numerous other nominations for the prize, including Russian opposition leader Alexei Nevelny and WHO climate campaigner Greta Thunberg. However Kushner said in a statement that he was honored to have been nominated for the prize, which will be awarded next October.
The “Abraham Accords” were announced between mid-August and mid-December and were the most significant diplomatic breakthroughs in the Middle East since the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestinians and the 1994 treaty between Israel and Jordan. These peace accords won the protagonists, Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzchak Rabin and PLO leader Yassir Arafat, the 1994 peace prize.
Don’t get too excited. Their chance of actually winning a Nobel Peace Prize is close to zero. Stacey Abrams was also nominated for the Peace Prize – by a left-wing member of the Norwegian Parliament; her chance of winning is about the same – zero.