I’ve been writing about the Gaza Strip for the past twenty-five years – an undertaking that has been pretty thankless if you ask me.
The problem is, documenting the unconscionable horrors and injustices to befall this cursed territory and its people never seems to gain much traction, until, of course, the situation explodes.
It’s then that the ‘best and the brightest’ show up, armed with the latest en vogue development ideas, a glossary of neoliberal doublespeak, and an alphabet soup of acronyms.
As the consultancy wonks hammer away at their latest solutions for Gaza, the storyline is always the same: this cesspool of trauma and sufferation is about to become a revitalised juggernaut integrated into the global economy, with peace and prosperity for all. Amen.
If I got a dollar for every time a variant of this drivel oozed from the humanitarian-development industrial complex swamp, I’d be a rich man. But alas, I am not.
That said, this time round, its Trump’s “Riviera” idea that has hit the billboards. Instead of just coining a catchy title like the “Singapore on the Mediterranean”, as Thomas Friedman once did for Gaza, Trump has used artificial intelligence to do the beguiling.
Trump Gaza
In February, the US president circulated a “Trump Gaza” video clip featuring Keffiyeh-draped guerrillas being replaced by cross-dressing, bearded belly dancers writhing on a scenic beachfront, while Elon Musk gorges on Chat GPT hummus. Eat your heart out Yahya Sinwar.
I imagine most folks were bemused and/or left aghast with how insensitive and out-of-touch Trump was when he did this. The rivers of blood flowing through the rubble of Gaza’s obliterated refugee camps have only widened after all.
But this was much more than a tasteless joke. Past months have witnessed a steady trickle of ‘leaks’ that reveal how Trump’s plans are envisioned to go from virtual to concrete.
First came a “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation” (GREAT) prospectus published by the Washington Post in September. The 38-slide plan outlines how the Gaza Strip will transition “from a demolished Iranian proxy to a prosperous Abrahamic ally.”
Then came the outline for the “Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA)” in September, proposing a specific "institutional structure” for how the future government of Gaza will operate.
Finally, the White House released a 20-point plan last week outlining how Gaza would seamlessly segue from genocide to glitterati, lubricated by not an insignificant amount of petrodollars.
Master’s house
The outlines of GREAT and GITA are now said to be circulating the corridors of power, as Trump drums up support from early investors who consider cornering markets in anticipation of when this ‘ugly page of history’ is turned.
In the press conference where the 20-point plan was announced, Trump praised his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the team of “geniuses” he leads. Kushner, who holds no formal portfolio in the government – but has plenty of conflicts of interests across the Middle East - commissioned Tony Blair’s institute to formulate ‘day after’ transitional matters.
Together, the team have come up with this visionary plan that one commentator already dubs the “deal of the millennium” - out-doing the ‘century’ version’ for peace that Kushner produced in the first Trump presidency.
Bigger and bolder, this Viagra-amped version of peace outlines a smorgasbord of no less than 10 mega construction projects, including an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone”.
The plan also outlines “digital government services and identity systems", echoing plans Blair’s institute has been advocating more generally, and which the current UK PM Kier Starmer controversially just rolled out in the UK.
Blair is also now slated to become Gaza’s viceroy and is envisioned by GITA to hold supreme power over the territory for five years.
Not only is Hamas expected to step aside to allow this vision to materialise, but so too is the Palestinian Authority, benched for the Kushner-Blair ‘dream team’ to show everyone how it's done. GITA will be an international mandate after all, with the US in the master’s house, and the UK, its poodle quarters.
Israel’s role is sequestered and obscured, though of course, the entire project relies upon its troops withdrawing.
The population of Gaza will of course, have to be temporarily removed for their own safety during construction. But their “right to return” to the site of their genocide will be preserved thanks to Blair’s “property rights preservation unit.”
Who can forget that the United Nations once registered more than 400,000 individual property registration cards for Palestinian refugee landholdings after the 1948 Nakba. ‘Who can remember?’, might be a better question.
Trump’s peace plan also places a gun to the head of Hamas. They must ‘fess-up’ that the movement was only kidding in its demands to end the war, rebuild Gaza, and release Palestinian prisoners…
No assurance
Hamas is now expected to surrender all its cards to ensure Trump’s great act of human progress can finally move forward - from handing over all Israeli captives still held in Gaza on the first day of the agreement, to Hamas leaders and members disarming and going into exile.
If it refuses, Trump promises that there can be no alternative but to concoct a new cocktail of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Trump has his finger on very large ‘green light’ button that Bibi and his biblical blowhards await in order to reign fire and brimstone upon Gaza’s starving babies. That’ll teach them.
Peace, prosperity and the need to end “thousands of years of conflict” in Trump’s words, has a stiff price tag. But rest assured, Emirati and Saudi trillions are due to flow down the same riverbeds where Gaza’s blood once gushed.
Perhaps it is significant to note that the last time Trump put a plan on the table to ‘end the war in Gaza’, the table itself blew up.
Indeed, Israeli ballistic missiles fired from the Red Sea, landed on a residential villa in Qatar where Hamas negotiators were said to be meeting to discussing the plan. The negotiation team only survived the mass-assassination attempt because they were supposedly kneeling in afternoon prayer at the time. Divine intervention? What do I know.
Remarkably, despite having its largest military base in the region in Qatar, and; despite having permitted Qatar to host Hamas for negotiations, the US call informing the Qatari government that Israeli missiles were incoming, only rang after the missiles already struck their targets. Woops! Better luck next time.
With the fires of Israel's Qatar strikes now extinguished – Bibi apologised after all - a new deal has thankfully emerged from the ashes.
Hamas, Netanyahu assures us, is in a corner and about to be culled. The only thing left, is to do what must be done, while coming to agreement on specific investment holding positions, as the booty of Gaza’s carcass is divvied up.
Empire
Israeli finance minister Betzalel Smotrich recently spoke specifically to this task at a Tel Aviv real estate conference. “We have paid a lot of money for this war” he said, and now “have to see how we are dividing up the land percentages.”
According to Smotrich, “the demolition, the first stage in the city’s renewal, we have already done. Now we need to build”, reassuring that the whole plan “pays for itself” and will be a “bonanza.”
His partner, National Security Minister Ben Gvir, also promises the Israeli police force that beachfront properties await them too.
This macabre fantasy billowing from Gaza’s detritus, is truly a gruesome spectacle. It wreaks of a dystopian horror show where Trump, the vulture capitalist; Blair the vampire vagabond, and; Netanyahu the angel of death, all swagger across the Middle East in pressed suits dripping in blood.
This carnival of necrophilia – where cronyism meets cynicism, meets bankruptcy of the highest moral and political orders – is unconscionable in its depravity.
More than one hundred years ago, Lord Arthur Balfour sent men with stiff upper lips to secure the Holy Land to ensure the ‘sun never set on the British empire.’
Herbet Samuels would become ‘Great Britain’s’ first High Commissioner for Palestine, establishing the infrastructure where a ‘Jewish state’ could be fostered. In doing so, he fulfilled Theodore Herzel’s vision of establishing this state as “a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism".
That was the zenith of the British empire.
Today, Trump’s new mandate regime for Gaza arises under different historical circumstances.
This empire, by his own reconning, needs to be “made great again” and has no shortages of significant challenges. In that respect, Trump's plans for Gaza and beyond resemble the desperate efforts of an empire in decline, sliding about on a bloody marble floor, barefoot.
The project, run by a coterie of pranksters, playboys and predators speculating on bitcoin resemble the act of moving about deckchairs on a sinking super yacht.
May Gaza be the stake in the heart of this cruel and wretched beast. May our movement in solidarity with it, be the hammer that drives it towards its great reward. So help us God.
Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian-American academic and author of “Palestine Ltd: Neoliberalism and Nationalism in the Occupied Territory.” He has worked in various capacities across the OPT as a journalist, researcher, consultant, editor, and publisher, including in Gaza for several UN bodies since 1997, and was most recently the Director of the Council for British Research in the Levant's Jerusalem Branch - the Kenyon Institute. He also writes for the Palestinian policy network Al Shabaka.
Follow him on X: @thaddad
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