Jared Kushner's Controversial Island Resort Reveals Scheme To Expand Israel's Sphere Of Influence

The proposed Sazan Island Resort highlights how Affinity Partners uses private investment to push the Trump administration's foreign policy.

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Transforming the Gaza Strip into oceanside luxury properties built atop a mass grave isn’t the only real estate development project proposed by Jared Kushner that has embroiled him in controversy. Across the Mediterranean Sea, Albanian authorities have opened an anti-corruption investigation into a company led by Kushner that hopes to transform an island off of the country’s coast into a luxury resort. While Kushner contends that his vision for the island is rooted in transforming it into a paradisaical resort, that picturesque image hides how the project serves as a vehicle for him to advance his ulterior political motives. The probe into his latest development project is the second major anti-corruption investigation in as many years that has exposed a strategy executed by Kushner to use the massive amount of private investment capital at his disposal to advance the interests of the State of Israel and expand the Zionist World Order he continues to fight in the vanguard of.

The Kushner-backed development project came under intense public scrutiny following an interview given by his wife, First Daughter Ivanka Trump. During the interview, Trump painted a romanticized picture of how she and her husband came to find an uninhabited island “in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea” in 2021 as if such a hidden jewel remained undiscovered within the cradle of western civilization for millennia. “We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it,” she said. “We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.” In reality, the island that Kushner has earmarked for his latest real estate development project is nowhere near the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Instead, Sazan Island lies just off of the coast of the Balkan nation of Albania in the Adriatic Sea.

Like its location, the picture painted by Kushner and his wife of the mysterious paradise they stumbled upon could not be further from the truth either. Sazan is the largest island in Albania and serves as the westernmost point of the country. The island also serves as a point of demarcation between the Adriatic and Ionian seas. That location made Sazan a crucial military post during the Second World War when it was controlled by the Kingdom of Italy before being ceded back to Albania in 1947. Following the war, Albania came under despotic communist rule by the iron fist of Prime Minister Enver Hoxha, who ruled the country from 1944 until his death in 1985. After Sazan was returned to Albania in 1947, the Hoxha regime declared Sazan a military exclusion zone to construct a strategic naval base on the island free of any civilian presence. Although Sazan saw little development under the yoke of communism, the Albanian government managed to build approximately 3,600 nuclear bunkers on the island during the Cold War in the years following its split from the Soviet sphere of influence in 1960, infrastructure that Affinity Partners would stand to inherit under the Kushner-backed investment strategy into developing the island into a luxury resort.

Although Albania officially abandoned communism in March 1992 shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, access to Sazan continued to be restricted from the public until July 2015. Decades of isolation from the public largely preserved the island’s unique ecology, which led to the Albanian government designating the island as part of the country’s first and largest national marine park in 2010. The Karaburun-Sazan Marine Park spans across Sazan Island and onto the Karaburun Peninsula on Albania’s Adriatic coast, harboring marine habitats that are home to several endangered species, including Mediterranean monk seals, one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals. Bottlenose dolphins, loggerhead sea turtles, and flamingos are other examples of the fauna within the Karaburun-Sazan Marine Park that the Albanian government has sought to preserve by extending environmental protections to the island.

The island’s emergence as a tourist destination since first being opened to the public in 2015 has made its unique environment politically contentious. Those tensions became considerably amplified in 2024 when Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC was awarded strategic investor status by the Albanian Strategic Investment Committee chaired by Prime Minister Edi Rama in order to develop the Sazan Island Resort. Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC is an extension of Affinity Partners, the American investment firm based out of Miami, Florida, created by Jared Kushner in 2021. Kushner’s firm promised to commit €1.4 billion to the development of the island, which planned to include a marina, hotels, private villas, restaurants, recreation facilities, and the crown jewel of a luxury resort managed by Swiss hospitality company Aman Resorts. In addition to the development of tourist destinations, Kushner’s firm has also committed funds to the restoration of Cold War-era military structures including the thousands of nuclear bunkers across the island.

According to Kushner, he had been encouraged to look to Albania for investment opportunities at the behest of Richard Grenell, who has served in the role of Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions since the position was established by the Trump administration in January 2025. During the first Trump administration, Grenell made headlines as he was named the first openly gay cabinet-level official in U.S. history after being appointed as the acting Director of National Intelligence in 2020. Grenell also served as the Special Presidential Envoy for Serbia and Kosovo Peace Negotiations from October 2019 until the end of the first Trump administration, through which he cultivated his connections to Albanian government officials involved in the diplomatic process to normalize relations between the two countries. Grenell’s encouragement to seek investment opportunities in Albania led to Kushner meeting with Prime Minister Edi Rama aboard the same yacht his wife stated he first discovered the island aboard in 2021. That yacht was owned by Nat Rothschild, the 5th Baron Rothschild of the infamous banking dynasty, who arranged the meeting between Kushner and the prime minister, which led to Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC being awarded strategic investor status by the Albanian government to begin developing the Sazan Island Resort in late 2024.

Revelations over the Kushner-backed plan to develop a luxury resort on Sazan Island sparked outrage across Albania. In late May, protests began to erupt at the proposed site of the development in the southern Albanian city of Zvernec on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, where protesters took to the large barbed-wire fences erected around the project. Those protesters were met by a private security detail assigned to the site of the development, an exchange that quickly turned violent as security guards began dragging protesters away from the area. Following the protests, Albanian officials revoked the licenses of two of the private security companies. Additionally, 15 protesters were charged in connection with the demonstration.

Demonstrations against the Kushner-backed development project continued as thousands of Albanians took to the streets of the nation’s capital, Tirana, voicing their fervent opposition to endangering the protected flora and fauna within the island. Joni Vorpsi, an ecologist with the PPNEA-BirdLife Albania organization, warned of the dangers the project presented to the region, stating, “This would be a new city with around 10,000 rooms, and it will completely destroy that wild region.” Vorspi also succinctly summarized the goal of the protests when he declared, “We want all construction to halt and heavy machines ‌out ⁠of the protected area.” Environmental protesters have announced a demonstration in Vlora, the third-most populous city in the country, which encompasses the Karaburun Peninsula and Sazan Island, planned for Saturday, June 6th, 2026.

Although protesters have largely taken to the streets across Albania in defense of protecting the ecology of Sazan Island, consideration over the dangers the development of the luxury resort poses to the wildlife of the region isn’t the most serious issue raised about the project concerning Kushner. In the wake of those protests, Albanian anti-corruption officials announced a probe into the project negotiated between Kushner and Prime Minister Rama. On June 1st, 2026, the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime (”SPAK”) of Albania confirmed that it had opened a formal investigation into the project. The decision by the country’s anti-corruption organization followed the publication of a report by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network based out of Tirana, which revealed that Albanians involved in Kushner’s project to develop a luxury resort on Sazan Island include a businessman with links to the Italian mafia, a disgraced former judge, the daughter of an attorney accused of committing forgery, a company whose owner was mysteriously murdered, and one of the country’s largest oligarchs.

The corruption investigation launched by SPAK against the development project on Sazan Island is not the first of its kind to target Kushner-backed investments. In December 2025, just weeks before Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC was awarded strategic investor status by the Albanian government, Affinity Partners announced that it had withdrawn itself from a $500 million construction project it planned in Serbia. Affinity Partners had planned to build a Trump Tower complex encompassing a hotel and luxury apartments in central Belgrade on the site of a former Yugoslavian Army headquarters that was destroyed during a NATO bombing raid in 1999 during the Kosovo War. Affinity Partners agreed to a 99-year lease on the site of the proposed Trump Tower complex with the Serbian government before withdrawing from the plan for its construction. The project was derailed following the indictment of Serbian Culture Minister Nikola Selakovic and three other officials on charges of abuse of office and falsification of documents filed by the country’s Public Prosecution Office for Organized Crime (”TOK”). In the indictment, the TOK alleged that Selakovic illegally removed the building’s cultural heritage status in order to greenlight the Affinity Partners project to build the Trump Tower complex in Belgrade. Selakovic’s trial on the charges filed by the TOK began in February 2026. While the charges brought against Selakovic gave his trial the ignominious distinction of being the first to be held against a sitting minister of the Serbian government since the overthrow of the regime of former president Slobodan Milošević, current Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic threatened to pardon him and his co-defendants in the event that they are convicted.

In discussing his plans for the Sazan Island Resort during an interview with the FII Institute, Kushner ostensibly gave insight into the political calculus behind his corruption-laden projects in Albania and Serbia. According to Kushner, the motives driving the development projects led by him through Affinity Partners are not just driven by the aim of expanding his own real estate empire inextricably tied to that of his father-in-law, President Donald J. Trump. Those motives are also inextricably tied to Trump’s political empire.

During the interview, Kushner remarked on how investment into countries like Serbia and Albania through Affinity Partners was part of a comprehensive strategy to expand the sphere of influence of the State of Israel. In discussing the investment strategy of Affinity Partners, Kushner minced no words, making it clear how nations that aligned themselves with Israel would receive the benefits of investments from his firm. Kushner expounded on how that dynamic could be used to expand the sphere of Zionist influence, remarking, “We’re looking at opportunities to invest in countries who have joined the Abraham Accords, but we’re also looking at opportunities to invest in countries that might join the Abraham Accords and to create economic packages to incentivize them.” Kushner elaborated how partners of his had also suggested exploring the opportunities of investing in countries including Morocco and Syria in an effort to persuade their governments to join the Abraham Accords as the next stage of his strategy to leverage investment capital to expand the Israeli sphere of influence.

Neither Albania nor Serbia is currently signatory to the Abraham Accords. The potential of joining those agreements does not simply offer the prospect of the investment of financial capital into the countries but political capital as well. Albania has long sought admission into the European Union (”EU”). The country formally applied for membership in the EU in 2009. It was given official candidate status in 2014 and has rapidly accelerated its pace for accession since. EU officials and Prime Minister Edi Rama have set their sights on concluding negotiations for Albania to join the EU by the end of 2027, with an ambitious target date for becoming its newest member-state set for 2030. Serbia similarly filed its formal application to join the EU in 2009 and began membership negotiations in 2014. However, unlike Albania, negotiations between Serbia and the EU have reached impasses over proposed political, judicial, and foreign policy reforms. In the case of each country, the possibility of entering into the Abraham Accords provides them with political capital that can be leveraged to advance their respective accessions to the EU. That dynamic highlights how Jared Kushner’s development projects through Affinity Partners not only serve as a gateway for foreign investment to advance his political ambition to expand the Zionist sphere of influence; they also further the political ambitions of the nations he brings into the fold, a reciprocally beneficial arrangement in which Israel is the ultimate beneficiary.

Following the collapse of Affinity Partners’ plan to build a sprawling Trump Tower complex in Belgrade, the project of developing the Sazan Island Resort in Albania stands as the centerpiece of Kushner’s strategy to use private investment capital to surreptitiously advance Zionist foreign policy ambitions outside of the public sphere. Just as concerns over dangers to the island’s ecosystem veil the malignant corruption behind the project from becoming the focus of the discourse over it, Kushner’s declared motive of investing in nations in the hopes of accelerating their development hides behind a similar facade that shields the political ambitions driving his strategy.