Gentrification Through Genocide: The Proposal for a Techno-Futuristic Beach Resort on the Toxic, Haunted Mass Grave of the Gaza Strip

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If just one photo captures the callous, ghoulish, cruel and heartless opportunism of those who see the world only through a lens of business opportunities and maximum profit-making for themselves and their cronies, it’s the photo above, an AI-generated vision of what was pitched to the world on January 22 as “New Gaza”, a futuristic high-rise coastal tourist resort on the shoreline of the Gaza Strip.

The image is from a PowerPoint presentation by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, and a prominent real estate investor, at the official launch of Trump’s “Board of Peace”, which took place at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland.

Other slides in the presentation showed “New Rafah”, a brand-new city featuring 100,000+ “Permanent Housing Units”, and plans for the eventual expansion of this “new city” model across the whole of the Gaza Strip, with these new residential areas flanked by industrial complexes featuring “data centers” and “advanced manufacturing.”

Ignoring the economic strangulation of Gaza by Israel over the last 58 years — and particularly since Israel cut Gaza off from the rest of the world as an “open-air prison” in 2007 — Kushner envisaged replacing what he described as Gaza’s “aid-driven economy” with “a free-market model”, and also let slip that his inspiration was developments in the Gulf states, where, as he described it, “they build cities like this — [for] two, three million people — in three years, so stuff like this is very doable if we make it happen”, conveniently forgetting that none of those projects took place in a genocidal wasteland full of two million displaced and war-traumatized people.

Kushner’s proposals are unspeakably grotesque for two particular reasons: firstly, because they are the most depraved manifestation of a global, international finance-led mania for “regeneration” that, over the last few decades, has involved the wholesale dispossession of communities of poorer people to make way for wealthier incomers.

In London, where I live, I have watched this social cleansing take place repeatedly, as council estates of social housing, built in the 1960s and ‘70s, which could have been refurbished, have, instead, been razed to the ground, and their many thousands of residents dispossessed, to make way for less grandiose versions of Kushner’s towers. No one involved cared about those who were displaced and dispossessed for being too poor, as they were judged unworthy of having any claim to live any longer on land coveted by those with considerably more money and power.

Until now, however, “regeneration” has never been proposed for a location where this dispossession has taken place through the gravest of crimes; namely, genocide.

And yet that is exactly what Kushner’s plans envisage — luxury beachside tower blocks, new residential cities and industrial complexes rising up on the site of slaughter on an industrial scale, a toxic wasteland, littered with debris to an almost unimaginable extent, and haunted by the ghosts of the estimated 10,000 murdered Palestinians whose skeletons and decomposing corpses remain buried beneath twisted piles of metal and concrete, laced with the malignant residue of mainly western-manufactured bombs and missiles.

For those who have survived Israel’s genocidal assault for the last 27 months, Kushner’s plans also revive the foundational lie of Israel’s Jewish colonial settlers who arrived in vast numbers, mainly from eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, in the 1920s and ‘30s — that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without a land”, even though, before the mass Jewish exodus began, around 750,000 people lived in Palestine, and 90% of them were Muslims, or Christian.

Nowhere in Kushner’s AI-generated visions are the Palestinians evident at all, even though, where the speculative towers will purportedly rise, the two million or so survivors of Israel’s genocide still live, cut off from the rest of Gaza, the 58% of the Palestinians’ land which Israel maintains control of through a militarized exclusion zone.

Where these shining towers are envisaged, the surviving Palestinians mostly cling to life in tattered tent cities, surrounded by sewage and mountains of garbage, lacerated by the winds and storms of a particularly cruel winter, and still deprived of most of the medical supplies and medical equipment that so many of them desperately need just to survive.

Fundamentally, Kushner’s vision for Gaza’s future, if fulfilled, would constitute the final erasure of the Palestinian people. Already dispossessed after repeated forced evacuations, in which many have lost all identifying documents, and most of the administrative infrastructure of Gaza has also been destroyed, those who have survived Israel’s genocidal assault for the last 27 months have mostly become anonymized refugees in their own land, their history destroyed, their very identities eliminated.

What provision will be made for them by the would-be gentrifiers? What provision will be made for their dead, in Gaza’s violated cemeteries, and in the innumerable impromptu graves for the tens of thousands slaughtered by Israel after it became impossible for them to be formally buried? And what provision will be made for the living, who must somehow be accommodated if all this monstrous “gentrification” is to take place?

No answer has, to date, been provided. Instead, Kushner’s presentation is one of two competing visions for Gaza’s future that are struggling for supremacy in the second phase of Trump’s “Peace Plan”, following the ceasefire deal secured at the start of October. This has involved the establishment of three separate components, as I reported in my recent article, Gaza: Caught Between Israel’s Ongoing Genocide, and Trump’s US-Led Neo-Colonial Takeover: a Palestinian technocratic committee charged with the day-to-day running of Gaza, overseen by a US-dominated “Board of Peace” led by Trump himself, and the “Gaza Economic Board”, in which a similar US presence is at least offset by the presence of UN officials and representatives of four Gulf and Middle Eastern countries involved in the long negotiations for a ceasefire — Qatar and Egypt, in particular, but also Turkey and the UAE.

In recent days, Trump has already begun undermining his own “Board of Peace”, which was meant to be focused on Gaza, and which included nine of his close US political and business associates (and Tony Blair), all of whom can very clearly be assessed as supportive of Kushner’s plans, by opening it up to all-comers, including his favourite autocrats, and even Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently as some kind of super-villainish alternative to the United Nations.

The “Gaza Economic Board”, however, remains of particular interest for its inclusion of UN, Gulf and Middle Eastern representatives, particularly if a meaningful way forward can be established with the Palestinian technocratic committee, the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG).

The thwarted efforts of both Israel and the US to secure the mass forced displacement of the surviving Palestinians

Below, I’ll discuss this second option competing with Kushner’s visions, but for now it’s important to also take note of Israel’s position, because, for its political leaders, we know that only one solution is still sought — the complete extermination of the surviving Palestinians through a longed-for resumption of their genocidal horrors.

For western audiences, the naked depravity of this seemingly unquenchable genocidal hunger for Palestinian lives has often been hidden behind rhetoric supporting their permanent expulsion to other countries; ethnic cleansing or forced displacement, in other words, but carefully disguised as “voluntary migration.”

This, however, has never been anything other than a convenient illusion. Marinaded in their own sense of exceptionalism, Israel’s leaders — and especially two far-right settler ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition government, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir — have been relentlessly indignant about the refusal of the rest of the world to help them achieve their invented historical and pseudo-religious claim to the whole of Palestine by opening their doors to people they have repeatedly described as terrorists — and who they have explicitly urged other countries to condemn in a similar manner.

Blinded by their own sense of supremacism, they seem not to have even noticed that the rest of the world has become increasingly hostile to refugees, even those who have never been tarnished as terrorists. Israel, however, has, since October 7, pushed the monstrous claim that no one in Gaza is “innocent”, and that, to quote Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, it is “an entire nation” that was “responsible” for the October 7 attacks.

In his speech at Davos, Jared Kushner deliberately avoided addressing the thorny issue of the Palestinians themselves, instead framing the planned “regeneration” of Gaza as a business opportunity, for which, above all, “stability” was required to encourage investment. As he stated, “Without security, nobody’s going to make investments, nobody’s gonna come build there. We need investments in order to start giving jobs.”

To the extent that the Palestinians were mentioned, it was all through the lens of this “stability.” As he said, the “number one thing is going to be security — obviously we’re working very closely with the Israelis to figure out a way to de-escalation, and the next phase is working with Hamas on demilitarization.”

We know, however, that the “voluntary migration” of the Palestinians has previously been openly discussed in US circles. In February 2025, when Trump, newly inaugurated in his second term as president, invited Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, he surprised everyone — including, it seems, Netanyahu himself — by declaring that the US would take over Gaza and remake it as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

It was the first public confession that, behind the scenes, Trump and those closest to him — Kushner and Steve Witkoff, his Special Envoy, who is also a real estate developer — had been working on the “Riviera” plans long before Trump even returned to the White House. In a revealing interview in October 2025, Witkoff let slip that Kushner had actually been working on the “master plan” for Gaza for two years, which, if true, indicates that his ambitions for Gaza started almost as soon as Israel’s genocide began.

Crucially, in the weeks before Netanyahu’s visit in February 2025, Trump and Witkoff had also floated the notion that, to rebuild Gaza, the existing Palestinian population, or a significant part of it, would have to be relocated, at least temporarily, to other countries. On January 18, just before Trump took office, NBC News reported that Indonesia, over 5,000 miles from Gaza, was “among the locations under discussion for where some of them could go”, according to a Trump transition team official.

However, Indonesian officials immediately responded by stating that “the Indonesian government had neither received any information nor been approached with any plans concerning such a relocation”, adding, “Such efforts to depopulate Gaza would only serve to perpetuate the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and align with broader strategies aimed at expelling Palestinians from Gaza. The ceasefire in Gaza must serve as a momentum to start dialogue and negotiations toward realizing a two-state solution, in accordance with international law and internationally agreed parameters.”

In July 2025, further outrageous suggestions were floated — for the transfer of Palestinians to either Ethiopia or Libya, even though the former is a human rights quagmire, and the latter has been a violent, unsafe and divided state since the NATO-backed overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

None of these plans progressed any further, however, because the US realized, as has Israel, that no one wants to help either country commit the largest and gravest crime of ethnic cleansing in history.

As a result, the grotesque visions floated by Kushner in Davos — of gentrification through genocide — look, above all, to be unachievable aspirations, undermined by the continued presence of two million Palestinians, challenged by Israel’s unwillingness to abandon its genocidal aims, and also by the Israeli settlers’ obsession with colonizing Gaza for themselves.

And then there is the cost. In October, the UN stated that Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza had created a “human-made abyss”, and that reconstruction, involving the clearance of over 60 million tonnes of debris, was “likely to cost more than $70bn (£53bn) over several decades.”

It’s estimated that at least £20bn is needed to meaningfully begin any kind of clearance and reconstruction process, and yet Kushner showed no willingness to address this at all.

Breaking the deadlock? Possibilities for the Gaza Economic Board and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza

As I noted above, the only viable way forward would seem to be through meaningful engagement between the Gaza Economic Board and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), enabling the latter to begin clearing and rebuilding Gaza, while negotiating with Hamas and other Palestinian factions for their disarmament, which remains a prerequisite not only for Kushner’s “stability” for investors, but also, according to its own stated aims, for the State of Israel.

All along, Hamas and the other factions have maintained that they would only consider disarmament in the second phase of the “Peace Plan”, but that they were amenable to doing so, and to handing over power, if a Palestinian alternative, truly representing the Palestinian people, were to be established.

If NCAG is properly empowered, and if Qatar, Egypt, Turkey and the UAE are allowed to assist, it may be that the elusive peace that is so desperately sought by the Palestinians will actually be achievable.

When Trump opened up membership of his “Board of Peace” to all-comers, it was noticeable that, as the autocrats flocked to Trump, and European and other western countries almost entirely maintained their distance, eight prominently Muslim-majority countries — Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Qatar and the UAE — issued a joint statement announcing that they would all be joining the “Board of Peace.”

They insisted, however, that they were only doing so “to reaffirm their countries’ commitment to supporting the implementation of the mission of the Board of Peace as a transitional administration, as set out in the Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict and endorsed by United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803, aimed at consolidating a permanent ceasefire, supporting the reconstruction of Gaza, and advancing a ‘just and lasting peace’ grounded in Palestinian self-determination and statehood under international law, thereby paving the way for security and stability for all countries and peoples of the region.”

Hady Amr, the former US Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, welcomed the joint statement, calling it “powerful” and “smart” in a post on X. Amr stated that it “re-grounds effort in international law”, and “creates solidarity”, because “joining together as a group is more powerful than acting alone and signals they will negotiate as a block” — and “possibly leave as a block.”

He also noted that the joint statement “re-grounds effort in Palestinian rights, self-determination and statehood and international law”, “gives key Muslim states leverage”, “avoids Muslim disunity”, “avoids angering Trump” and “effectively conveys to Israel a mild version of ‘No Justice, No Peace.’”

In conclusion, he stated that the “bottom line” of the statement was that “Muslims tell Trump/Israel, ‘we’ll play along for now — [but only] if this truly advances Palestinian rights/statehood.”

If Israel can continue to be restrained from resuming what, by now, it evidently regards as its God-given mission to focus the entire energy of its existence as a state on the complete extermination of the Palestinian people, a resolution of the perceived Hamas disarmament “problem” would lead to the “stability” that Kushner seeks so desperately to entice his vulture investor friends to begin funding his gentrification plans, although that, of course, would remain unacceptable because it fails to place the Palestinians at the heart of their own story.

If all of these parties can secure the disarmament of Hamas and other Palestinian factions, and the transfer of power to the Palestinian National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, then the only just and acceptable next step is for the committee to be allowed to clear and rebuild Gaza according to the Egyptian reconstruction and recovery plan for Gaza, launched in March last year, adopted by the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and welcomed by the EU, which the head of the committee, Dr. Ali Shaath, announced as “the basis of its work” on January 17.

As he also announced, according to this plan, the committee’s work in Gaza would begin “with an emergency shelter phase, providing temporary housing until homes destroyed in the Israeli onslaught are rebuilt”, and would also restore “the essential services that form the bedrock of human dignity such as electricity, water, healthcare, and education.”

This is what is needed, and not the disgraceful gentrification fantasies of foreign billionaires. Most crucially, however, unless the committee’s path is followed, I can see no sign of the Palestinian people accepting a future in which they are subservient to new colonial masters, shunted into peripheral roles, at best, in a futuristic techno-city built on their dreams, their homeland, and the ghosts of their dead.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of a photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’, which ran from 2012 to 2023), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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