The education of Steve Witkoff

At the end of January 2025 Steve Witkoff, a 67-year-old property tycoon recently appointed as Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, flew to Tel Aviv on his Gulfstream jet to bask in a remarkable diplomatic achievement: a ceasefire and prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. Negotiations were already at an advanced stage under the Biden administration. But Witkoff produced a deal that his predecessors had been unable to close: the first pause in the Gaza war in more than a year. As a result, dozens of Israeli hostages seized in the attacks of October 7th 2023 would be coming home after more than 470 days in captivity.

The deal made Witkoff, who was barely known in America, an overnight sensation in Israel. On January 30th he visited a plaza in Tel Aviv where relatives of Hamas’s captives rallied to urge Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to bring them back. The crowd, many of them sporting yellow ribbons to show solidarity with the cause, greeted Witkoff “like a rock star”, recalled Gil Dickmann, a 33-year-old campaigner who was there.

Witkoff gave an informal briefing to the families. “The president is my dear friend and he’s so concerned,” he said.

“Please! Please!” someone called out. “Bring all of them! Don’t stop!”

“No one’s stopping,” Witkoff said.

He talked movingly about the importance of repatriating the remains of those who had died in captivity. “I’m a member of that club that’s buried a child,” he said, referring to his son, Andrew, who had died of an opioid overdose in 2011 at the age of 22. Witkoff offered his personal number to the Israeli families, and pledged to stay in touch.

Dickmann was moved. His cousin Carmel Gat, a 40-year-old occupational therapist, had been kidnapped on October 7th and was later murdered. Like many of the hostages’ relatives, he regarded Netanyahu’s determination to prolong the war against Hamas as an unjustifiable risk to the lives of those still being held. Witkoff’s appointment had excited him. Here was a dealmaker, someone who had thrived in a New York milieu filled with liars and cheats. He seemed to feel the hostage families’ urgency. The new envoy, Dickmann thought, could be just the person to knock some sense into the self-interested politicians of Israel and the obdurate fanatics of Hamas.

Caught up in the moment, Dickmann approached Witkoff and handed him a small yellow ribbon. The envoy beamed and pinned it on his jacket.

The optimism Witkoff inspired that afternoon has long faded. Only one further hostage—Edan Alexander, an Israeli-American—has been released, in a side deal Witkoff negotiated without Israeli involvement. In March Israel abandoned talks on extending the ceasefire and renewed its offensive, at the cost of thousands of Palestinian lives. Israel’s recent bombing of Hamas leaders in Qatar, the Gulf state which had been mediating talks between the two sides, underscored the hopelessness of the negotiations process.

Arab commentators have portrayed Witkoff as a mere servant of Netanyahu’s policies, which have all but destroyed any prospect of a peaceful end to the conflict. The envoy undoubtedly follows the lead of Trump, who has historically backed the Israeli right.

Yet the hostages complicated the Trump administration’s alliance with Netanyahu. Both the president and Witkoff invested a great deal in trying to get them out, an effort that aligned them politically with Netanyahu’s opponents in Israel. They pressed Netanyahu, cut independent deals with Israel’s adversaries and pursued a grand bargain with Iran (which Netanyahu opposed). It was a predictable, but not foregone, conclusion that Trump and Witkoff would fail. The reasons why they did illuminate both Trump’s real priorities and the limits of American influence in Israel.

When I visited Witkoff in his suite at the White House in the summer, his standing with the president seemed undiminished. My 50-minute interview ended when an aide came in to announce that Trump wanted Witkoff in the Oval Office, pronto, to help deal with a different Middle East crisis (Israeli planes had just bombed Damascus). During a subsequent phone call, Witkoff had to go because the president was on the other line. When Trump meets foreign leaders from the Middle East or Russia, Witkoff is often in the room. “Steve Witkoff’s been amazing, he’s done a great job,” Trump told reporters in late August.

Other presidents have relied on trusted envoys in foreign affairs, with the most famous duo being Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. But that relationship was grounded in a shared concern with strategy and statecraft; Witkoff’s role is rooted in his personal ties to Trump. Together, they have attempted an improvisation unique in the annals of American diplomacy, with Trump making bombastic demands of enemies and allies alike on social media, and Witkoff following up with secret negotiations.

In person, Witkoff comes across as pleasant, even sunny. He is reflexively positive about his interlocutors, a trait which might be an asset in business but can come across as facile in diplomacy. Hamas is “not ideologically intractable”, he has opined; Netanyahu is “well motivated”, Vladimir Putin is both “straight up” and a “super smart guy”; Volodymyr Zelensky is “trying his best”.

That’s not to say Witkoff is bland. He jokes and drops F-bombs in meetings with foreign officials, according to those in attendance. French officials were appalled when he once said that the Elysée Palace’s gilded decor “looks like Mar-a-Lago”.

Though a diplomatic neophyte, Witkoff’s indefatigable bouncing from Tel Aviv to Moscow to Doha to Muscat appears to have yielded workable relationships with Putin and his inner circle, Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister of Iran, and mediators in Qatar and Oman.

Yet the envoy’s naivety about the conflicts he was sent to mediate has been painfully evident. State Department officials and veteran negotiators in the Middle East mock him for regularly turning up without experts or even his own aides nearby. At an early meeting with Putin, Witkoff mistook one of the Russian president’s translators for an American embassy employee. “He just negotiates blind—without a position,” said a close observer of the Hamas talks. “He goes in and hopes for the best and sees if it works.”

Witkoff makes no apologies, arguing that traditional diplomacy is often moribund and self-defeating. The peace processes he inherited remind him of negotiating with “amateurs” on construction projects. “It was so incremental and bureaucratic,” he said. “And then there were guys like me and the president. We were like a SWAT team.”

In peace negotiations, as in cutting property deals, it helps to be good at getting people to the table. But Witkoff wasn’t prepared for how intractable warring parties would be once they were there, he told me. “I didn’t know how difficult it was going to be to get people to be sensible.”

The partnership between Witkoff and Trump took shape soon after the president’s re-election in 2024. “He said to me, ‘What do you want to do?’” Witkoff recalled. “‘What secretary position do you want?’ And I said to him, ‘I want to be the peace guy.’”

He was referring to the backchannel diplomacy in the Middle East handled during the first Trump administration by Jared Kushner. Kushner had helped forge the Abraham accords, which normalised relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. “The more the president talked to me about it the more meaningful it felt,” Witkoff said. “It’s not like I’m so religious. I identify Jewish—that’s for sure—but more in a spiritual way, as opposed to a deeply religious way.”

Witkoff and Trump have much in common, not least the fact that they are both billionaires. Witkoff has a personal net worth of about $2bn, according to Forbes. He owns lavish homes in Miami Beach and the Hamptons, and flies on his own plane with a tiny entourage that sometimes includes his partner, Lauren Olaya, a clothing entrepreneur in her 30s (he has separated from his wife). Witkoff takes no salary and pays his own expenses, he said: “Jet fuel, pilots, everything.” He describes himself as Trump’s student and instrument: “I work for President Trump. I carry out what he asks me to do.”

Witkoff met Trump during the 1980s when he was a junior property lawyer and Trump, who was already famous, a client of his firm. The older man was a frequent visitor to the company’s offices on Park Avenue, and Witkoff admired his “swashbuckling style”. “I want to be him,” he told himself. This oft-repeated account is a mainstay of Witkoff’s public flattery of Trump—a necessary survival strategy for anyone in the president’s orbit—but rings true. Shortly afterwards Witkoff left law for real-estate investing. As he grew more successful, he did a bit of swashbuckling of his own.

The friendship between Witkoff and Trump solidified on the golf course. Witkoff was a near-scratch player. “He would come out to Long Island with me. He wants to play with people he’s comfortable with…We both play fast.”

Trump and Witkoff came “within an inch” of partnering to buy the Chrysler building in Manhattan at one point but lost out to another bidder. Otherwise, they did not work together on significant deals—which may explain how their friendship endured for so long. They had different strategies. Trump traded on his celebrity, chased trophy buildings and dabbled in a dizzying array of ventures from casinos to airlines to for-profit universities.

Witkoff took a less glamorous path. He invested in rental blocks in sketchy areas of north Manhattan and the Bronx and eventually bought older office buildings downtown. When the market took a plunge in the early 1990s Witkoff reduced costs by managing properties himself, even learning how to solder his own pipes.

As Witkoff made his fortune, none of his companies went bankrupt—a claim Trump cannot make—and by the mid-1990s he was rich. He turned up as a bold-faced name in the tabloids, sometimes alongside Trump. The papers labelled Witkoff a “boomer baron”, though he was not in Trump’s league as either a maestro of high-profile transactions or a source of scandal. The men grew closer after Witkoff lost his son—he later said that Trump had embraced him at a time when it seemed as if “all was lost”.

Witkoff was a workaholic, putting in seven days a week, according to former employees. “He was very good at knowing the questions to ask and tearing through BS,” recalled one. His optimism attracted investors: “He was good at spinning and finding an angle to spin. Whether it made sense or not, it was convincing.” In downtime he liked to hang out at Sparks Steak House and Rao’s, restaurants with a certain cachet for having been the scenes of past Mafia hits.

At Rao’s, Witkoff met Bo Dietl, a retired New York police detective and media personality. Their friendship became a big part of Witkoff’s expansive middle-age. Dietl had become a private eye with an improbable-sounding entourage—Mike the Russian, Joey Pots and Pans. Witkoff became known as “Smokin’ Steve”. Witkoff said that Dietl had exaggerated his place in their rat pack: “I’m the guy that goes to sleep at 8.30 at night.” Yet the two men were close enough for Witkoff to give Dietl equity in Manhattan buildings he acquired, and they dabbled in film-making together.

Dietl used to have a gambling addiction; he said Witkoff once generously covered a $250,000 debt he had incurred at a Las Vegas casino. The two men conducted target practice together at local gun ranges. Witkoff has said that he started carrying a pistol when collecting rents in rough neighbourhoods, and he seems to have kept up the habit. Dietl remembers Witkoff calling him last year after being appointed Trump’s envoy to report excitedly that he had been authorised to pack heat: “I got permission of the president—I can carry a gun!”

For many years Witkoff gave no sign of having firm political convictions of his own. He is registered to vote in New York as a “no party” independent and in Florida as a Republican. In the 1990s and the early 2000s Witkoff made campaign donations to New York politicians in both major parties—including to several progressive Democrats, according to campaign-finance records. He also made contributions to national Democrats, giving $25,000 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee in 2008.

Witkoff said he was mostly following the recommendations of the Real Estate Board of New York, the industry’s main trade association. “I never really had such an interest in politics until my dear friend decided to run,” he said. Since 2016, Witkoff and his sons have contributed millions of dollars to Trump campaign vehicles and the Republican Party.

Witkoff became a visible fixture in Trump’s inner circle after Trump’s election defeat in 2020 and his impeachment over the subsequent assault on the Capitol on January 6th. Witkoff stood by Trump as Democrats and prosecutors investigated his conduct, in that case and others.

In 2024 Trump was prosecuted over claims that he paid hush money to a pornstar. Witkoff often turned up at the courthouse to lend Trump moral support, and was there when a Manhattan jury convicted him on all counts. Months later, Witkoff was playing golf with Trump in Florida when Secret Service agents fired shots at a would-be assassin they spotted hiding in bushes along a fence line.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Witkoff held sensitive talks with Trump’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination. He hosted a private reconciliation session between Trump and Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, after the latter’s unsuccessful bid for the nomination, and flew to South Carolina to negotiate with Nikki Haley. Shortly afterwards Haley, the last Republican to drop out, endorsed Trump for the presidential nomination.

As Trump’s envoy, Witkoff has operated under the assumption that guided him through previous negotiations in politics and business: that a deal is always possible among rational people calculating their interests. The obvious problem is that the likes of Putin, Hamas and Netanyahu are often moved by ideology, historical grievance and ego—incentives which are not easily tabulated.

When Witkoff got started, the war in Gaza had been raging for over a year. Domestic and international pressure on the Israeli government to stop the fighting and get the hostages out was mounting. The deal diplomats were working towards involved an exchange of captives for Palestinian prisoners, followed by negotiations to get Gaza back on its feet. Netanyahu had resisted Biden’s efforts to bring about such an agreement but Trump’s re-election shook things up.

“There was a strong sensibility that, in the Middle East, Trump’s name and brand was going to matter,” Witkoff recalled. An initial ceasefire and hostage deal would be just a first step towards the grand prize of normalised ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Witkoff and Trump hoped.

This was always an ambitious aspiration—by that point in the bombardment of Gaza, the Saudis would probably have demanded a firm path towards Palestinian statehood as a pre-condition for recognising Israel. The new envoy nonetheless plunged in avidly.

Negotiating in Qatar on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, Witkoff grew frustrated by the intransigence of Israel’s top negotiators—David Barnea, the director of Mossad, and Ronen Bar, then the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic spy agency. Witkoff threatened to use Trump’s clout to have the pair fired, according to sources familiar with the talks.

Anyone entering the negotiations as Trump’s emissary would probably have made progress, given Netanyahu’s need to appease the Trump White House. Yet Witkoff worked hard and effectively, co-ordinating with Biden administration officials before the inauguration to ensure continuity on the American side, and channelling Trump’s wishes and bluster when talking to the Israelis (”they did not know how to get deals done,” he later complained about some of his interlocutors).

Eventually he got the agreement over the line, resulting in the release of 33 hostages, and a promise of “phase-two” discussions about permanently ending the war.

As the hostages came home in January, Witkoff tried to launch the phase-two negotiations. In the short term, he was looking to extend the ceasefire and do another prisoner exchange, but talks were ultimately supposed to encompass Gaza’s future—and perhaps a revived path to Palestinian statehood.

Hamas, having provoked the Israelis with a hostage-release ceremony designed to look like a military parade, insisted on moving to the next stage of the January truce which involved, among other things, further withdrawals of Israeli troops. Netanyahu for his part was simply not prepared to stop fighting Hamas for long, or entertain the idea of handing over Gaza to the Palestinian Authority (PA), the internationally recognised governing body for Palestinians in the West Bank (which is dominated by Hamas’s rival, Fatah).

Netanyahu’s reluctance to allow the main Palestinian governing entity to run Gaza flew in the face of decades of official American policy, which had been to work towards a Palestinian-run state in the West Bank and Gaza as part of an agreement which guaranteed Israel’s security. In reality Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank had made the prospect of a Palestinian state increasingly unrealistic.

Trump and Witkoff were largely indifferent to the so-called two-state solution, and tried to ignore the subject. Witkoff told me he preferred not to talk about a Palestinian state publicly because he didn’t want the far-right members of Netanyahu’s cabinet to torpedo his negotiations.

Other problems were brewing however. In a disconcerting stream of public remarks starting from January, the president sketched out a vision for Gaza’s future which went beyond indifference to Palestinians’ aspirations of statehood to actively precluding them.

Trump suggested that Gazans might be evacuated during reconstruction, and that many might not return—a plan that echoed the views of hard-right Jewish supremacists who have long dreamed of removing Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. Oblivious or indifferent to the offence his half-baked plan provoked across the Arab world, Trump pressed Egypt and other Arab states to absorb Gazans. Unsurprisingly, they refused.

Trump remained fixated on his Gaza plan nonetheless, declaring at a press conference in February that America would “take over” Gaza and “own it”. Witkoff loyally promoted the plan and offered modish ideas about how the enclave might be rejuvenated. “Maybe it’s about AI coming there. Maybe it’s about hyperscale data centres being seeded into that area…Maybe it’s about blockchain and robotics,” he mused in March on Tucker Carlson’s podcast.

This diplomatic albatross was partly of Witkoff’s own making. In January he visited Gaza with the IDF and found himself looking at it through a builder’s lens, he told me. He concluded that the five-year timetable for reconstruction proposed by the Biden administration was wildly unrealistic: “And I came back to the president—and this is when it all began—and I said to him, ‘Mr President, we’re not going to excavate…get rid of all those shells and survey from a geotechnical standpoint inside of ten years. And then it’s going to be another ten to build it. So the first thing is, let’s level-set the facts to everybody and not bullshit everybody about how big and enormous this job is.’”

Witkoff admitted that he had considered providing incentives to encourage Gazans to leave, but insisted it was never the administration’s intention to expel them. He maintained that the point was to be realistic about how long it would take to rebuild, and offer decent living conditions in the interim. “Everybody thought when I said that...that was a ruse to get the Gazans out. Utter horseshit,” he told me.

At a minimum, Witkoff failed to recognise how any talk of the Palestinians leaving would be received. The events of 1948, in which Israeli forces drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, still resonate in the Arab world as a historic injustice.

Trump’s apparent support for Palestinian evacuations from Gaza gave Israel extraordinary latitude. Why get stuck in discussions on a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians when this American solution, however implausible, enjoyed Trump’s backing? The vision for Gaza’s reconstruction promoted by Trump and Witkoff “gave Netanyahu and the far right a reason not to go to phase two”, said Dan Shapiro, a former American ambassador to Israel.

On March 2nd, in a televised address, Netanyahu announced a new blockade of Gaza and made clear that Israel would return to war. He thanked Trump for “his visionary plan for Gaza…which Israel fully supports”, and blamed Hamas for the failure of talks. Israel had accepted “Steve Witkoff’s plan” for renewing the ceasefire but Hamas had made demands that were “totally unacceptable”. This was Netanyahu’s signature approach, both flattering and defying America. Witkoff put a positive spin on it. Israel’s renewed offensive in Gaza, he told Carlson on his podcast, was “in some respects unfortunate, and in some respects falls into the had-to-be bucket…Hamas was not responding.”

This was a blow to the hostage families. It was much harder to get a deal during active fighting, not least because Hamas’s negotiators, based in Doha, would find it more difficult to communicate with leaders inside Gaza.

Witkoff was still trying however, and remained personally motivated by the mission, chatting with many of the hostage families on WhatsApp and inviting them to the White House, where some spent hours with Trump.

Yet those same families watched with frustration as Witkoff kept being pulled away. Trump had other deals he wanted to close.

Buoyed by his initial success with the Gaza ceasefire, Trump had dispatched Witkoff to Moscow, where he met Putin for several hours at the Kremlin. It marked the start of Trump’s effort to honour a campaign promise to end Ukraine’s war “in one day”. The effort became a months-long fiasco of diplomatic confusion and zig-zagging on policy that strengthened Putin, weakened Ukraine and left Witkoff’s credibility in Europe in tatters.

Witkoff said he was glad to follow the president’s order to start seeing Putin. “First of all, I enjoyed the meetings,” he said, not because he enjoyed the company but because “I had to get information about him.” Otherwise, “How in the world could we negotiate?”

Even more ruthlessly than Netanyahu, however, Putin exploited Witkoff’s inexperience. He peppered the envoy with Kremlin talking points: Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied areas in the east of the country want Russian rule; fundamental disputes must be settled before any ceasefire can be achieved. Witkoff, sniffing a breakthrough that might win Trump accolades, exaggerated Putin’s reasonableness. “There are many under the illusion that he wants all of Ukraine,” Witkoff told me. “And it’s completely preposterous.”

Trump also assigned Witkoff to negotiate with Iran’s theocratic regime, to seek a peaceful resolution of the international stalemate over its nuclear programme. This proved to be another distraction from the Gaza negotiations. Starting in April, Witkoff held five rounds of formal talks with the Iranian foreign minister, jetting back and forth to Muscat and Rome, only to have the effort collapse on June 13th when Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and scientists.

Throughout the spring and summer, Witkoff repeatedly expressed optimism about his mediation with Israel and Hamas. He told reporters at the White House on May 29th that he had “some very good feelings” about the prospects for a Gaza deal. On July 8th he said he was down to a single unresolved issue with Hamas. Around that time, Trump authorised Witkoff to press Netanyahu in private to enact a ceasefire and bring more hostages home, but Witkoff was still unable to get an agreement.

By the third week of July, Trump and Witkoff seem to have accepted a line the Israelis were pushing at the time, which was that Hamas would fold only once it was truly afraid that America was going to walk away from the hostage negotiations. On July 24th, without warning, Witkoff announced that America was pulling its negotiating team from Qatar and would now “consider alternative options for bringing the hostages home”. The pressure tactic didn’t work—Hamas clung to its hostages.

Within days, “alternative options” had evolved into a new American negotiating posture: Witkoff no longer sought a 60-day ceasefire and prisoner exchange, as he had pursued for months, but now wanted an “all or nothing” deal that would see all the hostages released in one fell swoop, as well as Hamas’s acceptance of disarmament and Gaza’s demilitarisation—essentially, surrender terms.

The purpose of the pivot may have been to make demands that Hamas would never meet, thereby freeing Netanyahu to act as he pleased in Gaza. Or Witkoff may have been persuaded by his Israeli counterparts that switching to “all or nothing” might rattle Hamas and lead to more hostage releases, in which case he was played. Whatever the origins and premise of the idea, the effect was to liberate Netanyahu from the necessity of compromise. The prime minister soon announced plans to occupy Gaza and called up 60,000 Israeli reservists in anticipation of a new assault.

In early August Witkoff returned to Tel Aviv. At an emotional meeting with dozens of hostage relatives at a public library, he answered anguished questions for three hours, trying to put an upbeat gloss on what America’s change of position meant for the fate of the surviving Israeli captives. Witkoff all but openly aligned American policy with Netanyahu’s plan to defeat Hamas by force—the same policy the prime minister had been pursuing when the envoy had burst onto the scene the year before.

The goal now, Witkoff said, was “no more Hamas in Gaza”, according to partial recordings of the meeting made by attendees. “We’re going to get the demilitarisation of Hamas.” This was “50%” of the solution required, alongside “the reconstruction of Gaza, which we’re already working on…We have a very very good plan that we’re working on collectively with the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and that effectively means the end of the war…So we are very very close to a solution to end this war.”

As ever, Witkoff shamelessly promoted his boss as the singular personality whose toughness would change the equation: “Hamas is afraid of us. I’m telling you, Hamas is afraid of Donald J. Trump.”

The atmosphere at the library was glummer than the giddy reception Witkoff had enjoyed in January. “He was trying to sound optimistic but it sounded to me like he had no plan for how to bring this possible deal,” an Israeli who was there recalled. “When he said ‘all or nothing’ we were very disturbed by it..I’m afraid that it looks like Netanyahu tricked Witkoff in order to keep the war going and, more important, to keep his government intact.”

As the possibility of another ceasefire receded, France, Britain and other American allies advanced a plan to recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly meeting in September.

Witkoff continued to work in secret on the administration’s own plans for post-war Gaza. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, Arab governments and consultancy groups such as BCG have all pitched their ideas to the White House. When I met Witkoff in mid-July he shared some of his thinking. A post-war governance apparatus in Gaza would not empower the Palestinian Authority but might include PA officials, he said. “Let’s get people like me who love their country so much that they want to get involved in it,” he said. “But they don’t know how to govern...So let’s put them into a sort of receivership, teach them how to govern, and then every five years we’ll make an evaluation.” Israeli officials said that Blair is a candidate to manage the receivership (representatives at his non-profit organisation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, declined to comment).

It seems unlikely these plans will ever be realised. Netanyahu appears set on a full-scale Israeli reoccupation of Gaza. Israel’s bombing of Hamas leaders in Doha on September 9th effectively ended Witkoff’s peace process.

It is too simplistic to dismiss Witkoff, as some have, as merely a tool of Netanyahu. Between January and July, Trump and his envoy had an agenda that was distinct from the Israeli leader’s, albeit mainly on the subject of hostage release. But on critical decisions—whether to challenge Israel’s famine-inducing policies in Gaza or to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities during Israel’s 12-day war—Trump and his envoy took the path that empowered Netanyahu.

The failure to free the remaining hostages must be difficult for Witkoff. When we met, he spoke with emotion about sitting in a hospital in January with female IDF soldiers who had been released from Hamas captivity, singing “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The people of Israel live”, a Hebrew anthem of solidarity). His willingness to spend hours addressing questions from agitated relatives of hostages is one of the more admirable examples of his lack of formality. Their WhatsApp messages remind him daily of those still in captivity, people whose names he knows and whose injuries he can describe in vivid detail. “Now we’re down to the last 20,” he said.

During his rise in New York, Witkoff was relentlessly “goal-oriented”, he said, asking himself, “How do I get to that, because that’s the finish line. Not the one-yard line. How do I get to that?” Diplomatic breakthroughs, he has learned, can’t always be achieved through force of will.

“There are agendas, and you have to know the agendas. And if you don’t know the agendas, you tell me, then how do you figure it out?” ■

Steve Coll is a senior editor at The Economist.
Additional reporting by Sophie Pedder, Nicolas Pelham and Anshel Pfeffer.