The Trump/Kushner vision for “rebuilding Gaza” sounds less like a policy and more like a child dumping a box of Lego bricks on the floor and declaring a city where reality is optional. Click here for a marina. Stack this for luxury condos. Add one peace agreement, stir gently and presto, history, trauma and politics politely vanish.
It is the architectural equivalent of drawing a rainbow over a battlefield and calling it urban planning.
This fantasy treats Gaza as empty land, a blank sandbox waiting for grown men with shiny suits and PowerPoint slides. Not a place with two million people. Not a strip of land layered with grief, blockade, radicalization, failed diplomacy, and generational despair. Just an inconveniently damaged property in need of better branding.
The language gives it away: development, investment, opportunity, waterfront potential. Words borrowed from real estate brochures, not post-war reconstruction. Gaza becomes a “project,” its population a logistical footnote, background noise to the real stars of the show: hotels, ports, office parks, and “regional integration.”
It is colonial thinking wearing Silicon Valley sneakers.
The plan assumes that prosperity can be air-dropped like aid packages, that economic growth will quietly sedate political rage, and that people who have lived under siege will trade dignity for a shopping mall. It imagines that trauma is a software bug that can be patched with foreign capital.
But Gaza is not broken because it lacks beachfront cafes.
It is broken because it is trapped, physically, politically, psychologically. It is broken because borders are controlled, airspace is sealed, electricity is rationed, water is poisoned, and children grow up fluent in the sound of drones. You do not fix that with conference slides and buzzwords.
There is something deeply insulting about the optimism, too. Not hopeful optimism, the reckless kind. The kind that confuses ignorance for vision. It is optimism that does not listen, does not ask, does not wait. It barges in with a blueprint and assumes gratitude will follow.
History is littered with such blueprints.
They always begin with “economic zones” and end with resentment.
Trump and Kushner speak of Gaza the way tourists speak of a rough neighborhood: It has great potential, if only someone would clean it up. They reduce a political catastrophe into a renovation problem. Walls become “security infrastructure.” Occupation becomes “stability management.” Resistance becomes “bad incentives.”
This is not neutrality. It is narrative laundering.
And then there is the timeline, always a few years. Four years, ten years, one administration cycle. As if identity, sovereignty, and justice run on election calendars. As if decades of displacement can be solved before the next press conference.
The Lego city rises quickly in speeches. Towers sparkle. Ports hum. Investors smile. The children of Gaza are reborn as startup founders in the closing paragraph.
Reality, however, is stubborn.
You cannot pour concrete over humiliation and expect peace to grow.
You cannot substitute rights with resorts.
You cannot design reconciliation from a hotel ballroom.
The tragedy is not that the plan is ambitious. It is that it is shallow. It mistakes visibility for substance. It believes that if something looks modern enough, it must be moral. Glass towers instead of accountability. Infrastructure instead of freedom.
A city is not a product.
A population is not a development obstacle.
And suffering does not dissolve when you rename it “market inefficiency.”
If Gaza is ever rebuilt and it will be, because human beings rebuild even on ashes, it will not be because someone imagined a luxury coastline. It will be because people were allowed control over their lives. Because borders opened. Because fear receded. Because justice, however imperfect, replaced permanent emergency.
Until then, these glossy visions remain what they are, cartoons drawn over ruins.
A child’s Lego city, balanced on rubble, pretending that history is something you can simply bulldoze away.
It is comforting to believe in simple solutions. It is profitable to sell them. But comfort is not peace, and profit is not dignity.
Gaza does not need to be redesigned.
It needs to be allowed to breathe.
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