On January 22, 2026—367 days after Donald Trump’s second inauguration and 352 days after his announcement of a plan for America to “Raze and Rebuild Gaza” and the day he launched his “Board of Peace” to “oversee” Gaza—Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner took the stage at the World Economic Forum at Davos to explain how “Raze and Rebuild” worked in practice. A video of this speech shows Kushner, on a podium to the left of the members of the Board of Peace including Trump, speaking as is his wont at a rapid gait and appearing almost boyishly earnest. A Power Point to Kushner’s right showed “a futuristic dreamscape of gleaming apartment blocks and office towers, with neat industrial parks and residential districts” as well as a “data center, luxury apartments, and [spaces for] ‘coastal tourism.’”
Beginning by commenting that “this is for the people of Gaza,” Kushner went on to lay out his one-minute thesis of the case, a Marshall Plan on Autopilot to create, in Libertarian Institute director Scott Horton’s deathless description, a “new Jetsons City of the Future”:
“We said, ‘You know what? Let’s just plan for catastrophic success’….People ask us what our plan B is. We do not have a plan B. We have a plan…In the Middle East, they build cities like this of 2 or 3 million people…in three years. Gaza…could be a destination, have a lot of industry…there should be 100% full employment and opportunity for everybody there…that…really gives the Gazan people an opportunity to live their aspirations.…We’re basically studying the best practices from all over the world, and we’re watching who does education best, who does health care delivery the best…All this is IP [Intellectual property] that the Board of Peace is going to make public…[to] really show how…you do peace implementation.”
The rest of the speech was call-outs, or warnings, or paeans, to specific audiences. To businesses, Kushner dangled an invitation to a coming conference in Washington and noted “I know it’s a little risky to be investing in a place like this, but we need you to come, take faith, invest in the people, try to be a part of it.” To Gazans, Kushner mentioned that “we continue to be focused on humanitarian aid, humanitarian shelter, but then [on] creating the conditions to move forward…” To “people on the media and on the social media…trying to escalate” he advised “just calm down…focus on the positive stories…turn a new chapter…if we believe that peace is possible, then peace really can be possible.” To Palestinians, he warned that “if Hamas does not demilitarize, that will be what holds back…the people of Gaza from achieving their aspiration.” And, finally, perhaps inevitably, he gave shout-outs to real estate. One was to Yakir Gabay, the Israeli developer magnate who’s “volunteered to do this, not-for-profit, really, because of his heart.” The other was to President Trump, who “never gave up…never stopped….gave us different ideas…” and is doing “a lot of…things…in America…we should all be copying.”
It’s hard to know how to respond to a speech which sounds like a practice presentation by a marketing associate at a mid-ranked American consulting firm but is made before the president of the United States, the president of Argentina, and the prime minister of Hungary while the people it purports to address live in tents flooded by water pelted by rain surrounded by rubble and ten thousand of their dead. In the words of Rahma Zein, an Egyptian journalist who noted that ten children have died from cold in Gaza this winter, “it is a sick kind of detachment for people to be able to think of real estate in the same place where bodies are continuing to pile up.” “Sick kind of detachment” sums up the feel of the presentation, and also sums up the strategy. Like most projects of liberal imperial development, its language erases past or context (the real world) in the name of the future.
Indeed, rinsed-out futurist language was what British and French cheerleaders of empire like Thomas Macauley and Napoleon III used to justify projects which turned Muslim-ruled Mumbai into a racialized caste community and working class Paris into a boulevarded city filled with corporate department stores where workers were homeless, alienated and eventually revolutionary and consumers distracted and depressed. Jewish Zionists went to school on the British and the French and gained power from the WASPs, who built America’s empire in imitation of the British and French—and, though Anglo-French development language was ornate and Kushner’s is technocratic, they both vacuum out reality. In the words of Susan Sontag, they “systematically den[y] the determining weight of history—of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, and conflicts” and, through “pious uplift,” suggest “a world in which everybody is…immobilized in mechanical…identities and relationships” that make politics “irrelevant.” The Jewish Zionist David Bell wrote recently about Napoleon III’s remaking of Paris in just this vein: arguing that “the magic of great cities comes from the fact that even if their constant reinvention rarely proceeds from pure motives, it can never be reduced to impure motives” meaning that “whatever its history, the city is what we make of it.” If this is what Bell “makes” of the horrors of Napoleon III’s Paris, imagine what he might make of Kushner’s Gaza.
The problem with this “sick kind of detachment” is not simply that it erases history. It’s that it immobilizes its audience from action, distancing people from reality so that they go along with whatever power is doing. And investigating the history of Kushner’s plan for Gaza, where it’s likely to lead, and how it will be imitated shows a project not just of considerable brutality but of considerable danger to the rest of us. As I wrote for the Libertarian Institute about the initial Raze-and-Rebuild proposal in February 2025, it will most likely lead in Gaza and eventually in America to the “barbarism” of “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.”
Crucial to understanding this barbarism is understanding its history. Namely, the fact that Raze-and-Rebuild has been integral to the project of Israel since its inception, and justified in the same terms. Sabri Jiryis and Walid Khalidi, Palestinian historians of the displaced generation, have written of Jewish Zionists’ steady incursions into Palestine beginning in the 1890s at the hands of operators like the French and British Rothschilds and Theodor Herzl. The method of these connected operators was to use pressure from the British and French empires to secure Zionist control over land owned or farmed by Palestinians. It was a project that culminated in “418 Palestinian villages destroyed and depopulated in the 1948 war” and “the fall of more than a dozen of the major urban centers…exclusively populated by them” as well as “others where they were either the vast majority…or had substantial pluralities [including] West Jerusalem, and their ancient seaport Jaffa…”
This is what was portrayed in western media, thanks to American Zionists and their WASP allies, as a heroic project of erstwhile settlers and survivors. It came at the unspoken expense of pushing dislocated Palestinians to a narrow sliver of territory with limited access to the sea while Palestinians in Jerusalem became, in the description of Edward Said, “strangers in their own land…dwellers in what has been made an Arab ghetto at the heart of the Jewish state.” But this project, carried out on-the-fly by a ragtag army of mostly Eastern European socialists with under-the-table help of western Jewish Zionist financiers, didn’t assume its current form of eradication-and-construction until it allied with a broader and deeper British imperial project in the Middle East.
This was a project beginning in the 1920s but coming to maturity after the Second World War where “modernization” and “development” were codes for America and Britain controlling Iraq and Iran and the Gulf states and getting their oil. As the scholar Mona Damluji shows, movies produced by British Petroleum and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and created by Arab and Muslim intellectuals paired carefully-crafted scenes of individual villagers with sweeping vistas of the “improvements” (massive hydroelectric dams; bridges and roads; housing construction) that would supposedly increase material wealth and “protect them” from flood or famine or other natural disasters. As Damluji also shows, the reality these films elided was Anglo-American operators eradicating traditional life and summarily shoving aside any political movement that tried to put the oil in control of the citizens who lived on the lands it was under.
Israel’s founding generation was savvy to the politics of oil and development. It gained entrée into Washington’s intelligence and military apparatuses in the 1950s by marketing Israel as America’s and Britain’s allies against the Soviets in the Middle East. This was a collaboration that continued throughout the Cold War with the aid of connected American Jewish Zionists and helped create such plays for oil as Iran-Contra and the First Gulf War. But it was the second-generation Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu, trained at MIT and Boston Consulting Group, who recognized as the Cold War ended that deeper western commitment to the region and its “redevelopment” could be guaranteed not just by oil but by technology.
In the 1990s, Netanyahu took advantage of the backing of American companies enjoying a finance boom engineered by American Zionists like Robert Rubin and Larry Summers: players who’d succeeded WASPs as the decisive influences on American economic policy and spent the decade encouraging financial conglomeration which boosted stock prices. With the help of American capital, Netanyahu set about making Israel the “high-tech” capital of the Middle East. One result was even closer ties between Tel Aviv and Silicon Valley, also being funded by American Zionist networks and increasingly arbitered by American Zionist technologists. Another result was that Israeli military operations to “contain” organizations for Palestinian sovereignty begun in earnest in the Palestinian territories in the 1960s could be “supplemented” by a “carrot-and-stick” strategy of cooption and coercion based on Zionists’ new closeness to Washington and Zionists’ increasing technological edge. The “carrot” was the project for Palestinian statehood dangled by the “Liberal” Zionist prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak in the 1990s via the Oslo Accords. The “stick” was militarized blockades and enforcement of the Palestinian territories if (and in fact when) the peace process failed.
But the ultimate goal of Israeli leaders was not peace between sovereign nations, Israel and Palestine. It was to make of the Palestinian territories generally and Gaza specifically something other than what it is or its people want it to be. Before 2024, according to Palestinians’ own testimonies and to accredited scholars of Palestine including International Crisis Group’s Tareq Baconi, Harvard’s Sara Roy, Chatham House’s Julie M. Norman, and Kennesaw State University’s Maia Carter Hallward, Gaza was religious but not exclusively Islamist, and highly law-abiding. It was the site of proliferating charities and neighborhood organizations and schools whose success lent legitimacy to whatever government was in charge. And it was economically oriented around small manufacturing, the professions, entrepreneurship, and goods-based trade. That encouraging this reality has never in any way been Israel’s aim is clear from public remarks of Shimon Peres, the last prime minister of the “founding generation” of Israel, who:
“…express[ed] a vision for transforming the Gaza Strip into a prosperous, thriving area, similar to how Singapore developed from a small, poor country into a wealthy, hi-tech hub…[based on]…economic cooperation with Israel. His vision was based on the idea that Gaza, with the right investments and international aid, could flourish through trade, tourism, and technology, much like Singapore had done, thus leading to a better life for its residents and reducing the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.”
The thought that it might be misplaced to apply the model of a techno-authoritarian East Asian city-state to a Muslim Levantine community with roots in agriculture and trade did not enter into this “liberal Zionist” schema. Nor was it really intended to, since for Israeli leadership and its supporters—people who came to power by supplying empire with technology—modernization is an absolute imperative. In the words of Martin Peretz, a close ally of Shimon Peres’ peace-seeking successor Ehud Barak, criticizing Britain’s willingness to encourage Middle Eastern agriculture: “teaching someone to farm, in the late twentieth century, even with the newest equipment, is not modernizing.” And this absolutist aspect of Israel’s project for Palestinians was demonstrated by the fact that Israel’s policy was not meaningfully different during the sustained period of de jure peace in the 1990s following the Oslo Accords than it was before or after.
According to Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi, after the Oslo Accords and despite widespread “euphoria” about them among Palestinians, “conditions grew much worse for all but a very small number of individuals whose economic or personal interests were intertwined with the Palestinian Authority” while “for everyone else, there were consistent denials of permission to travel and move goods from one place to another as a labyrinthine system of permits, checkpoints, walls, and fences was created.” In the meantime, as part of this widening of the earlier ghettoization process described by Edward Said, Gaza was severed from the West Bank, which was itself severed from Jerusalem, effectively cleaving the Palestinian territory in thirds. The anti-Zionist Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein calls this process “collaboration-building to facilitate a burden-free Israeli occupation,” the “operative premise” of which “was that after growing accustomed to the emoluments of power and privilege, the stratum of Palestinian beneficiaries would…do the bidding of the power that meted out the largesse.”
The point, in other words, was to create a class of Palestinian leaders not committed to Palestinian sovereignty but to Israeli proxy control even as Israel isolated and bifurcated Palestine. Eventually, as Palestinians became savvy to this subterranean play, they elected Hamas in Gaza to replace demonstrably corrupt elites and offer a defense of their sovereignty. Israel’s response was a blockade and the use of surveillance security infrastructure that made of Gaza what David Cameron, the Zionist prime minister of the United Kingdom, called a “prison camp.” According to Finkelstein, technology has allowed Israel to maintain its occupation of Gaza and the 1.8 million people who live in a space of land twenty-five miles long and five miles wide (a higher population density than Tokyo) “largely by remote control.” Consequences have included, at various times, a 70-80% poverty rate and the blockage of medical supplies from entering the strip, while Palestinian entrepreneurial activity with the outside world was done via tunnel to avoid the Israeli blockade.
Crucially, Israel’s approach in Gaza (“modernizing” carrot paired with technology-security stick) begat its own Middle Eastern imitators. The authoritarian regime of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi which took power in Egypt with American backing after the revolution of 2011 undertook a “modernization” project in Cairo. The scholar Julia Elyachar compares this project in her recent book to “counterrevolutionary urban planning in Paris” by Napoleon III, where “boulevards—straight, wide, passages through which armies could pass…would make impossible the building of ‘barricades.’” And the scholar Elham Fakhro has revealed in the first full-length book on Jared Kushner’s 2020 normalization project the Abraham Accords that new leaders in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates eased relations with Israel for technological exchange. It then used the technology to undertake similar development projects as Sisi’s. As I reported for the Libertarian Institute about these “smart” or “surveillance” cities in February 2025:
“…Vertical and horizontal towers will shoot into the sky or snake through the desert, with apartments stacked on top of or next to each other to save space. Artificial intelligence will monitor civilians’ daily needs and health emergencies. International brands will be provided with tax breaks and a competitive edge in a fast-growing desert, making the Gulf States consumer and tourist friendly…digital apps will allow for trash disposal, entertainment, and self-care products to be just a click away.”
These alliances between Gulf state authoritarians and Israel bore tangible fruit after Hamas’s attack of October 7, 2023 became an opportunity for Israeli leaders to follow through on Shimon Peres’s plan to make Gaza Singapore by razing Gaza to the ground. Indeed, the 2024 plan to “raze-and-rebuild” Gaza, which as I reported for the Libertarian Institute last year was authored by the American Jewish Zionist “development expert” Joseph Pelzman at Kushner’s implicit behest, drew directly on Saudi surveillance cities to model what the “new Gaza” would be. When Kushner mentioned in his speech at Davos that “in the Middle East, they build cities like this of 2 or 3 million people…in three years,” he was not speaking theoretically. What he did not mention was the costs of those Gulf state development projects. Among them have been the displacement of a 20,000-strong Bedouin tribe; the dozens of senior white collar executives who left citing an abusive work environment and sexual harassment; and the 21,000 workers, mostly Indians, Nepalese, and Bangladeshis, who have died in construction.
Most likely, displacement in some form will be the unspoken cost for Palestinians as well. Kushner, in his speech, warned that “if Hamas does not demilitarize, that will be what holds back…the people of Gaza from achieving their aspiration.” Whether or not the people of Gaza aspire to Hamas demilitarizing, very little in Israel’s nor Hamas’s history suggests that this will be what transpires—especially because, according to The Wall Street Journal, Israel is already funding aspirant Palestinian “leadership” militia groups to attack Hamas inside Gaza’s ruins. This is the kind of project of accelerating provocation-and-response that will create violence which will justify Israel following through on relocation. As Joseph Pelzman put it, describing what became Kushner’s plan in August of 2024 and signaling this future: “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…”
But, even if events don’t transpire this way, what will life be like for Palestinians in Kushner’s Gaza? What will a communal Islamic population with a bent for trade and entrepreneurship do in a new Singapore flush with investment and corporate operators from abroad? Judging by examples in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, Doordash and Uber work seem like the most likely paths “up” for the people whose “aspirations” are the justifications for raze-and-rebuild in the first place.
Certainly, Gazans will get no help from Kushner’s project’s leadership. According to Al Mayadeen, the independent Arab satellite news channel based in Beirut, the Gaza Board of Peace which has ultimate authority over Raze-and-Rebuild is comprised, when it comes to staffing, of such Jewish Zionists as Aryeh Lightstone and Josh Gruenbaum. When it comes to the Executive Board it is comprised of the Zionists Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Tony Blair, and Marc Rowan. Another Executive board member is the Israeli real estate magnate Yakir Gabay, whom Jared Kushner described in his presentation at Davos as having “volunteered to do this, not-for-profit, really, because of his heart” but whose real motivation, as suggested by a recent report in an Israeli newspaper sympathetic to Gabay, is something rather different. Namely, the determination to implement a “thesis” about Gaza which became “close to an obsession” for Gabay after October 7, 2023. The thesis, which Gabay pitched to a receptive Kushner, “rests on one iron condition: it is not the economy that will bring security, but the opposite. First, Hamas must be disarmed.”
The final major player on the Executive Board and its attenuated connective tissue to Palestinian leaders is “Bulgarian diplomat Nickolay Mladenov” who also “will serve as High Representative for Gaza, acting as a key liaison between the [executive] board and the newly formed National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG).” The NCAG will be led by Ali Shaath, “a Palestinian with experience in zone development.” Shaath, described as a technocrat, has ties to the Palestinian Authority, which is the leadership Gazans rejected in 2005 because of its demonstrable cooption by Israel. These are the ingredients for Singapore on the Mediterranean: coercion, cooption, and foreign rule.
What makes Gaza’s likely trajectory significant for more than moral reasons, though these are resoundingly enough to oppose it, is that what is happening in Gaza will not stay in Gaza or the Middle East—it will come home to America, and in fact it already is. Indeed, the redevelopment of American cities these last fifty years bears a striking resemblance to those in the Middle East. As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute, the catalysts of this process were Jewish Zionists who took the reins of power in America from WASPs. Beginning in the late 1970s, they directed government subsidies toward real estate and then finance to pave the way for urban “redevelopment” in New York, a process imitated in Chicago and Los Angeles and San Francisco and Miami. To watch American film and television in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s is to see many of the same dynamics as in BP and Anglo-Iranian produced-pictures of the Middle East in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Namely, sweeping vistas of development (and in this case “glitz”) covering or dramatizing or romanticizing or comedizing mass displacement in the name of urban “growth” accompanied by policing to control an increasing number of homeless and dislocated people.
Zionist operators also “modernized” these cities, creating the origins of “smart cities”: high-rise glass skyscrapers which doubled as surveillance spaces that housed high-earning finance and tech workers who powered a consumer economy serviced by illegal immigrants and low-wage Americans. As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute, the developers behind these projects were some of the same people helping Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates develop their smart cities—and also supporting Israel’s ongoing project of absolutely “remaking” by Gaza and the Palestinian territories. Michael Bloomberg, Daniel Doctoroff, Anthony Malkin, Stephen M. Ross, Barry Sternlicht, Gary Barnett, Andrew Farkas, P. Michael Reinenger: these are the Jewish Zionists who “modernized” New York and Miami. At the same time they helped Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis lay the groundwork for their “modernizations.” And, after 2023, they exercised their arbitrative power in America’s imperial complex by shutting down the space for critiquing Israel when it commenced its current project of Raze-and-Rebuild in Gaza.
These Zionist monopolists have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who along with Kushner attributes his “success” in Gaza to being “forged in the fire of New York real estate.” As early as March 2023, Trump was proposing “Freedom Cities.” These were ten tabula rasa developments to be built on undeveloped federal land where “commuters…could get around in flying cars” in “an echo”—tellingly, given Scott Horton’s description of the “new” Gaza—“of ‘The Jetsons.’” Early projects to secure land for these cities, for example Republican Senator Mike Lee’s (R-UT) efforts to privatize national lands for the purpose, have not gotten off the ground. But the administration is bringing urban-style militarized surveillance to national parks via drones which are replacing security workers.
In New York, Trump is taking on a similar project. Trump’s means appear to be an alliance with Democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City eased by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump and their ally NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch: a scion of one of America’s most powerful Jewish Zionist families. Trump’s end appears to be a remaking of the city that dovetails with new development projects backed by Michael Bloomberg and Jewish Zionist Democrats.
The people at the brunt end of this raw exercise of power in America, as I reported for the Libertarian Institute in two investigations last April and May, are not so different from people at the brunt end of power in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates or from Gazans—in Edward Said’s words, “strangers in their own land.” They are laborers displaced to the tune of 60,000 in New York over twelve years beginning in 2002 under the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg whose children work as Uber drivers and Doordash deliverers. They are Cuban-American Republicans who left Cuba and secured a middle class life now forced to move in with relatives. They are middle-aged residents of upper-middle class neighborhoods in Miami and Manhattan whose houses are being infringed by mini-malls or whose rents have skyrocketed to a third of their incomes. They are black men held in jail for crimes they didn’t commit based on the new surveillance architecture that has accompanied “development” in New York at the hands of Jessica Tisch. They are teenagers and young women in Miami-Dade County induced into prostitution rings or rape gangs by wealthy “new arrivals,” the most infamous of them Israeli Jews. And they are farmers whose land is being squeezed by development because, like the Gazans, they don’t meet the criterion of Jewish Zionists for what is or is not appropriate economic activity for modern life.
Tellingly, much of the development that has hurt these different groups has been done in the same way that Jewish Zionists accrued control of Palestine from 1880 to 1948. The process begins with quiet deals for land and development engineered by empire; continues with the forced squeezing of indigenous populations that remain; and accelerates into full-scale “modernization” projects justified by propaganda. And this similarity is not a coincidence, because Zionists went to school on the empires which preceded them. Indeed, James Mayer de Rothschild, the father of Edmond Benjamin de Rothschild, the French Jewish financier who funded the first Zionist colony in Palestine which began Zionists’ eighty year expansion in the territory, was an integral part of the development of Paris under Napoleon III. And it is a present-day Rothschild, Matthew, who appears to be an integral facilitator of Jared Kushner’s Raze-and-Rebuild projects in and near the Middle East.
What these interconnections and intersections go to show in shorthand is that imperial dreams and realizations rarely start where they end. They are, like the French and British and Zionist-arbitered American empires, global in ambition and scope and reach. And this in turn means that, should Americans acquiesce to “the sick kind of detachment” about Gaza pushed by Jared Kushner at Davos, we will likely all end up living in the future Kushner imagines for Gazans together.
