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FIRST RAZE GAZA, THEN BUILD A PLAYGROUND FOR GLOBAL CAPITAL  
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Abe Asher
November 19, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ Profit-hungry developers, Gulf monarchs, Donald Trump, Tony Blair,
and the Israeli far right are all united in a vision for Gaza: a
tech-fueled special economic zone governed by billionaires, with no
question of self-determination for Palestinians. _

The Trump administration’s vision for Gaza, published in its GREAT
Trust plan document. , (GREAT Trust plan)

 

When President Donald Trump brokered a cease-fire agreement between
Israel and Hamas in late September, the American president was
heralded, even by some leading Democrats
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for his peacemaking. Speaker Mike Johnson and Israeli Knesset speaker
Amir Ohana said they would
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jointly nominate Trump for his coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

The unveiling of Trump’s relatively sober twenty-point peace plan
for Gaza appeared to mark a sharp turn from how the president was
thinking about Gaza less than eight months prior, when he announced
[[link removed]] at a White House press
conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the
United States would take control of the Gaza Strip, occupy it, and
turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East” — a possibility
that, in Trump’s words, could be “so magnificent.” Shortly after
the press conference, Trump shared a bizarre AI-generated video
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of a rebuilt Gaza on social media complete with belly dancers, Elon
Musk throwing fistfuls of bills into the air, and Trump and Netanyahu
lying shirtless on beach chairs.

Trump’s ambition to turn Gaza into a resortland was incorporated in
a broader plan for the region’s future that came under discussion
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in Washington at the end of the summer. The Gaza Reconstitution,
Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust
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was the Trump administration’s first major proposal for bringing
peace to Gaza. Its logic remains operative in the current peace plan.

The GREAT Trust plan was remarkable for its bluntness: it proposed
relocating a quarter of the existing population of Gaza to neighboring
countries for the duration of the rebuilding process and shunting the
rest of the population into temporary, restricted accommodations in
the strip. That done, the United States would assume control of Gaza
for a period of ten years and oversee the transformation of the
devastated home of more than two million Palestinians into “a
Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism,
benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets (Europe, GCC
[Gulf Cooperation Council], Asia), resources, and a young workforce,
all supported by Israeli tech and GCC investments.”

The transformation would be funded by up to $100 billion in public
investment and up to $65 billion in private investment, which would
cover the cost of everything from “generous relocation packages”
for Palestinian residents to “10 Mega construction projects.”

The idea that drew the most scrutiny was the project to transform the
Gaza coastline into “Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands,” a string of
top-end resorts and small artificial islands modeled on the Palm
Islands in Dubai that would, presumably, attract pleasure seekers
happy to set up their beach chairs on the bones of the Palestinian
dead. But that wasn’t the only megaproject in the proposal. Others
include the construction of highways named for Mohammed bin Salman,
the ruler of Saudi Arabia, and Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the ruler
of Abu Dhabi; a smart manufacturing zone named for Elon Musk; and a
network of data centers to serve Israel and the Gulf states.

Nowhere in the plan was there any suggestion that the Palestinian
population of Gaza might democratically support the transformation of
their besieged homeland into a US-governed, techno-futurist special
economic zone; words like democracy and sovereignty were absent from a
thirty-eight-slide deck
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on the proposal, obtained by the _Washington Post_. This is either
because the plan’s architects knew it could not achieve democratic
support or because they have given up the pretense of caring. There is
no question of Palestinian political rights in the plan until such
time as Gaza has been “demilitarized and deradicalized,” at which
undetermined time governance will be transferred to a pliant
Palestinian polity that will join the Abraham Accords and,
potentially, sign a compact of free association with the GREAT Trust
to secure ongoing financial support “in exchange for the Trust
retaining some plenary powers.”

In the meantime, the implicit assumption is that the Palestinian
population of Gaza will either migrate permanently to neighboring
countries or be pacified by a multibillion-dollar security apparatus
backed by, if the logos that appear in the slide deck are any
indication, a who’s who of the world’s leading military
contractors and weapons manufacturers. The GREAT Trust plan does not
mention what might happen if Gazans resist this next phase of their
dispossession, but it is not terribly difficult to imagine.

THE NEOM MODEL

As Alberto Toscano has written
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is being reimagined as an “apotheosis of that fusion of capital and
authoritarian rule that constitutes, for so much of global reaction,
the ‘miracle’ of those ‘miracle cities’ of the Middle East.”
The reference to the miracle cities of the Middle East is often
explicit in plans for Gaza’s future, with Neom, the planned city
being constructed at enormous cost on the northwestern coast of Saudi
Arabia, serving as a frequent point of reference.

The region where Neom is being built has been described as a “blank
canvas” by bin Salman, much in the way the architects of Trump’s
plan appear to be conceiving of Gaza. Neom, too, has been imagined as
a gleaming new regional hub for industry, trade, and pleasure,
complete with a ski resort and a soccer stadium suspended above the
ground. But the region is not a blank canvas at all. The government
has already destroyed multiple villages in the process of clearing
land for construction, Last year, it authorized
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lethal force against villagers to facilitate the ongoing and
potentially doomed [[link removed]] construction
of the Line — a 110-mile-long, glass-encased smart city that was
initially supposed to be able to accommodate a quarter of the total
population of the country.

The Neom project is notable not just for its dizzying ambition
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— a floating industrial city! a luxury island resort! an
“ultra-luxury upside-down skyscraper”! — but for how it
incorporates the same logic animating the plans for Gaza: that the
land is a blank slate waiting to be transformed, not in the name of
nation-building but in the name of creating special economic zones
that can only be accessed by the wealthy and function, Quinn Slobodian
has suggested
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like the “cruise ship or the theme park.”

We have already seen versions of this vision enacted in places like
Dubai. Though Palestine is often used as a laboratory
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for the future, the Trump plan for Gaza is not so much a preview of
the future to come but a gruesome extension of a future that has
already arrived — not only in the Gulf but also in Central American
countries like El Salvador
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and Honduras
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RELIGIOUS ZIONISM MEETS GLOBAL CAPITAL

The GREAT Trust plan was predictably excoriated by Palestinians and
much of the rest of the international community, but in Israel it
proved quite popular with key players in the Netanyahu government. In
September, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich suggested at a real
estate conference in Tel Aviv that the cost of the assault on Gaza
would ultimately pay for itself. “The demolition, the first stage in
the city’s renewal, we have already done,” Smotrich said
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“Now we need to build.”

Smotrich is far from the only leading figure to back the spirit, if
not the exact letter, of Trump’s Gaza Riviera plan. Over the summer,
Smotrich spoke at a Knesset conference titled “The Gaza Riviera —
from Vision to Reality” to a crowd that reportedly included
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other government ministers, members of the Knesset, security
personnel, relatives of the hostages, and a variety of other
researchers and activists like the notorious “godmother” of the
Israeli settler movement, Daniella Weiss. Smotrich assured his
audience that Trump supported the effort “to turn Gaza into a
prosperous strip, a resort town with employment.” That, he said, is
“how you make peace.”

The fact that Smotrich and members of his far-right Religious Zionist
coalition party support the resettlement and annexation of Gaza in the
aftermath of the war is not surprising; territorial expansion has long
been a primary objective of the religious Zionist movement, and
Smotrich himself was arrested for plotting
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to bomb an Israeli highway in protest of Israel’s withdrawal of
settlers from Gaza in 2005. Smotrich grew up in the Beit El settlement
in the West Bank; his father is Rabbi Chaim Smotrich, who similarly
protested the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza two decades ago
and has remained a highly visible figure in religious Zionist politics
as dean of a yeshiva in the settlement of Kiryat Arba outside Hebron.

What is notable is the enthusiasm Smotrich and his allies have shown
for the project of reconceiving Gaza in precisely the way Trump does:
as an opportunity for capital extraction and accumulation. It is
almost as if Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the similarly extreme
minister of national security, understand
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that this is a particularly effective framework for rallying the
international support they need to complete the resettlement and
annexation. This notion did not begin with Trump’s intervention:
last year, prior to Trump’s reelection, Netanyahu promoted a plan
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that similarly proposed rebuilding Gaza “from nothing” into a
prosperous free-trade zone that could serve as a hub for the wider
region.

The plans have more in common than their shared desire to turn Gaza
into a techno-futurist hub for extraction and free trade. PowerPoint
presentations detailing the particulars of the plans feature the exact
same [[link removed]]
AI-generated image of a rebuilt Gaza gleaming with angular glass
skyscrapers, extensive rail lines, bright green fields, and a fleet of
oil rigs idling just off the Mediterranean shoreline. There is nothing
identifiably Palestinian in the image; this transformed Gaza could be
anywhere with a coastline and a suitable development policy.

Netanyahu’s “Gaza 2035” proposal had several notable elements.
One was its focus on oil extraction, as evidenced by the ominous
presence of the rigs on the Mediterranean. The United Nations has
estimated
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that there are 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil sitting in the
Mediterranean’s Levant Basin, along with 122 trillion cubic feet of
gas. Another was its reference to Neom, which would be connected to
Gaza by high-speed rail. The plan, Shane Reiner-Roth has argued
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“demonstrates how unbounded the settler colonial imagination is when
the subject of containment is perceived as a thing of the past.”

Plans of this nature abound. Last April, the billionaire hedge fund
manager Bill Ackman put forward his own proposal
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global competition among architects, planners, and “technologists”
vying for the right “to build a new city from a blank sheet of
paper” that would be governed by the United States and a consortium
of allies from the Gulf. In the Ackman fantasy, Gaza becomes not only
habitable, but a “model city.” There is no question of
self-determination for the Palestinian residents of Gaza, and
certainly not of Palestinian statehood. That is similarly the case in
plans
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released [[link removed]]
by the RAND Corporation and the Jewish Institute for National Security
of America: Gaza can and will be resurrected, but only as a sanitized
conduit for capital and a playground for the global elite.

BLAIR AND THE BILLIONAIRES

Trump has since backed away from the Gaza Riviera plan, and his
twenty-point peace plan
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beach clubs or Haussmannian redesigns of Gaza City. It is rhetorically
mellower, if no less ominous — not least because it garnered the
support
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of the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and the major
Gulf states. It remains to be seen whether the latter points of the
twenty-point plan will ever become operative; Israel has reportedly
already violated
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the terms of the cease-fire nearly three hundred times
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and Palestinians are well aware that the latter stages of peace plans
often never see
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the light of day. There is already evidence
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that the United States has no intention of adhering to the terms of
the twenty-point plan.

Nevertheless, the Trump plan, in theory, calls for a
“de-radicalized” Gaza to be transformed into a “special economic
zone” with “preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated
with participating countries.” This special economic zone will be
governed for an interim period by a “technocratic, apolitical”
Palestinian body overseen by an international committee chaired by
Trump himself.

The committee will also include former UK prime minister Tony Blair.
The oversight body would “set the framework and handle the funding
for the redevelopment of Gaza” until such time as the Palestinian
Authority was deemed fit to take control, governing in a manner that
is “conducive to attracting investment.” This vision of Gaza does
not explicitly endorse further ethnic cleansing, but, as Oliver
Eagleton has argued
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it still resembles a “colonial protectorate.”

Blair’s involvement in the project is not limited to some future
horizon. The former Labour leader’s London-based think tank
reportedly consulted
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on Trump’s initial Gaza Riviera plan, and Blair reportedly helped
draw up the twenty-point plan at a White House meeting with Trump,
Middle East advisor Jared Kushner, and Israeli minister of strategic
affairs Ron Dermer in late August.

Another plan, discussed prior to the announcement of the cease-fire
agreement, was for Blair to run a transitional
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authority for Gaza for a three-year period with a board composed
largely of billionaires like Wall Street financier Marc Rowan and
Egyptian tycoon Naguib Sawiris.

Blair’s presence, his public service record notwithstanding, may
have something to do with who his friends are. Since 2021, Oracle
executive chairman Larry Ellison — a longtime backer
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of the Israel Defense Forces — has donated or pledged to donate in
excess of $300 million to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
Saudi Arabia
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the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have contracted
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the Blair Institute for work as well, and Blair, in his previous
service in the region, has always been a devoted advocate for opening
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Palestinian land up to foreign investment.

The medley of plans for Gaza’s reinvention appear farcical in their
ambition, but there is no reason to believe that some version of some
combination of them won’t be executed. The world that was unable or
unwilling to stop the genocide in Gaza until this fall may not have
any greater success stopping the next phase of the erasure of the
people of Gaza and the theft of their homes, natural resources, and
rights.

This is, of course, not necessarily incompatible — at least in the
short term — with the goals of the Israeli far right. And so we
arrive at a moment when the religious Zionist movement, seeking the
expropriation of Palestinian land on Jewish supremacist grounds, finds
common cause with a global right-wing power structure seeking to
create frictionless, authoritarian, supranational spaces for capital
extraction and exchange.

This alliance suggests that, despite all that was exceptional about
the circumstances of Israel’s creation, the state must be primarily
understood as an in-progress settler-colonial project that is now part
of a network of states and business interests attempting to remake the
world for its enrichment. Gaza, agonizingly, remains in its
crosshairs.

_Abe Asher is a journalist whose reporting on politics, social
movements, and the climate has been published in the __Nation__,
__VICE News__, the __Portland Mercury__, and other outlets._

* Gaza
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* peace settlement
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* corruption
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* profiteering
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