President Donald Trump’s proposal for razing and rebuilding Gaza is being hailed by some America First conservatives as another in a line of bold moves which benefit our country, like incorporating Greenland and restoring the Panama Canal. To them, the proposal showcases American free-market can-do and know-how in the hands of a businessman who can succeed where deep state diplomats failed. Glenn Beck exuberantly predicted that, “Thanks to Trump, you could plan your honeymoon destination on the Gaza Strip.” Steve Bannon, while firmly and consistently stating that he wanted America to have nothing to do with Gaza, praised Trump for thinking “outside the universe” with the idea.
But original America First policymaking is not what the project really represents—whether it’s undertaken by America or a coalition of Arab states to prevent America’s proposed involvement in the region. Looking closer at its actual blueprint, the scholarly article written by Joseph Pelzman, whose ties to Washington and Israeli operators I reported on in a recent piece for the Libertarian Institute, shows that it’s both unoriginal and frightening—and exactly what America First is set up to oppose.
At bottom, what is on offer is an often-used model of government-backed racketeering that makes a mockery of Pelzman’s regular references to “approach[ing]” the “problem” of Gaza using a “purely economic perspective,” “focusing narrowly on the investment solution to a failed experiment,” and treating Gaza as a “post-bankruptcy situation.” And this racket goes beyond normal government-incentivized real estate corruption in cities—unless that corruption is happening in the People’s Republic of China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or Qatar.
This is what the Gaza scheme really looks like: a state-run surveillance city, something more in common with the practices of interconnected “modernizers” like Xi Jinping, Muhammad Bin Salman, and (unnervingly) Michael Bloomberg than populist constitutionalist believers in limited government. It’s also something that, concerningly, is coming to parts of America, and in some of the same hands.
In his introduction, Pelzman is straightforward about his vision for Gaza, the “Build – Operate – Transfer (BOT) framework.” This framework will be invested in by unnamed countries which will become “equity shareholders with a 50-year lease,” with “the sovereignty for the residents” only “be[ing] addressed…after the 50-year lease arrangement is complete.” In lieu of self-government by residents, government will be “subcontracted to the selected investors and/or their representatives.” Under this model, “civil administrators” will be “brought into Gaza” to set up a bureaucracy based on “‘private provision of public services’” while creating “the ‘rule of law.’” Additionally, “a revitalized education system will be instituted based on a reformed UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabian curriculum…staffed by international educators based on the Singapore IB model.” Also, “the introduction of an urban environment with an above ground rail system and 100 percent solar power throughout the strip.” And “a three-sector Gaza economy (tourism, agriculture and high tech)…will be implemented to address alternative pathways for the development of this sovereign non-militarized green economy.”
So, government by bureaucrats provided by the highest bidding investors who are backed by foreign governments, ensuring “public provision of private services”; commerce based on “tourism,” “high tech,” and a “green economy”; as well as a “revitalized education system” based on the curriculum of Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Bahrain staffed by educators trained in the top-down management style of Singapore. This model doesn’t call for much in the way of citizens, who are not mentioned in the proposal layout, nor does it call for anything in the way of free market entrepreneurship. But it calls for a great deal of government-backed investment.
When it comes to investors, the players are clear. The first step in redeveloping Gaza, Pelzman writes, is “a pilot project can start immediately in the Northern segment of Gaza with leasing arrangements worked out with Israel,” with the first elements being “a port and a desalination facility…” As I reported in my recent piece, according to the website Middle East Eye, Jared Kushner’s Saudi-UAE-Qatar-backed firm Affinity Partners has invested in two Israeli companies, including a “part owner of Israel Shipyards, the only domestic shipbuilder for the Israeli navy.”
This is an obvious link, with an obvious payoff, but others exist in Pelzman’s plan as well, namely the Saudi Public Investment Fund controlled by the royal family. It’s the Investment Fund which has pioneered in Saudi Arabia the approach Pelzman envisions in Gaza, and Pelzman uses the Fund’s Saudi mega-projects “to get a local…estimate of the relative construction cost for housing and hotels [in Gaza].” These mega-projects Pelzman cites include:
- The Neom high-tech 22 development covering nearly 27,000 sq km on the far-north-west coast.
- The Red Sea Project (a luxury resort development encompassing 34,000 sq km on the western coast…).
- The Qiddiya entertainment city near Riyadh (which is touted to be three times the size of the Walt Disney resort in Florida).
- The establishment of the King Abdullah Financial District in the north of Riyadh.
Based on these projects, Pelzman estimates that “the construction cost of a hotel complex and housing units…and a full array of solar power infrastructure will range from $500 billion to $1 trillion and will take at least 5 years to complete.”
Digging into these Saudi projects, their vision and participants and backers, shows what a “new” Gaza in Pelzman’s model will look like.
Neom is a “vertical city” based around “the Line” which Neom’s website says will reach “across inspirational desert valleys to the beautiful Red Sea” without “roads, cars or emissions.” Instead, “it will run on 100% renewable energy and 95% of land will be preserved for nature.” This preservation of mostly desert will occur via the Line: “the ultimate sidescraper,” a building the height of a skyscraper but turned on its side to snake across the ground. It will “eventually accommodate 9 million people and will be built on a footprint of just 34 square kilometers.” To put this in perspective, New York City has an area of about 778 square kilometers and a population of approximately 8.2 million.
Red Sea Global (RSG), “for people and planet,” is “where luxury, sustainability, and innovation converge”; “a pioneering regenerative tourism destination on the west coast of Saudi Arabia” including “16 iconic resorts across three islands and two inland sites…operated by globally renowned brands,” including the St. Regis and the Ritz Carlton.
Qiddiya Entertainment City, “the world’s first city built for Play,” will house 500,000 people and be the destination “where thrilling entertainment & sports meet cultural experiences.” These will include Six Flags, Aquarabia Water Theme Park, and Dragon Ball Theme Park.
King Abdullah Financial District is “an iconic destination known for its world-class commercial offices and retail spaces, with contemporary residences, a unique entertainment offering and advanced smart city solutions.” The way to buy, move, and order in the city is through the KAFD App: a government-controlled Alexa-type instrument that effectively structures a citizens’ day, from arranging trash disposal to shopping at retailers ranging from the new international upscale hamburger staple Black Tap, to “health and wellness” providers like FourSpa.
Not surprisingly, the development details of these cities which will “redefine” urban living are less seamless than their backers make them seem. A case in point is Neom, easily the most ambitious of the Saudi ventures, and also the most obviously troubling. Some of the controversy surrounding the development is, like the leveling of Gaza, tragic but hard for westerners to relate to. One example is a 20,000-strong Bedouin tribe displaced by the construction, several of whose leaders have been killed by the Saudi military under suspicious circumstances.
But other controversy hits closer to many Americans’ everydays. One example is a Reuters report, picked up and expanded by the New York Post, that the Line, the habitable heart of Neom, is:
“…being designed with artificial intelligence at its core, with data used to manage power, water, waste, transport, healthcare and security…Data will also be collected from residents’ smartphones, their homes, facial recognition cameras, and a host of other sensors, a data sweep that…would feed information back to the city and help it predict user needs… By sharing their location, health and movement data, for example, if a user is immobile for too long, a drone can be deployed to check on them…”
According to Neom officials, “users on Neom’s consent management platform can decide what personal date to share, who has access to the data, monitor how it is used, and can opt out any time,” and they are also paid for the use of their data. But “experts are divided…if such incentives will create a two-tier system where some peoples’ data is deemed more valuable than that of others”—the equivalent of a digital caste system where only a select few can opt out of having their data harvested. According to the Post, quoting Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager for the digital rights organization Access Now:
“Although Neom and other cities like it are being marketed as ‘smart’ or ‘eco cities,’ they’re actually ‘surveillance cities’ because ‘essentially they’re built on an architecture that is fueled by people’s personal data, and in a country like Saudi Arabia where there is no data protection or safeguards, no oversight, no accountability, no transparency, no separations of powers, and the fact that [Mohammed bin Salman] is actually ruling the security agencies,’ Fatafta [said]…adding ‘It is a scary idea.'”
The main player in these mega-projects is the Saudi Public Investment Fund, but the Saudis are not the sole mover behind these plays. RTX Corporation, formerly Raytheon Technologies Corporation, one of Washington DC’s “big five” weapons contractors which, as I’ve reported elsewhere, funnel weapons to the Pentagon and funds to the think tanks which feed the Pentagon, was selected in 2023 to “provide development and services at Neom Bay Airport.” Globant, the multinational AI technology conglomerate, partnered in 2024 with Qiddiya in “a landmark partnership to make Saudi Arabia’s Qiddiya City one of the world’s most immersive entertainment hubs.” Also, according to the New York Post, writing about Neom:
“China is playing a major role in distributing surveillance technology, so as to enable the creation of [cities like Neom]—part of…Xi Jinping’s larger plan to ‘normalize and seek to legitimize its vision of a state-led cyberspace and surveilled public,’ Harvard University fellow Bulelani Jili commented…It would appear that the Saudi Prince—whose ties with Jinping have recently grown stronger—is eager to assist in realizing this vision on a grand scale.”
And there is an internationalist angle. The House of Saud, ostensibly as part of their top-down “modernizing” push for Saudi Arabia, is deeply committed to renewable energy. This means an outsized role promoting their mega-projects as “climate-friendly” initiatives at the World Economic Forum at Davos; claims that researchers call inflated. Included as part of this modernizing push are media partnerships with proponents of renewable energy like Xi-Jinping-sympathizer Michael Bloomberg, whose reputation as an American-troubleshooter-at-large (from gun control to climate change) gives at least some cover for the surveillance projects the Saudis are putting in motion.
Finally, when it comes to staffing the development of these new Saudi surveillance cities, the American presence in key roles is disconcertingly clear. Though he doesn’t advertise it on his biography, P. Michael Reininger, currently the CEO of South Florida’s controversial new rail line Brightline, was until 2021 the CEO of Qiddiya Investment Co., which supervises the construction of Qiddiya. Daniel Doctoroff, who until 2018 was associated with Neom, served as the CEO of Bloomberg L.P. and then as Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding for New York City from 2002 to 2007, when Michael Bloomberg was New York mayor. Neom’s CEO, Joseph M. Bradley, started his career in Silicon Valley, then hopped from Seattle to Chicago to Toronto to Hong Kong before becoming “Sector head” for Neom out of Chicago and, simultaneously, CEO, both posts he holds today.
These aren’t America First CVs; instead, they’re redolent of a completely different approach to the world. In this vein, it’s not coincidental that those non-Saudi executives attached to these projects who aren’t American are British or South African, because the historical analogy to the Saudi plays is the British Empire of the 1760s. As recent scholarship has shown, the empire was truly crony capitalist; it contracted with its chosen monopoly, the British East India Company, to rule India and force-sell its tea in America. The American colonies used their legislatures and popular politics to resist the incursion; the Indians, whose history hadn’t included popular politics or representative government, weren’t so lucky.
But, in contemporary America, this public-private colonizing is happening, too.
Tellingly, P. Michael Reininger’s Brightline, “the only privately owned and operated intercity railroad in the United State,” is backed by Fortress Investment Group, which was backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund until it was spun off to a United Arab Emirates Fund in 2022. This Brightline development also has characteristics of Gulf state public-private boondoggles. For example, a Florida County sued to stop the development over $2.7 billion in tax exempt private activity bonds issued to Brightline investors by the Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration that the project arguably didn’t qualify for.
As in Saudi Arabia, the Brightline investment itself seems tuned to help government-backed corporations at the expense of smaller investors. Indeed, “critics of Brightline have theorized that if the passenger service fails,” which seems likely since ridership is at only half of projected levels, “a Fortress [Investment Group] subsidiary will still have made money on real estate deals surrounding the train tracks…but bondholders could be left holding the debt.” Also, like Saudi projects, Brightline justifies itself with claims about its “sustainable trains” and “social impact,” e.g. “we help to remove 3 million cars from roads each year.”
Brightline’s P. Michael Reininger is not the only player helming similar projects in Saudia Arabia as in America. Neom’s Daniel Doctoroff served under then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg when Bloomberg rezoned 40% of the city to create a “global” city and “tourist” hub. From these roots, New York has become a “playground city” for the well-to-do, at least to the extent that it’s not a city of crime, since rezoning displaced the city’s middle class and small businesses and turned it into a feudal city of the rich and poor. What’s more, the new city has created the kind of surveillance spaces, helmed by Chinese Communist Party-backed companies, that the New York Post deplores in Saudi Arabia, with the promise of more to come. It is not surprising, in this light, that Daniel Doctoroff, who helped kick-start this development, is currently the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sidewalk Labs, “an Alphabet company that accelerates the integration of digital technology into urban environments”—one that, in 2020, “shelved a plan for a data-driven neighborhood in Toronto…that [many] said [represented] an invasion of privacy.”
More similarities exist across these developments. The marquee Bloomberg-backed Manhattan development project, Hudson Yards, is co-developed by Stephen Ross, the Israeli-linked billionaire. Hudson Yards has been criticized, much as Neom has been criticized, for vast architecture that is friendly to surveillance while dwarfing the individual, leading to depression, “isolation,” and suicides. These similarities make sense, since the projects derive from the same sources. In 2020, not long before it jettisoned its investment in Fortress Investment Group, the backer of Brightline, the Saudi Public Investment Fund picked up a 15% stake in Stephen Ross’s real estate company, Related Companies, which developed Hudson Yards. The marquee entertainment complex in Hudson Yards, the Shed, is founded and chaired by Daniel Doctoroff.
Because of the location, because of the attention, and because of Washington DC’s direct or indirect involvement in the project, the Gaza redevelopment will be the marquee “smart city” in the world. This new Gaza will be a city-state whose citizens lack sovereignty, where unaccountable control is given to bureaucrats handpicked by government-backed corporations and wealth funds, where the free market is non-existent, where education is imported from outside, where ultimate control rests with foreign contractors—all under the comforting label of “green” development. For the autocratic and semi-autocratic operators backing it, this new Gaza will be the alpha and omega of their aims. Almost surely, techniques pioneered here to control the populace will be exported elsewhere.
Justifying the creation of this surveillance city-state is the reality of everything that’s happened in Gaza since October 2023. It’s undeniable that Hamas’ killing of approximately 1,200 Israeli citizens and hostage-taking more than 250 others, including some American citizens, was barbaric, deliberately so. But there is another kind of barbarism than the kind practiced with grenades, guns, or knives, and the rebuilding of Gaza seems to promise it. This is Soviet-style barbarism, updated to the twenty-first century: 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. It’s this barbarism that, judging by recent years, is the clearer and more present threat to free markets and free citizens. Americans should recognize this—and address the threat accordingly. Standing, in the name of America First and against the remaking of Gaza would be a promising first step.
