told his circle Kushner passed to him.”207
According to the New York Times, the domestic purge MBS orders in November 2017 results in at least one death and a number of detainees being tortured—including a Harvard-educated American doctor, Walid Fitaihi, who was “blindfolded, slapped and stripped to his underwear before being bound to a chair and shocked with electricity … [an] episode of torture that lasted about an hour.”208 A friend of Fitaihi’s will tell the Times that the doctor’s Saudi torturers “whipped his back so severely that he could not sleep on it for days.”209 A spokesman for MBS’s government will say, in response to accusations it tortured the American, that “the kingdom prohibits torture.”210 As of spring 2019, Fitaihi was still imprisoned in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton without any charges having been announced or trial held, and with no public evidence that the Trump administration is seeking to free him.211
Another MBS detainee, according to the Washington Post, is a “longtime U.S. ally in the country, billionaire investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talel … [who] had publicly attacked Trump as a ‘disgrace’ to America during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump followed the crackdown with a public tweet in support of Mohammed’s moves.”212 Alwaleed is of course not the only Trump critic MBS targets; as he purges the kingdom in the fall of 2017, he has set in motion a sequence of events that will eventually lead to the gruesome assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 (see chapter 9). The New York Times will report in 2019 that MBS’s agents also tortured women’s rights advocates during the crown prince’s late 2017 domestic purge, with the torturers’ favorite method of inflicting pain being electrocution.213
It is not only the identities of MBS’s detainees and torture or murder victims that worry the American intelligence community. It is also that Kushner’s “secretive” trip to Riyadh, which preceded MBS’s purge by mere days, catches “some intelligence officials … off guard,” and that the general consensus is that this was intentional on Kushner’s part, with “most people in the White House … kept out of the loop about the trip and its purpose.”214 After Kushner returns to the United States, “intelligence officials [a]re troubled”—again—“by a lack of information [from Kushner] about the topics [he] discussed” with MBS, with Kushner saying only, euphemistically, that “he and the prince met alone to ‘brainstorm’ strategies” relating to a “Middle East peace plan.” The White House will intimate that other foreign nationals were involved in these meetings with Kushner and MBS as well, but will not say who.215
That the “Middle East peace plan” Kushner, MBS, and perhaps some others allegedly discuss in Riyadh in October 2017 is not the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan Kushner has already been tasked with working on by his father-in-law is seemingly confirmed by the fact that, just weeks after Kushner leaves Riyadh, Trump formally recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by announcing he will move the U.S. embassy there. It is a controversial decision that, unsurprisingly, leads to a months-long suspension of diplomatic contact between the Trump administration and the Palestinians on the subject of a Middle East peace deal.216 Indeed, Kushner evinces no hurry in his peace planning either in October 2017 or at any other time; well over a year after Trump’s December 2017 change in U.S. policy on Jerusalem, Kushner will tell an international conference that he refuses to release any Israeli-Palestinian peace plan until after Israel’s April 2019 elections, a vote in which Netanyahu ultimately secures reelection (see Epilogue).217 Kushner instead spends the period from December 2017 to early 2019 in a fashion decidedly not conducive to Israeli-Palestinian peace talks: “pushing to remove the refugee status of millions of Palestinians as part of an apparent effort to shutter the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).218 According to the Atlantic, Trump, with Kushner’s support, spends 2018 seeking to “cut financial assistance for … [UNRWA] out of pique that the Palestinians have not given him the requisite ‘appreciation or respect,’ as if humanitarian aid, even when it serves U.S. national interests, should be awarded in return for flattery.”219 “It is no surprise, therefore,” the magazine adds, “that the Palestinians stopped talking to the administration.”220
Whether the 2018 freeze in U.S.-Palestinian relations is intentional on Trump and Kushner’s part is worth discussion. Certainly, as the Atlantic notes, when “dozens of Palestinians in Gaza were killed in clashes with the Israeli Defense Forces [in early 2018], the Trump administration