The Gaza Plan’s ‘Sick Kind of Detachment’ and its Dangers for America
On January 22, 2026—367 days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration and 352 days after his announcement of a plan for America to “Raze and Rebuild Gaza” and the day he launched his “Board of Peace” to “oversee” Gaza—Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner took the stage at the World Economic Forum at Davos to explain how “Raze and Rebuild” worked in practice. A video of this speech shows Kushner, on a podium to the left of the members of the Board of Peace including Trump, speaking as is his wont at a rapid gait and appearing almost boyishly earnest. A Power Point to Kushner’s right showed “a futuristic dreamscape of gleaming apartment blocks and office towers, with neat industrial parks and residential districts” as well as a “data center, luxury apartments, and [spaces for] ‘coastal tourism.’”
Beginning by commenting that “this is for the people of Gaza,” Kushner went on to lay out his one-minute thesis of the case, a Marshall Plan on Autopilot to create, in Libertarian Institute director Scott Horton’s deathless description, a “new Jetsons City of the Future”:
“We said, ‘You know what? Let’s just plan for catastrophic success’….People ask us what our plan B is. We do not have a plan B. We have a plan…In the Middle East, they build cities like this of 2 or 3 million people…in three years. Gaza…could be a destination, have a lot of industry…there should be 100% full employment and opportunity for everybody there…that…really gives the Gazan people an opportunity to live their aspirations.…We’re basically studying the best practices from all over the world, and we’re watching who does education best, who does health care delivery the best…All this is IP [Intellectual property] that the Board of Peace is going to make public…[to] really show how…you do peace implementation.”
The rest of the speech was call-outs, or warnings, or paeans, to specific audiences. To businesses, Kushner dangled an invitation to a coming conference in Washington and noted “I know it’s a little risky to be investing in a place like this, but we need you to come, take faith, invest in the people, try to be a part of it.” To Gazans, Kushner mentioned that “we continue to be focused on humanitarian aid, humanitarian shelter, but then [on] creating the conditions to move forward…” To “people on the media and on the social media…trying to escalate” he advised “just calm down…focus on the positive stories…turn a new chapter…if we believe that peace is possible, then peace really can be possible.” To Palestinians, he warned that “if Hamas does not demilitarize, that will be what holds back…the people of Gaza from achieving their aspiration.” And, finally, perhaps inevitably, he gave shout-outs to real estate. One was to Yakir Gabay, the Israeli developer magnate who’s “volunteered to do this, not-for-profit, really, because of his heart.” The other was to President Trump, who “never gave up…never stopped….gave us different ideas…” and is doing “a lot of…things…in America…we should all be copying.”
It’s hard to know how to respond to a speech which sounds like a practice presentation by a marketing associate at a mid-ranked American consulting firm but is made before the president of the United States, the president of Argentina, and the prime minister of Hungary while the people it purports to address live in tents flooded by water pelted by rain surrounded by rubble and ten thousand of their dead. In the words of Rahma Zein, an Egyptian journalist who noted that ten children have died from cold in Gaza this winter, “it is a sick kind of detachment for people to be able to think of real estate in the same place where bodies are continuing to pile up.” “Sick kind of detachment” sums up the feel of the presentation, and also sums up the strategy. Like most projects of liberal imperial development, its language erases past or context (the real world) in the name of the future.
Indeed, rinsed-out futurist language was what British and French cheerleaders of empire like Thomas Macauley and Napoleon III used to justify projects which turned Muslim-ruled Mumbai into a racialized caste community and working class Paris into a boulevarded city filled with corporate department stores where workers were homeless, alienated and eventually revolutionary and consumers distracted and depressed. Jewish Zionists went to school on the British and the French and gained power from the WASPs, who built America’s empire in imitation of the British and French—and, though Anglo-French development language was ornate and Kushner’s is technocratic, they both vacuum out reality. In the words of Susan Sontag, they “systematically den[y] the determining weight of history—of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts” and, through “pious uplift,” suggest “a world in which everybody is…immobilized in mechanical…identities and relationships” that make politics “irrelevant.” The Jewish Zionist David Bell wrote recently about Napoleon III’s remaking of Paris in just this vein: arguing that “the magic of great cities comes from the fact that even if their constant reinvention rarely proceeds from pure motives, it can never be reduced to impure motives” meaning that “whatever its history, the city is what we make of it.” If this is what Bell “makes” of the horrors of Napoleon III’s Paris, imagine what he might make of Kushner’s Gaza.
The problem with this “sick kind of detachment” is not simply that it erases history. It’s that it immobilizes its audience from action, distancing people from reality so that they go along with whatever power is doing. And investigating the history of Kushner’s plan for Gaza, where it’s likely to lead, and how it will be imitated shows a project not just of considerable brutality but of considerable danger to the rest of us. As I wrote for the Libertarian Institute about the initial Raze-and-Rebuild proposal in February 2025, it will most likely lead in Gaza and eventually in America to the “barbarism” of “the ‘Brave New World’ that Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury and George Orwell wrote about, one of absolute psychological control exercised from the top down.”
Crucial to understanding this barbarism is understanding its history. Namely, the fact that Raze-and-Rebuild has been integral to the project of Israel since its inception, and justified in the same terms. Sabri Jiryis and Walid Khalidi, Palestinian historians of the displaced generation, have written of Jewish Zionists’ steady incursions into Palestine beginning in the 1890s at the hands of operators like the French and British Rothschilds and Theodor Herzl. The method of these connected operators was to use pressure from the British and French empires to secure Zionist control over land owned or farmed by Palestinians. It was a project that culminated in “418 Palestinian villages destroyed and depopulated in the 1948 war” and “the fall of more than a dozen of the major urban centers…exclusively populated by them” as well as “others where they were either the vast majority…or had substantial pluralities [including] West Jerusalem, and their ancient seaport Jaffa…”
This is what was portrayed in western media, thanks to American Zionists and their WASP allies, as a heroic project of erstwhile settlers and survivors. It came at the unspoken expense of pushing dislocated Palestinians to a narrow sliver of territory with limited access to the sea while Palestinians in Jerusalem became, in the description of Edward Said, “strangers in their own land…dwellers in what has been made an Arab ghetto at the heart of the Jewish state.” But this project, carried out on-the-fly by a ragtag army of mostly Eastern European socialists with under-the-table help of western Jewish Zionist financiers, didn’t assume its current form of eradication-and-construction until it allied with a broader and deeper British imperial project in the Middle East.
This was a project beginning in the 1920s but coming to maturity after the Second World War where “modernization” and “development” were codes for America and Britain controlling Iraq and Iran and the Gulf states and getting their oil. As the scholar Mona Damluji shows, movies produced by British Petroleum and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and created by Arab and Muslim intellectuals paired carefully-crafted scenes of individual villagers with sweeping vistas of the “improvements” (massive hydroelectric dams; bridges and roads; housing construction) that would supposedly increase material wealth and “protect them” from flood or famine or other natural disasters. As Damluji also shows, the reality these films elided was Anglo-American operators eradicating traditional life and summarily shoving aside any political movement that tried to put the oil in control of the citizens who lived on the lands it was under.
Israel’s founding generation was savvy to the politics of oil and development. It gained entrée into Washington’s intelligence and military apparatuses in the 1950s by marketing Israel as America’s and Britain’s allies against the Soviets in the Middle East. This was a collaboration that continued throughout the Cold War with the aid of connected American Jewish Zionists and helped create such plays for oil as Iran-Contra and the First Gulf War. But it was the second-generation Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu, trained at MIT and Boston Consulting Group, who recognized as the Cold War ended that deeper western commitment to the region and its “redevelopment” could be guaranteed not just by oil but by technology.
In the 1990s, Netanyahu took advantage of the backing of American companies enjoying a finance boom engineered by American Zionists like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers: players who’d succeeded WASPs as the decisive influences on American economic policy and spent the decade encouraging financial conglomeration which boosted stock prices. With the help of American capital, Netanyahu set about making Israel the “high-tech” capital of the Middle East. One result was even closer ties between Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley, also being funded by American Zionist networks and increasingly arbitered by American Zionist technologists. Another result was that Israeli military operations to “contain” organizations for Palestinian sovereignty begun in earnest in the Palestinian territories in the 1960s could be “supplemented” by a “carrot-and-stick” strategy of cooption and coercion based on Zionists’ new closeness to Washington and Zionists’ increasing technological edge. The “carrot” was the project for Palestinian statehood dangled by the “Liberal” Zionist prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak in the 1990s via the Oslo Accords. The “stick” was militarized blockades and enforcement of the Palestinian territories if (and in fact when) the peace process failed.
But the ultimate goal of Israeli leaders was not peace between sovereign nations, Israel and Palestine. It was to make of the Palestinian territories generally and Gaza specifically something other than what it is or its people want it to be.
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