The Gaza Trap: How Israel-Backed Players are Pushing a Gaza Rebuilding Plan that Hurts America
President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza, relocating Palestinians and building the Riviera of the Middle East on the land where they lived, managed the rare trick of offending almost everyone. Objections fell along tracks worn into trenches by long warfare. Leftists called it a violation of international law and an insult to Palestinians who define their struggle as one of national self-determination. Conservatives asked for aid for East Palestine, Ohio before Palestine and warned President Trump about embracing neoconservative nation-building. Neoconservative sympathizers like Lindsay Graham, believers in the “civilizing” power of American might but not in freelance real estate, criticized the project’s feasibility. Liberals called it, hypocritically, a recipe for “endless wars” and pined for Kamala Harris.
The problem with the plan when it comes to Americans, though, is something else. Namely, it’s counterproductive to President Trump’s primary goal of his second term because it will empower those Washington operators he is even now beating back. In broad strokes, these operators are the same ones I reported on for the Libertarian Institute about the Ukrainian NGO boondoggle and its links to players pushing a new Global War on Terror. They are part of the contracting and consulting wings of the American Deep State: the military-industrial complex and scientific technological elite Dwight Eisenhower warned about sixty-four years ago this past January. But the “Gaza as Riviera” plan also draws heavily on foreign operators: Israel and the Gulf states which America partnered heavily with in the lead-up to 9/11—a catastrophe that’s directly traceable to that partnership, and that could happen again today.
Troublingly, digging into the plan’s inception suggests that, far from being a sudden brainchild of the president’s or even a negotiating gambit, it was pushed inside the Trump campaign and the White House for many months. Though it likely appealed to President Trump because of his successful background in real estate, this plan is miles away from a real estate play, though it was marketed as such. Instead it’s a political move made by domestic and foreign operators deeply embedded in the Washington institutions promoting permanent war—and delivering war’s consequences on Americans.
The first reference to the plan Trump laid out for Gaza came in early 2024, from an instructive source. This was Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law who was influential in his first term, especially when it came to negotiating closer ties between the Gulf States (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates) and Israel. In 2020, Kushner, who is Jewish and a Zionist, proposed “Israel to annex 30 percent of the West Bank and a Palestinian pseudo-state to be created with no military,” and he “tried to entice the Palestinian Authority” to accept the plan “by offering $50bn in economic aid” which “was rejected.”
Kushner has been politically peripheral since 2021. He was known to be scouting for partners in the Gulf states to sponsor his development projects. The upshot of this scouting was Kushner’s new firm Affinity Partners, which is backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth to the tune of $2 billion, along with $1.5 billion cumulatively from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. According to the website Middle East Eye, Kushner’s firm Affinity Partners has invested in two Israeli companies:
“Phoenix Holdings, an insurance company, and the car leasing division of Shlomo Holdings, whose parent company, Shmeltzer Holdings, is part owner of Israel Shipyards, the only domestic shipbuilder for the Israeli navy.”
This is the context in which Kushner, speaking to an audience in February 2024 at Harvard’s Belfer Center, said the following:
“Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable. 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.”
Fast forward to August 2024, and the idea came up again, from another instructive source. This was Joseph Pelzman, a George Washington University professor who doubles as an international consultant. Speaking on a podcast hosted by the former Israel Ministry of Tourism official Kobby Barda, Pelzman said that Kushner “wants to put money in” and his investors are “salivating” to get into Gaza. He told the podcast host that he had written a scholarly article proposing Gaza redevelopment and “went to the Trump people [with it] because they were the ones who initially had an interest in it.” According to Pelzman:
“The place to start is to dig up the entire place. Then you have to figure out what to do with the local population, you gotta move them around. Everything’s gotta go…nothing vertical stands…The United States can lean on Egypt. Egypt is a bankrupt state. We know that they are broke, really broke.”
Read more at The Libertarian Institute.
Photo credit: WAFA (Q2915969) in contract with a local company (APAimages)