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First Raze Gaza, Then Build a Playground for Global Capital
By Abe Asher | November 19, 2025
Profit-hungry developers, Gulf monarchs, Donald Trump, Tony Blair, and the Israeli far right are all united in their vision for Gaza: a tech-fueled special economic zone governed by billionaires, with no question of self-determination for Palestinians.
When President Donald Trump brokered a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas in late September, the American president was heralded, even by some leading Democrats, for his peacemaking. Speaker Mike Johnson and Israeli Knesset speaker Amir Ohana said they would jointly nominate Trump for his coveted Nobel Peace Prize.
The unveiling of Trump's relatively sober twenty-point peace plan for Gaza appeared to mark a sharp turn from how the president was thinking about Gaza less than eight months prior, when he announced at a White House press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States would take control of the Gaza Strip, occupy it, and turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East" — a possibility that, in Trump's words, could be "so magnificent." Shortly after the press conference, Trump shared a bizarre AI-generated video of a rebuilt Gaza on social media complete with belly dancers, Elon Musk throwing fistfuls of bills into the air, and Trump and Netanyahu lying shirtless on beach chairs.
Trump's ambition to turn Gaza into a resortland was incorporated in a broader plan for the region's future that came under discussion in Washington at the end of the summer. The Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust, was the Trump administration's first major proposal for bringing peace to Gaza. Its logic remains operative in the current peace plan.
The GREAT Trust plan was remarkable for its bluntness: it proposed relocating a quarter of the existing population of Gaza to neighboring countries for the duration of the rebuilding process and shunting the rest of the population into temporary, restricted accommodations in the strip. That done, the United States would assume control of Gaza for a period of ten years and oversee the transformation of the devastated home of more than two million Palestinians into “a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets (Europe, GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], Asia), resources, and a young workforce, all supported by Israeli tech and GCC investments."
The transformation would be funded by up to $100 billion in public investment and up to $65 billion in private investment, which would cover the cost of everything from “generous relocation packages” for Palestinian residents to "10 Mega construction projects."
The idea that drew the most scrutiny was the project to transform the Gaza coastline into "Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands," a string of top-end resorts and small artificial islands modeled on the Palm Islands in Dubai that would, presumably, attract pleasure seekers happy to set up their beach chairs on the bones of the Palestinian dead. But that wasn't the only megaproject in the proposal. Others include the construction of highways named for Mohammed bin Salman, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, and Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi; a smart manufacturing zone named for Elon Musk; and a network of data centers to serve Israel and the Gulf states.
Nowhere in the plan was there any suggestion that the Palestinian population of Gaza might democratically support the transformation of their besieged homeland into a US-governed, techno-futurist special economic zone; words like democracy and sovereignty were absent from a thirty-eight-slide deck on the proposal, obtained by the Washington Post. This is either because the plan's architects knew it could not achieve democratic support or because they have given up the pretense of caring. There is no question of Palestinian political rights in the plan until such time as Gaza has been "demilitarized and deradicalized," at which undetermined time governance will be transferred to a pliant Palestinian polity that will join the Abraham Accords and, potentially, sign a compact of free association with the GREAT Trust to secure ongoing financial support "in exchange for the Trust retaining some plenary powers."
In the meantime, the implicit assumption is that the Palestinian population of Gaza will either migrate permanently to neighboring countries or be pacified by a multibillion-dollar security apparatus backed by, if the logos that appear in the slide deck are any indication, a who's who of the world's leading military contractors and weapons manufacturers. The GREAT Trust plan does not mention what might happen if Gazans resist this next phase of their dispossession, but it is not terribly difficult to imagine.
The Neom Model
As Alberto Toscano has written, Gaza is being reimagined as an "apotheosis of that fusion of capital and authoritarian rule that constitutes, for so much of global reaction, the 'miracle' of those 'miracle cities' of the Middle East." The reference to the miracle cities of the Middle East is often explicit in plans for Gaza’s future, with Neom, the planned city being constructed at enormous cost on the northwestern coast of Saudi Arabia, serving as a frequent point of reference.
"Though Palestine is often used as a laboratory for the future, the Trump plan for Gaza is not so much a preview of the future to come but a gruesome extension of a future that has already arrived."The region where Neom is being built has been described as a "blank canvas" by bin Salman, much in the way the architects of Trump's plan appear to be conceiving of Gaza. Neom, too, has been imagined as a gleaming new regional hub for industry, trade, and pleasure, complete with a ski resort and a soccer stadium suspended above the ground. But the region is not a blank canvas at all. The government has already destroyed multiple villages in the process of clearing land for construction, Last year, it authorized the use of lethal force against villagers to facilitate the ongoing and potentially doomed construction of the Line — a 110-mile-long, glass-encased smart city that was initially supposed to be able to accommodate a quarter of the total population of the country.
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Editor's note: Praxis, a tech-backed startup with ambitions to build the "next great city" as a techno-libertarian society, potentially in Greenland, supported by around $525 million in funding from crypto and venture investors. Praxis, co-founded by Dryden Brown, presents itself as a new "network state" aiming to "revitalize Western Civilization with minimal regulation, crypto-native economics, and a vision of future expansion even to Mars." The project has ties to Peter Thiel through Pronomos Capital, a venture fund that supports experimental city projects worldwide (e.g., Próspera in Honduras and Itana in Nigeria), and draws on libertarian ideals like "low taxes, fewer rules, and technological innovation." Although Greenland's government has so far resisted any sale or independence plan, Praxis continues to explore the idea as part of its broader mission to physically establish a high-tech, semi-autonomous community outside traditional nation-state structures. These tech oligarchs are so full of shit it's not even funny anymore. What projects like Praxis reveal is a technocratic misunderstanding of civilization itself. Western civilization was not built by efficiency, code, or capital optimization. It emerged from Greek philosophy, Roman law, Renaissance art, sacred music, poetry, myth, tragedy, and moral struggle. From Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Augustine, Bach, Dante, Shakespeare. These were cultural and spiritual achievements, not engineering digital techno projects. The hubris lies in these fascists believing a civilization can be rebooted like software:
A Startup Linked to Peter Thiel Wants to Build the "Next Great City" in Greenland
A Startup Linked to Peter Thiel Wants to Build the "Next Great City" in Greenland
How does this fit into the context of Pax Judaica? Are Israelis looking for alternatives when Israel collapses?
Argentine affected by the Patagonia fires interviewed by local news:
— COMBATE |🇵🇷 (@upholdreality) January 11, 2026
"They burned our paradise. They ruined everything. They're trying to sell Patagonia to the Jews. The place is crawling with Israelis. They're buying up the land. No one does anything." pic.twitter.com/0FumOIHleL
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