Hamat airport in Lebanon

By Gulf news - Joseph A. Kechichian - Beirut: Lebanese MP Riad Rahal, a member of the Future Movement from the Akkar region, north of Tripoli, has urged officials to “begin work to revamp the Qlay‘at Military Airfield into a civilian airport immediately.” A statement issued on Saturday by The Movement of Public Opinion in Akkar [MPOA], a new civil society organisation, hailed the social media campaign as a long overdue initiative. Although the relatively neglected Akkar region provides Lebanon with a vast pool of young men who serve in the armed forces, it also houses a key airfield, the Rene Mouawad Airbase — Qlay‘at, named after the head-of-state assassinated in 1989, and which hosts a helicopter wing. Officials now want to revitalise the region and, simultaneously, encourage Lebanon to have a second international gateway. In fact, Qlay‘at offers a strategic alternative to Rafik Hariri International Airport [RHIA], which is located in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Dahiyah, and which poses potential security risks as its perimeter fence is too close to various Hezbollah strongholds.

Over the years, a controversial debate preoccupied the Lebanese to find an alternative civilian facility — whether at Qlay‘at or the Rayaq Airbase in the Bekaa Valley — precisely to avoid serious security breaches at RHIA. The Qlay‘at facility has a 3,600-metre by 60-metre concrete runway and there are warehouses for fuel, areas for maintenance, spare parts, telecoms devices and radars.

Jared Kushner, second from left, with his wife, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief adviser, at the White House on Friday for a visit by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan.

By JODI KANTOR

When Jared Kushner was 17 years old, he stood where a million Jews had been murdered and listened to Israel’s prime minister stress the country’s importance. “The Holocaust could have been prevented. We know it could not have taken place had the Jewish state been established a few years earlier,” the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said in 1998, standing amid the ruins of an Auschwitz-Birkenau crematory. He had just led Mr. Kushner and thousands of other teenagers waving Israeli flags in a procession through the camp’s gates and past the barracks. As part of the commemoration, the group would soon leave Poland and fly to Israel, to complete the journey from slaughter to Zionist rebirth.

Back then, Mr. Kushner was a high school basketball player, a Billy Joel fan, a quiz team manager and no one’s guess to become a negotiating partner with Mr. Netanyahu. But unlike other students on the trip, he knew the prime minister, who was friendly with his father, a real estate developer and donor to Israeli causes. Mr. Netanyahu had even stayed at the Kushners’ home in New Jersey, sleeping in Jared’s bedroom. (The teenager moved to the basement that night.) On Wednesday, when the Israeli prime minister visits the White House, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Kushner will reunite on far different terms from before — and yet their meeting will be imbued with some of the shared ideas of those old encounters. Mr. Netanyahu is on his second stint as prime minister; Mr. Kushner, now 36, is President Trump’s son-in-law and a leading adviser on Middle Eastern affairs with a formidable assignment. Mr. Trump has said that Mr. Kushner will try to “do peace,” which the president has called “the ultimate deal.”

Mr. Kushner, on something of a crash course in diplomacy, has been speaking with Arab leaders in recent weeks. But he is a mystery to most Middle Eastern officials. He has no experience in government or international affairs. His up-close exposure to the Arab world amounts to trips to a handful of Persian Gulf countries and one star-studded jaunt to Jordan.

Even though Mr. Kushner has visited Israel since childhood, and more recently to do business, he is little known there. Though he holds strong views about the state of Israel, he has not been outspoken about them, save for editorials in The New York Observer, the newspaper he owns. His thinking on sensitive matters like settlements is not well understood. “Israel wasn’t a political discussion for him; it was his family, his life, his people,” said Hirschy Zarchi, rabbi at the Chabad House at Harvard, where Mr. Kushner was an undergraduate.

Rather than diplomatic experience, Mr. Kushner has ties to Israel that are personal and religious. His visit to Auschwitz was stark, but its themes were not new to him. His grandmother survived the Holocaust by crawling through a homemade tunnel in Poland. His grandfather escaped the massacres by hiding in a hole for years. An Orthodox Jew, Mr. Kushner was instructed to protect Israel, remember the genocide and assure the survival of the Jewish people, those close to him say.