Kushner is pitching a “new,” gleaming resort hub. However scratch the floor, and you discover nothing lower than a blueprint for ethnic cleaning.
President Donald Trump’s son-in-lawJared Kushner in the course of the World Financial Discussion board n Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, January 22, 2026.
(Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg by way of Getty Photographs)
Final week, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner formally announced the US authorities’s long-awaited “grasp plan” for the way forward for the Gaza Strip—one Trump’s Center East envoy Steve Witkoff has said was within the works for 2 years. Kushner couldn’t have chosen a extra becoming venue for the spectacle: the World Financial Discussion board at Davos, the place the highly effective collect to congratulate themselves for expressing concern about crises they don’t have any intention of resolving.
The image Kushner painted of a “new” Gaza—replete with looming luxury high-rises and sprawling resorts—is unrecognizable not solely from the morbid expanse of rubble that Israel has turned the territory into throughout greater than two years of genocide, but in addition from the once-teeming metropolis that endured, regardless of all odds, beneath a suffocating Israeli blockade for many years. However there’s something much more sinister on the coronary heart of Kushner’s imaginative and prescient: the efficient absence of Palestinians.
Kushner has by no means been shy about his assist for Israel’s most excessive fantasies for Gaza—fantasies that start with ethnic cleaning. However he additionally is aware of {that a} single, overt act of ethnic cleaning on the size that many Israelis overtly dream of is likely to be too controversial to launder via Davos-speak—and that the prospect of a mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza in a single fell swoop has already triggered worldwide backlash that the architects of this mission would slightly keep away from. So the Kushner plan is constructed round one thing extra marketable, extra reproducible at scale: attrition. Or, to place it one other means, the achievement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reported order to shut aides to “skinny out” Gaza’s inhabitants.
The euphemism Israel has been promoting to the world is “voluntary migration,” as if Palestinians would abruptly get up with wanderlust and resolve it might be good to go away their homeland eternally for no different cause than restlessness. The fact, after all, is that Israel has turned Gaza into an unlivable graveyard so it might supply migration as the one remaining possibility for many who have misplaced all the pieces.
Those that keep in Gaza—as a result of they’ve nowhere else to go, as a result of they refuse to give up their declare to the land, or as a result of leaving represents its personal sort of loss of life—will discover that Kushner’s imaginative and prescient doesn’t make room for them as folks. It holds them captive as an issue to be managed and tucked away. They may change into successfully invisible: cordoned off like cattle into hyper-surveilled “deliberate dwelling communities,” the place their each transfer will likely be policed beneath Israel’s omnipresent panopticon.
These camps wouldn’t even qualify as bantustans—they’re open-air prisons the place Palestinians’ biometric knowledge will likely be collected, their motion tightly managed, and their days decreased to a sequence of permissions and checkpoints. Their starvation will likely be quantified, their energy counted, their sustenance allotted on the discretion of their jailers. Healthcare can be stripped all the way down to the naked minimal—clinics that maintain our bodies purposeful, however not far more. Training can be engineered the identical means: a sanitized curriculum for kids already traumatized by genocide, designed much less to heal and educate than to pacify. On this Gaza, mobility has just one path: out.
Present Challenge
Sometime, as soon as the rubble has been cleared and the mud has settled sufficient for buyers to swoop in, the Palestinians warehoused in these enclaves could also be deemed helpful once more—not as residents with rights, however as low-cost labor to serve the vultures who will reap the revenue.
If buyers don’t select to rent labor from overseas, Palestinians is likely to be given the consideration of constructing the resorts and high-rises the place their houses as soon as stood. Possibly even over the graves of their family members, or the mangled stays of our bodies that had been by no means recovered from the ruins. And if they’re very fortunate, a small quantity could also be permitted to remain on as a everlasting underclass, cleansing rooms, washing dishes, and serving cocktails on terraces that overlook the ocean and the mass graves beneath. However they’ll at all times stay invisible to these they serve.
Will Kushner’s plan come to fruition precisely as he and his cronies think about? Nobody can completely predict Gaza’s future, and there are many causes this fantasy could by no means escape the convention halls of Davos. Kushner expects nations all through the area to foot the invoice for a lot of the mission, however what authorities goes to sink billions into an initiative that can’t assure stability? What insurer will underwrite it, what developer signal on with out ironclad ensures, what political coalition maintain it alive when the information cycle shifts and the donors transfer on?
And who is aware of whether or not the urge for food for a Trump-branded Gaza will outlive the president’s second and, hopefully, closing time period, or whether or not it would change into one other hulking, half-built monument to hubris? However most significantly, the plan’s core assumption is one which historical past retains disproving: that Palestinians will roll over and settle for being engineered out of their homeland and forgotten. I shouldn’t must remind anybody of the implications of writing Palestinians off. Resistance in its many types will proceed, whether or not it’s in response to continued Israeli occupation or to the vulture capitalists making an attempt to rework Gaza into their experimental playground.
Whether or not or not Kushner’s absurdist imaginative and prescient for Gaza materializes precisely the way in which he hopes, what we may be certain of is that Israel is busily implementing its personal exterminationist agenda as we communicate—establishing the “details on the bottom” earlier than any worldwide plan is finalized. A lot of this plan overlaps with Kushner’s—Israel’s far proper has been overtly salivating over the prospect of rebuilding settlements in Gaza. And if the fantasy requires just a little assist from multinational builders—if sharing beachfront property with resort companies makes it extra “viable” to the world—then so be it.
However whereas the remainder of us argue over worldwide regulation, the contours of Trump’s Board of Peace, or what humanitarian help provision ought to appear like, Israel is entrenching and increasing its management of Gaza previous the so-called “yellow line” meter by meter, demolishing the few remaining buildings nonetheless standing in areas Israeli forces management, and massacring Palestinians at will. Israel’s final goal in Gaza is and has at all times been Palestinian erasure. And erasure can are available many types: genocide, ethnic cleaning, and now perpetual imprisonment.
Within the face of whole erasure, folks will little doubt name Palestinians ungracious for not groveling at Kushner’s ft. They’ll say we ought to be grateful that somebody, a person whose {qualifications} encompass nepotism and an actual property portfolio, has deigned to think about a future for Gaza in any respect. Grateful that, amid the devastation, there exists a “plan,” any plan, even one which treats Palestinians as an inconvenient afterthought at finest. We’ll hear the acquainted, lazy chorus: “Effective—so what’s your various? At the very least he has a imaginative and prescient.”
The demand for gratitude is just not incidental; it’s a part of the structure of oppression. Gratitude is what the highly effective demand when they’re making an attempt to color coercion as benevolence, dispossession as “alternative,” a jail as a “dwelling group.” However what precisely is there for Palestinians to be thankful for? The beachside boardwalks, the glistening resorts, and the glass towers will not be for them. The “New Gaza” being marketed at Davos is just not a Gaza the place Palestinians can lastly reside freely, with an airport that’s theirs, borders they management, and a authorities that solutions to them slightly than to their occupiers. What Palestinians are being supplied is the “alternative” to outlive, however as little greater than servants to their genocidaires in perpetuity.
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For this reason the “imaginative and prescient” speak is such mind-melting bullshit. As a result of there isn’t any scarcity of Palestinian-led visions for Gaza. There by no means has been. Palestinian engineers, planners, economists, public well being specialists, and municipal employees have been fascinated with Gaza’s future for many years, not from a podium in Switzerland however from beneath siege, bombardment, and hunger—situations that may break most societies. The Phoenix plan, for instance, is only one of a number of Palestinian proposals circulating, and begins from a premise that Kushner can not even fathom—that reconstruction have to be a political mission rooted in self-determination. It asks primary questions that the Davos crowd refuses to ask as a result of the solutions implicate Israel: Who controls borders? Who controls supplies coming into the territory? Who controls motion? Who controls airspace and maritime entry? What occurs to the refugees? Maybe most significantly, what’s owed to a individuals who have survived a genocide?
In fact, Palestinians who’re greater than certified to reconstruct Gaza will do their finest with the inadequate instruments they’ve, simply as they at all times do. For the final two years, Gaza’s municipal employees and engineers have sacrificed their lives to restore roads, repair water pipes, and rebuild no matter they will whereas beneath Israeli fireplace, they usually’ll maintain going. Even the newly appointed technocratic committee working beneath President Trump’s sham Board of Peace will do what they will, as a result of Palestinians don’t have the posh of nihilism. However as at all times, they may function on the will of an entity bent on their erasure. And they are going to be ignored, co-opted, and overruled not as a result of they’re incapable, or their visions unrealistic or unreasonable, however as a result of they epitomize what Israel and its patrons have spent many years thwarting: liberation.
What Palestinians are being supplied is the phantasm of life inside a cage—an opportunity to outlive, however solely invisibly at finest and perhaps, simply perhaps, the possibility to stroll once more on blood-soaked seashores, blood that solely they appear in a position to discern.
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