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"Not anchored in law, nor in facts. Just glossy real estate pitch decks dreamt up by Jared Kushner."
The presentation on the future of Gaza given by President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, inyelloe Davos on Thursday, offered what one journalist called "a sanitized, cosmetic image" of an exclave that, due largely to US policy, is actually "a place that needs immediate help and support for people who are on the verge of collapse."
Kushner presented a four-phase "master plan" illustrated by CGI-generated images of luxury apartments, data centers, and futuristic-looking skyscrapers.
In the "New Rafah," built over the southern town that the Israel Defense Forces razed last year and forced hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians to leave, Trump's so-called "Board of Peace" plans to build more than 200 education centers and over 180 cultural, religious, and vocational buildings.
The "New Gaza" plan seeks to build 100,000 permanent housing units in all as well as 75 medical facilities. A map presented by Kushner shows yellow "residential areas," bright pink zones set aside for what Kushner called "coastal tourism," sections of land dedicated to industrial data centers and "advanced manufacturing," and green sections for “parks, agriculture, and sports facilities."
The presentation showed that "the ethnic extermination plan is two-pronged: Kill as many as possible, then gentrify the rest out," said entrepreneur David Haddad.
Before Israel began its US-backed destruction of Gaza in 2023, which has killed more than 71,000 people, and destroyed more than 90% of housing units, the exclave's healthcare system included 36 hospitals, fewer than 14 of which were still partially functional as of October, when a "ceasefire" was agreed to and Trump began moving forward with his 20-point "peace plan."
The presentation Kushner gave Thursday was part of that plan, with four phases of transformation beginning with the opening of the Rafah crossing and moving northward through Khan Younis and Gaza City, with a seaport and airport also being built.
The master plan, said Kushner, is projected to cost $25 billion, and would ultimately result in "peace and prosperity" in Gaza.
“People ask us what our plan B is, we do not have a plan B. We have a plan, we signed an agreement, we are committed to making that agreement work,” Kushner said. “There’s a master plan. We’ll be doing it in phasing. In the Middle East, they build cities like this, in, uh, you know, 2, 3 million people. They build this in three years. And so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen.”
International lawyer Itay Epshtain said that as with the "'peace to prosperity' fantasy," the so-called master plan "won't come to pass."
The proposal, he said, is "not anchored in law, nor in facts. Just glossy real estate pitch decks dreamt up by Jared Kushner. Meanwhile, real humanitarian relief, recovery, and peace for Palestinians are sidelined—sacrificed to delusions of grandeur and war profiteering."
At the "signing ceremony" for the Board of Peace—which includes no Palestinians and has no support from the United States' major longtime European allies—Trump said he approached the development of Gaza as "a real estate person at heart."
"It’s all about location, and I said, look at this location on the sea, look at this beautiful piece of property, what it could be for so many people,” Trump said. “It’ll be so, so great. People that are living so poorly are going to be living so well."
That outlook, said Hani Mahmoud of Al Jazeera, is one that views Gaza as a "future investment project."
"That’s the problem," said Mahmoud. "It is not being dealt with as a place where people are being killed and starved, and being pretty much cornered in every way possible by the acts that the Israeli military is conducting on the ground. The danger stems from the fact that Gaza is being discussed as an investment and a planning site, rather than as a place where people are being killed on a daily basis—largely ignoring the displacement, the genocidal acts, the starvation, and the misery."
Dilly Hussain of the UK-based news outlet 5 Pillars, said Kushner had proudly presented a plan for a "mega city built on the mass graves of Palestinians after a two-year genocide sponsored by the US."
"No accountability, just business as usual," said Hussain, "with the chief genocider [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu sitting on the 'Board of Peace.'"
Palestine has been subjected to waves of imperial conquest and colonial rule for thousands of years—and yet we, the Indigenous people of this land, remain.
The men in Western capitals who are making decisions about Gaza have no real understanding of its people. They do not know their history, their lineage, their culture, or their deep roots in the land. And now, added to them, are the rich and insulated men who have never associated with ordinary people even in their own countries—men who have never known hunger, fear, displacement, or the sound of bombs in the night.
These are the men who presume to determine the fate of a people who have lost their homes, their family members, and their limbs. They dine together on champagne and caviar, slap each other on the back for their “strategizing,” and congratulate themselves on their cleverness—while entire families are being erased and a wounded people are reduced to numbers in briefing papers.
Yet this is exactly what is happening. Men in Armani suits, taking their directives from a president who does not even know the geography of the region—much less its history—are now presiding over a grotesque tribunal whose real concern is not justice or peace, but real estate, luxury projects, and the protection of the occupiers. It is a scene reminiscent of the Dark Ages of Europe, when humanity was set aside so that a handful of rulers could live in comfort and isolation, untouched by the suffering they decreed for others.
They shuttle back and forth in carefully staged visits, with the media serving as their marketing arm, recording their words as if they were gospel truth, while the victims of this genocide continue to languish in tents, under rubble, and in extreme heat and cold. To make themselves look important—and to pretend they are learners and peacemakers—they “consult” with the occupiers, bribe or threaten the dependent regimes surrounding Palestine in the name of their so-called noble mission, and then announce to the world their “progress” in bringing peace to the region.
What these men do not understand is that even while bombs rain down on us from the sky, we focus not only on surviving, but on succeeding.
Even before they began this so-called mission, these wealthy men were already complicit in the destruction of Gaza. They are on record describing Gazans as barbaric killers who must be “reined in” because a small number of armed resisters refused to submit quietly to life under brutal Israeli occupation. Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald Trump and a close ally of Benjamin Netanyahu, has spoken openly about further ethnic cleansing. He was quoted as saying, “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”
When Steve Witkoff was asked whether a genocide was taking place in Gaza, he replied, “Absolutely not… No, no… there was a war being fought.” This, despite the fact that many major human rights organizations and genocide scholars—including Jewish and Holocaust experts—have described what is happening in Gaza as genocide.
As for Tony Blair, he has never seen a Western war he did not like. He was among the first to support the invasion of Iraq, took part in the Kosovo war, and remains an ardent supporter of Israel and its occupation. These men—and their wealthy Arab collaborators—see no problem in deciding the fate of the Palestinians without a single Palestinian at the table.
Their aim is clear: to keep Israel armed and protected as it continues what it has been doing since 1948—ethnically cleansing, colonizing, and reshaping Palestine in their so-called enlightened Western image and their so-called democracy.
They see Gaza only through maps, military briefings, and political calculations—not through the lives of human beings who carry memory, dignity, and an unbroken history in their very bones. You cannot govern, partition, or destroy a people you have never taken the time to know.
Yet as a Palestinian, I am not shocked or surprised by these delusions. I am not even discouraged by the scale of destruction or the theater of cruelty disguised as diplomacy. After all, our history is riddled with empires and conquerors. Palestine has been subjected to waves of imperial conquest and colonial rule for thousands of years—and yet we, the Indigenous people of this land, remain.
What these men do not understand is that even while bombs rain down on us from the sky, we focus not only on surviving, but on succeeding. While every university in Gaza has been destroyed, surviving professors have continued teaching and training new doctors to replace the many medical workers who were killed. What they will never understand is that children whose limbs were severed by bombs are forming soccer teams and playing the game they love on crutches.
What these so-called peacemakers will never understand is this: The men, women, and children whose fate they are trying to decide come from a lineage that has outlived every empire, outlasted every conqueror, and will still be here long after these architects of destruction have been forgotten.
The genocide in Gaza has not ended, but has taken on a different form.
The Trump peace scheme is not an imperfect plan that at least ends the genocide in Gaza. It is in fact a new plan to continue the genocide using a different strategy. It poses a mortal threat to the survival of Palestinians in Gaza. However this plan is not being implemented in isolation from the massive Israeli attack on Palestinians in the West Bank, but in conjunction with it. We are now witnessing, not merely a messy and complicated ceasefire in Gaza and stepped up attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Rather, we are witnessing a coordinated 2-pronged attack to destroy the very idea of Palestine. As a result we need to move from targeting the Gaza genocide as separate from what’s being done in the rest of Palestine to a focus on both Palestinian self-determination and opposing ongoing efforts to erase the reality of Palestinians as a people. To repeat: we must now insist on the national rights of Palestinians to live in a Palestine shaped by their own hands – and to counterpose that insistence to the Trump-Netanyahu plans being implemented throughout Palestine to savage Palestinians and destroy their existence as a people.
Trump’s peace plan for Gaza is of course absurd. The Palestinians played no role in creating it. The country that has been committing an internationally recognized genocide is now going to “temporarily” occupy more than 50% of the territory on which it has carried out that genocide. And the President of the country who teamed up with Israel to commit that genocide is the Chairman of something bizarrely named the “Board of Peace”. As such he is given the power to oversee all aspects of Gaza’s future including an international “peacekeeping” military force and the appointment of Palestinians he judges should temporarily administer Gaza while Israeli troops directly occupy most of the area. The only party to be disarmed is the Palestinian resistance to the genocide.
On paper there was at least to be a ceasefire. But instead we see the Israeli military killing Palestinians on a daily basis. At the same time they violate their obligation to allow sufficient food, medicine and other basics of life to be brought in to Gaza by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as Israel creates all kinds of barriers to sufficient aid reaching the people. In addition the Israelis have blown up 1500 more buildings in the area of Gaza allotted to them and are taking over parts of Gaza beyond the area given to them in the plan. Nothing gets in the way of Israel doing whatever it wants.
In the ultimate act of betrayal, the United Nations security council has turned over the future of Gaza, not to Palestinians, but to Israel, Trump and his investors. Yet this brute reality is not seen clearly by most of the world. It is now our movement’s job to take on this plan directly and create a counter narrative that explains the continuing genocide and the need to immediately rise up in opposition to it. If the millions of people who rose up against the genocide in the past saw this plan for what it is, instead of seeing it as something that might benefit the Palestinians, they would increasingly roar their opposition.
In the West Bank the escalating violence includes land theft, murders, the expulsion of farmers from their fields, uprooting trees, burning home and cars, and systematic attacks during the olive harvests – a central source of their livelihoods. All this to lay the ground for almost complete ethnic cleansing and a vast expansion of Israeli settlements. The ultimate goal is to turn the West Bank into a part of greater Israel.
Meanwhile thousands of Palestinians from both areas are “interred” in the Israeli Gulag of torture centers where unspeakable conditions are just as bad—or even worse–than those at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
In short, we are seeing a wave of expulsions, arrests and murders by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank in combination with post-ceasefire killings, demolitions and restrictions on food, medicine and shelter in Gaza. The goal of these tactics is the same as that of the genocidal military operations and food blockade during the first 2 years of Israeli rampage that has left Gaza in ruins:The end of Palestine.
We must now shift our focus from Gaza alone to the preservation of Palestine, as Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom are under deadly attack throughout their country. We must educate the public on how the genocide in Gaza has not ended, but has taken on a different form, while Israel’s goal of eliminating the possibility of Palestinian life has broadened to include the West Bank.