Trump 'special economic zone' in South Lebanon: A neoliberal US-Israeli buffer zone?

In its latest diplomatic manoeuvre in Lebanon, the United States has floated a proposal to establish a “special economic zone” (SEZ) along the country’s southern border.

At first glance, it looks like a development plan. On closer inspection, however, the language of planning reveals itself as a thin disguise for the transformation of Lebanon’s southern border areas into a military buffer zone for the protection of Israel’s northern settlements.

Accompanied by Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, the American negotiating team that visited Lebanon most recently in August 2025 proposed the creation of a “Trump Economic Zone” in South Lebanon, pressed up against the Israeli border.

Personally championed by President Trump, the project is marketed as part of a package of “incentives” for Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah. In return, the plan claims to transform war-scarred southern regions into an investment hub anchored by state-owned factories, solar energy farms, electricity generation projects, and promises to establish links to Eastern Mediterranean gas infrastructures.

Framed as both an economic initiative and a geopolitical strategy, the project claims to curb “Iranian influence” in South Lebanon by inviting Gulf investment, particularly from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, into large-scale renewable energy ventures. In this way, the SEZ is pitched as a US-brokered Gulf investment laboratory, in an aim to reshape regional alignments through economic enticement.

Behind this rhetoric lies a starkly different vision: carving out an eight-kilometre strip of Lebanese land through the partial or full seizure of 27 villages and their full depopulation.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, this region has been devastated by the rupture of its natural social and ecological continuities with Northern Galilee. Since then, South Lebanon has also been subjected to numerous rounds of violence, including 22 years of military occupation (1978-2000).

Israel’s most recent war on Lebanon, which intensified in September 2024, was followed by a ground invasion that further devastated the borderlands. Despite the declaration of a ceasefire in November 2024, Israel continues to bomb and bulldoze homes, torch agricultural fields, and prevent families from returning.

To date, over 4,000 Lebanese citizens have been killed, thousands were wounded, and material losses -including infrastructures- are estimated at over 11 billion USD.

Building on our knowledge as planning researchers and educators, we read the introduction of an SEZ in this destroyed and torched geography of violence and dispossession as a military project disguised as development planning.

Planning, particularly development planning, has long been central to Israel’s colonial practices. Even before 1948, Zionist settlers, backed by the British Mandate, enlisted Western planners to redraw municipal boundaries, redistribute farmland, and displace Palestinian communities.

After statehood, Israel perfected these techniques. Under banners such as urban renewal, heritage preservation, reforestation, or tourism, planning was repeatedly used to justify the displacement of Palestinians and the erasure of their presence. Zoning laws, building permits, and land confiscations were turned into bureaucratic weapons of colonisation.

The Oslo Accords deepened this logic. Settlements mushroomed across West Bank territory designated for a future Palestinian state. Urban planners debated architectural styles while bulldozers carved up, and continued to carve the land with bypass roads, separation walls, and watchtowers.

These plans were not about modernisation or economic growth. They have been about fragmenting Palestinian territory to make Palestinian sovereignty impossible.

The proposed SEZ in Lebanon continues this lineage. It deploys the neutral-sounding language of “development” to carry out the familiar work of dispossession, all while offering geopolitical benefits to Israel and its allies.

What are SEZs?

Since the mid-20th century, governments such as China, India, and the UAE have relied on “special economic zones” as tools to jump-start industrial growth by creating zones that link clearly delineated areas within their territories to the global economy.

These zones typically operate as enclaves of exception where laws such as labour protections, migrants’ rights, or redistributive taxes are suspended.

As such, SEZs provide investors with extraordinary privileges — tax exemptions, cheap land, weak labour oversight — while acting as economic enclaves severed from surrounding communities.

Shenzhen, once a fishing village, is the most frequently cited example: in less than four decades it became a global technology hub. The formula appears simple: attract investment, expand exports, generate jobs.

However, in Shenzhen and elsewhere, reality is far murkier. SEZs have been widely decried as sites of exploitation, environmental destruction, and social dislocation rather than inclusive development, as evidenced by numerous scholarly studies.

The US has long used economic planning for geopolitical leverage. In this region, Jordan and Egypt’s “Qualifying Industrial Zones” (QIZs) were, for example, established and given duty-free access to the American market, on condition that they incorporated Israeli inputs.

Established following the 1993 Oslo Accords, supposedly as an incentive to encourage peace through commercial and industrial exchanges, the QIZ are widely seen to have entrenched economic dependency, exploited migrant labour, and produced spatial segregation rather than fostering national growth.

Other experiments seem to have been equally unsuccessful. Thus, Gaza’s Erez Industrial Zone, once marketed as a development corridor, became a militarised enclosure after the Second Intifada.

Elsewhere, political tensions led to the collapse of the Kaesong Industrial Zone, a North–South Korean experiment, while the EU-backed economic zone between the two parts of Cyprus never materialised.

The Trump Economic Zone in South Lebanon is a continuation of such experiments. Its novelty lies perhaps in forcing a developmental vision through displacement while the war rages, while other experiments may have waited for the violence to quell before their introduction.

The details of the proposal underscore its militarised nature. A permanent US military presence of up to 2,000 US troops is envisioned. It is not clear if US soldiers will act as temporary “peacekeepers” or if they envision a long-term presence to replace the UNFIL peacekeeping forces, who have until now monitored security in this area.

Instead of the UNIFIL, the SEZ plan envisions Israeli watchtowers to ring the zone with permission to penetrate as the Israeli army sees fit, hence allowing Israel to extend its security frontier without bearing the costs of direct occupation, while Washington secures yet one more military base in the region.

This militarisation betrays the SEZ as a buffer protecting Israel’s northern border. The logic of the “buffer zone” resonates with US military practices elsewhere. Washington has long built such areas to contain resistance and secure imperial interests.

For example, the US Green Zone in Baghdad was nominally administrative but functioned as a fortress of occupation. In Afghanistan, “development corridors” were drawn to secure NATO supply lines rather than enrich Afghans. Across Africa, SEZs and economic corridors often arrive hand in hand with militarised infrastructure, securing access to resources under the guise of trade.

Urban planning and military strategy converge seamlessly here. The so-called Trump Economic Zone in Lebanon exposes yet another dark side of the SEZ model. It is an engineered project of land dispossession meant to serve Israel’s security agenda. Where most SEZs suspend labour rights, this one suspends citizenship itself, expelling entire communities to create a militarised buffer zone, cloaked in planning jargon.

When planning becomes a tool of colonisation

Planners have long justified displacement by presenting glossy visions of a “better” future. The Trump Economic Zone follows this script, planning to empty 27 Lebanese villages whose families have lived on the land for generations.

The offer of compensation reduces deep social ties and community life to cash payouts, treating displacement as a technical matter rather than an act of violence.

This dynamic is well documented in scholarship on “development-induced displacement.” From India’s Narmada Valley dams to mining corridors in Africa, communities have been uprooted and livelihoods destroyed in the name of progress.

In Gaza today, AI-generated renderings promote Trump’s fantasy of a Mediterranean Riviera on the ruins of genocide, where over 60,000 have been killed and entire neighbourhoods bombed to rubble.

In South Lebanon, however, displacement serves primarily a geopolitical rather than economic purpose. This is not development-induced displacement. It is security-induced displacement, wrapped in the rhetoric of growth.

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Beyond the Middle East, the naming of the SEZ as the “Trump Economic Zone” is not incidental. The branding collapses the personal ambitions of a US president with the geopolitical ambitions of empire.

Trump’s name, stamped on hotels and golf courses across the world, has long been used to push through developments that conflate private profit with the public good, offering elusive promises of job creation while demanding exceptions to planning rules.

Decades later, scholars have found a consistent pattern: rules were bent, historic landscapes gave way to golf courses, and the promised jobs never materialised. The Trump brand has become shorthand for the use of planning as a tool to turn private enrichment into a public obligation.

In Gaza’s “Riviera”, as in Lebanon’s proposed SEZ, the substitution is not just private profit for public good, it’s also militarised development for peace.

Planning operates as a stage for political spectacle, where war and colonisation are recast as development and peace.

The urgency of a development plan for Lebanon and the reconstruction of its devastated South is undeniable. However, the Trump Economic Zone is not the solution. It is a plan that entrenches foreign control, militarises the border, and deepens dispossession.

It is a neo-colonial project masquerading as economic development. Rather than empowering such a trajectory, the SEZ plan consolidates the effects of displacement and strips the Lebanese government of its authority by asking it to hand over land to foreign powers

For communities who suffered most from the war, the trust in the Lebanese government rests on the state’s ability to champion a sovereign recovery, one based on the principles of justice and inclusion.

Such development would invest in local agriculture, empower cooperative economies, and rebuild war-torn infrastructures. It would recognise Lebanon’s sovereignty over its national territories, as enshrined in international law, and strengthen fragile state institutions instead of bypassing them through enclaves of exception. Most importantly, it would protect the rights of native populations rather than erase them.

In proposing an SEZ for South Lebanon, US and Israeli partners are using the common playbook of planning to serve the logic of empire. To accept such a proposal would be to normalise a future in which development is synonymous with emptied-out villages and peace is synonymous with colonisation and militarisation. Lebanon and the international community should reject this proposal outright. As planners, we feel the urge to reclaim our practice for its promise, a means of allowing populations to imagine a better living together, rooted in their lands, and aspiring for more hopeful futures.  

Hiba Bou Akar is an urban planning scholar whose work focuses on urbanism in Beirut.

Follow Hiba on Instagram: @hibabouakar

Mona Fawaz is a planning educator working and living in Beirut, Lebanon. 

Follow Mona on X: @mona_fawaz

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com.

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.