These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Tacitus, Agricola
What is beautiful about Gaza is that our voices do not reach it. Nothing distracts it; nothing takes its fist away from the enemy’s face. Not the forms of the Palestinian state we will establish whether on the eastern side of the moon, or the western side of Mars when it is explored.
Mahmoud Darwish, “Silence for Gaza”
In late September, the Trump administration released its 20-point plan to end the “Gaza conflict.” At the time of writing, both parties have agreed to the first phase of the ceasefire agreement though its implementation remains uncertain. No consensus exists on the later phases that would address the question of Gaza’s reconstruction, nor is it likely to emerge—though the pressure to implement an anti-Palestinian vision of development will be immense. For the past eight months, Trump’s obscene “Gaza development plan,” which projected the devastated territory as the “Riviera of the Middle East”—accompanied by an AI “slop” hallucination of what this would look like—has served as an abiding reference point for Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Netanyahu and his ministers relished in the fact that the plan’s real estate ontology—as Brenna Bhandar and I delineated in our article “Slumlord Empire”—rejected all semblance of international law and envisaged total population transfer as the prelude to a building boom.
Here lies perhaps the key function of this “plan” as of countless others: the strategic management of political time. Armed with what serves more as a diagram of dispossession rather than a blueprint for a new order, Israel, the U.S., and allied or complicit powers can continue their wars of elimination and accumulation as if they were governed by a discernible telos, some kind of endgame. The plans in this sense complement the other technique in Israel’s settler-colonial politics of time, namely negotiations (including the Oslo agreement itself), perfidiously stage-managed as a kind of international psyop to debilitate the enemy, perpetuate dispossessive violence, and buffer against growing waves of delegitimation. As even The Economist acknowledged, “talks about the future just buy time for Israel to create alternative facts in the present.” The Palestinian political analyst Abdaljawad Omar has observed that negotiations are but another modality of perpetual war, or pacification in perpetuity, through which Israel hopes “to exhaust global outrage the way it hopes to exhaust Palestinian resistance: through delay, confusion, the normalization of collapse, and of course, through coercion by the weaponization of antisemitism.”
Diplomatic calculus—namely the need to gain the assent and participation of Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, and Gulf states—has blunted the patrimonial extremism of the original proposal. In February, Trump had told reporters on Air Force One: “Think of it as a big real estate site. The United States is going to own it and we’re going to slowly, very slowly—we’re in no rush—develop it and bring stability to the Middle East.” In a subsequent Fox News interview, in which he confirmed that this Gaza acquisition would abrogate any right of return for Gaza’s Palestinian inhabitants, Trump seemed to shift the title to the territory from the U.S. government to himself: “We’ll build safe communities, a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is. In the meantime, I would own this. Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land. No big money spent.”
Trump’s developer’s utopia, which staged the making uninhabitable of Gaza as the precondition for its transformation into lucrative property, has not gone away—at an Urban Renewal Summit in Tel Aviv in September, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced an imminent “real-estate bonanza,” affirming: “We have done the demolition phase, which is always the first phase of urban renewal—now we need to build.” He also added: “We have paid a lot of money for this war. We have to see how we are dividing up the land in percentages.”
But while this real estate logic of genocide (“the demolition phase”) persists in the minds and actions of key players, the September Trump plan and some of the more detailed proposals that preceded and prepared it—namely the leaked documents detailing the Tony Blair Institute’s (TBI) Gaza International Transition Authority (GITA) and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation-linked Gaza Reconstitution Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) Trust—fold that logic into a broader neo-colonial design. I want to argue that this design is both symptom and evidence of the intimate links and elective affinities between the seemingly fringe utopias of the far right, especially in its “techno-fascist” proclivities, and the core ideologies and practices of contemporary imperialism. At a deeper level, what we can see at work in these diagrams of dispossession is the nexus between accumulation and elimination, the genocidal logic of recursive “so-called primitive accumulation.” In other words, to borrow from Venezuelan Marxist literary critic Ludovico Silva, it is a salient dimension of capitalism’s relations of destruction.
These plans for what the latest Trump document names “New Gaza”—which are a sprawling genre unto themselves, preceding the genocide and accompanying its unfolding from multiple perspectives—are a kind of recombinant palimpsest of colonial techniques for pacification, dispossession, domination and expulsion. They all incorporate: 1. frameworks of rule that void Palestinian claims to autonomy, sovereignty, or self-determination; 2. the production of neo-colonial spaces (Gaza as “zone” or “hub”); and 3. a capitalist vision of speculative and extractive development that erases any and all other claims and experiences on and of Palestinian land, community, and culture. The resulting vision is that of a meticulously policed and depoliticized (i.e., pacified) space for the circulation, consumption, and production of capital. Gaza is not only a “rehearsal for the future” as a planetary laboratory for wielding technologically sophisticated genocidal violence on “disposable” populations—as denounced by Colombian president Gustavo Petro and many other commentators—it is also, as evidenced by these “plans,” a rehearsal for neo-colonial modalities of subjugation that are functional to new regimes of capital accumulation.
Trump’s 20-point plan, which waters down the more brazenly colonial forms of authority outlined in the GITA and GREAT documents and nominally checks Israel’s expansionist drives (“Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza”), nevertheless shares in the minimum demand, so to speak, of all these visions of subjugation, namely the demilitarization and radical depoliticization of Palestinian space. As it declares, “Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee.” This is to be overseen by a “Board of Peace,” presided over by Trump with the support of Tony Blair and unnamed others. Note how the symptomatic need to double the temporary with a transitional, the technocratic with an apolitical, lest there be any lingering doubts that “governance” is the antithesis of self-government. Above all, even the shadow of anti-colonial resistance must be snuffed out; the “new Gaza” is to be a “deradicalized terror-free zone,” the negative condition for the only “positive” vision for Gaza, namely as a “special economic Zone” with “preferred tariff and access rates.” The benchmark to be attained is that of the “modern miracle cities in the Middle East,” and the method is “to synthesize the security and governance frameworks to attract and facilitate investments.” As Daniel Lévy observed, this document resembles “the charter for a 21st century version of the Dutch East India Company” and constitutes “an attempt to erect a further layer of international occupation of the Palestinian people, in addition to that of Israel.”
The plan advanced by the Tony Blair Institute for the Gaza International Transition Authority is a far more granular proposal than Trump’s intentionally generic document. As Arnaud Miranda has noted, it envisions Gaza as “a laboratory for new techno-imperial governance.” Its detailed, costed and scheduled organogram of the transition authority is the opposite of a political constitution— Gaza will have no citizens, at most denizens or wards—but a structure for an experiment in neo-colonial entrepreneurial domination. The authority’s highest political body (named, as we are comically informed, by “international consensus”) is a board with a chairman.
In its design, Blair’s transition authority is a perfect illustration of how the ruling ideas today are the ideas of the ruling class: just beneath Blair’s executive prerogative, which has had many reaching for the moniker of “Viceroy of Gaza,” two of the mooted members of the board are billionaires—private equity owner Marc Rowan, who has played a key role in the Trump administration’s efforts to quash Palestine solidarity and muzzle critical thinking, and Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian telecoms, tech and real estate mogul. Besides the Dutch technocrat Sigrid Kaag, the other prospective member of the board is businessman and rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, a key figure in the Abraham Accords and one of the founders of so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has been described by Médecins Sans Frontières as a “system of institutionalised starvation and dehumanisation.” (It is worth noting that the biggest funder for the TBI, to the tune of half a billion dollars, is Blair’s close friend Larry Ellison, also the biggest private donor to the IDF, and, through his company Oracle, a key figure in the tech-sector’s integration with the Trump administration. He is now poised, with his son, to attain a near-monopoly over U.S. media.) As Ammiel Alcalay noted in Middle East Eye , the GITA envisions “the corporatization of an entire traumatized people under the ‘leadership’ of billionaires”.
In this glittering vista of limitless heteronomy, the Board, with its own special security force, monitors and controls an “executive Palestinian authority” (not to be confused with the extant PA in Ramallah), which cannot execute anything, has little if any authority, and is predicated on the abnegation of any Palestinian national claims. The only claims Palestinians are really allowed to make in this scheme are as property owners. The GITA provides for a “Property Rights Preservation Unit” whose role is allegedly to “ensure that any voluntary departure of residents from Gaza during the transitional period is documented, legally protected, and does not compromise the individual’s right to return or retain property ownership.” The fact that “voluntary departure” is the frame, together with the vagueness about how “transitional property claims” might be adjudicated, is highly symptomatic.
The billionaire-led technocracy outlined by Blair’s GITA is given a more techno-futurist sheen in the Gaza Reconstitution Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) Trust, whose PowerPoint deck, circulated in the White House, was leaked to considerable consternation. As Palestinian scholar Rafeef Ziadah has pointed out, ‘the document echoes the “Gaza 2035” plan promoted by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu […] the 2024 proposal that envisioned Gaza as a sanitised logistics hub linked to Saudi Arabia’s Neom mega-project and stripped of meaningful Palestinian presence.”
Liberally illustrated with AI graphics and investment graphs, GREAT lies somewhere between Blair’s governance blueprint and the far-right blogger and White House whisperer Curtis Yarvin’s earlier “modest proposal,” “Gaza, Inc.”
Yarvin’s dystopian fantasy pictured a fully corporatized and privatized conception of sovereignty that “exits” from the very parameters of international law or democratic politics—after the model, of Próspera, the “charter city” in Honduras financed by venture capitalists including Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Marc Andreessen. For Yarvin, a precondition for turning Gaza into “the first sovereign corporation to join the UN” is not just deporting its people but obliterating their property title to their land—abstracting the land itself into a fungible token. As he declared:
Gaza, without its residents (even more important, without their complex maze of Ottoman-era land titles), is worth much more than Gaza with its residents, even to its residents. This is 140 square miles of Mediterranean real estate, clear of titles, demolished and demined at a cost of perhaps ten billion dollars. This land becomes the first charter city backed by U.S. legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.
Like Blair, Yarvin too wants to put Zionist billionaires in charge, suggesting that the “roadshow” for this IPO should be run by Adam Neumann, the Israeli-American billionaire who co-founded WeWork. Core to this speculative vision of privatization-as-pacification is the proposition that “All real-estate titles have war as a genesis block.” (The genesis block is the first block in a blockchain, the distributed ledger of transactions at the basis of cryptocurrencies).
The GREAT plan (subtitled “From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally”), like its kin proposals, is also a recapitulation, recombination and acceleration of multiple forms and devices of domination emerging from the history of colonial racial capitalism. As a node in what it calls “the Abrahamic fabric” of this imperial region, the political form to be taken by Gaza is that of a “U.S.-led multilateral custodianship.” The Trust, we are told, will govern Gaza “for a transition period until a reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity is ready to step in its shoes.” To implement this structure of antipolitical governance—an echo of the UN Mandate system which regarded certain populations as unready (or in the case of Palestinians, unfit) for self-governance without European tutelage—this machine to void Palestinian sovereignty, premised on the subaltern’s willingness to mature into a willing and pacific client, GREAT includes its own productions of neocolonial space, namely what it terms “Hamas-free humanitarian transition zones.”
Presented with operational maps, these “humanitarian transitions areas,” to be managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and then a “hybrid security framework,” are the not-very-distant descendants of the British practice of resettlement into “new villages” in Kenya and Malaya, the French policy of regroupement in Algeria, and United States’s own strategy of “hamletization” in Vietnam. Demonstrating the sheer continuity in the ruling imaginary of counterinsurgency, the very design of the “New Gaza,” with its golf courses and green areas, draws on the history of social war in the imperial metropolis itself. As we can read in one of the slides: “Like Haussman’s strategy in 19th century Paris, this plan aims to address one of Gaza’s ongoing insurgency’s root causes: its urban design.” Felicitously, spatial discipline can now be complemented by cybernetic control, once “all services and economy in these cities will be done through ID-based AI-powered digital system.”
But GREAT has a much wider horizon than the mere management of pacification in the wake of genocide. In the breathlessly vapid language of venture-capitalist visionaries, it sings of raising billions in public private investment, employing an “innovative funding model” that would combine some kind of “tokenized” “land trust” whose returns would be invested in a “Wealth Fund for Gaza.” Gaza’s value, now estimated at 0 dollars, would rise in ten years to over $300 billion (accompanied by “1 million jobs”). Critical to GREAT’s vision is the idea of Gaza as a “hub” in a vast logistical-extractive-productive regional complex to compete with China. The establishment of the “New Gaza” would serve to accelerate the profitable integration of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and transform the Strip into the “center of pro-American regional architecture,” securing economic, political, and military power over the circulation of energy, capital, and commodities (special attention is given to “rare-earth minerals”). As Ziadah argues, what “is being imagined is not recovery for [Gaza’s] residents, but the conversion of Gaza into a logistics centre serving IMEC,” “a corporatized trusteeship for global capital”. In GREAT, she concludes, “Gaza is described less as a society than as a distressed asset to be flipped. This is disaster capitalism at its sharpest. It is devastation reframed as the precondition for speculative profit.”
The “reimagining” of Gaza is 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. Rendered a tabula rasa by the Israeli genocide, Gaza is reborn through ten “mega-projects,” which tellingly include an MBS ring highway (named after Saudi potentate Mohammed Bin Salman), an MBZ central highway (named after Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi), an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone, and a Gaza Trump Riviera with associated artificial islands. Data centers, electric vehicle giga-factories, a deep sea-port, oil and gas pipelines—all the accoutrements of 21st-century accumulation are accounted for.
As for the land, not only are the property rights of Palestinians ephemeral, but the plan, in calculating the relative costs and benefits of temporary housing in the Strip (debt-financed with public land as collateral) and “voluntary” relocation, makes a directly economic case for ethnic cleansing, noting how 500 million dollars would be saved for every 1% of the population relocating, thereby “increasing the value of Gaza.” We are also told the Trust would retain 30-40% ownership of Gaza’s lands. In the wake of the scholasticide, it is highly indicative that provision for schooling in Gaza does not include the re-establishment of higher education, and that indeed all high-school instruction is designated as “vocational.” This is perhaps linked to the fact that the EV industrial zone is imagined as employing “skilled (low-cost)” labor.
In this panoply of plans—which overlap in terms of their intentions, ideology, circulation and personnel—we see the ghastly crystallization of the relations of destruction that govern the present moment. In visioning the aftermath of the genocide, they retroactively justify and integrate it as the precondition for a new round of regional imperial integration, accumulation, and development. In the future perfect tense that underlies the plans’ speculative temporality, the genocide will have been the necessary prelude to a shining future of speculative real estate expansion, logistical-extractive integration, and regional hegemony. It will have broken the spiral of Gaza’s “de-development” to make possible a “New Gaza” of hyper-capitalist development. It will also have given the lie to the admonition, voiced by former U.S. diplomat Josh Paul, that “you cannot build a riviera on the bones of the dead.”
On the contrary, for Trump, Blair, Netanyahu, and their billionaire backers, in Gaza you can only build a riviera on the bones of the dead. One might even hazard that the more dead there are—the greater the scale of destruction, dispossession and displacement—the more potentially lucrative the riviera. What the plans reveal, between the lines, is a 21st-century variant of the racialization of war as a process of devaluation and investment. (The GREAT plan is stark on the arithmetic: from the 0 dollars produced by the “demolition phase” to the future valuation of over $300 billion.) Seeing the genocide through the prism of the plans reveals to us capital’s own logic of elimination, in which a war of extermination is revealed as what Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato call a “war of accumulation,” as destruction—of human beings, of their relations and institutions, of their culture and land, of their cities, space, and nature —is retroactively revealed to operate as what Marx in Capital, Vol. I called the “forcing-house” of accumulation.
While the genocide was not directly driven by a capitalist strategy of accumulation, these plans reinscribe it as integral to such a strategy. What Raphael Lemkin described as the synchronized attack on different aspects of life of the captive people here morphs into the precondition for the mega-projects, the new logistical corridors and infrastructures for rare earth minerals, fossil hydrocarbons, and commodity chains, but also for the massive technological ensembles of concentrated violence (now “AI-powered”) that would be necessary to secure these patterns of circulation and accumulation. In these plans—as they recollect, repeat and recombine colonial-racial logics in a framework overdetermined by capital’s cutting edge (AI, EV, etc.)—we can see the distinct lineaments of the genocidal logic that defines so-called primitive accumulation as the recursive logic of capitalist violence.
As Harry Harootunian has argued, in his superlative Marxist memoir of the Armenian genocide, The Unspoken as Heritage, the real history of capitalism repeatedly throws up “a formula combining genocidal murder and massive theft, sanctioned by accumulation and directed by some form of political authority, whether an emergent state or falling empire. […] Mass murder means mass acquisitions.” From this vantage, genocide is “a necessary instrument of carrying out the process of capitalism’s primitive accumulation,” which, through the “systematic implementation of massive appropriation, dispossession, and theft […] reverses the everyday into its negative, a living hell of necropolitics.”
The transitions envisaged by these Gaza plans make the cessation of genocide conditional on politicide; they are predicated on the subjugation of Palestinians, who would at best serve as servile labor or comprador security forces in an imperialist strategy of regional accumulation that remixes all the stratagems of colonialism to drive the authoritarian speculative fictions of contemporary billionaires and their technocratic consiglieri. The aftermath of the genocide is revealed as the indefinite extension of its logic, but also its subsumption as a moment in a broader imperialist vision. Mass murder becomes a vanishing mediator for authoritarian tech capital and its mega-projects.
These plans are the faithful diagram of a future which is the antithesis of justice, equality, or liberation, for Palestinians and for peoples around the world; it is a future in which genocide is not an incommensurable crime but a prologue to prosperity and a factor of accumulation, where the “value of Gaza” is another name for the destruction of Palestine. Only working towards the expropriation and destitution of capital’s despots (MBS, MBZ, Musk, Ellison, Rowan, Trump, Blair & co.) can impede new rounds of eliminatory accumulation from casting their shadow across the earth. They plan for our disposability—we should plan for theirs. ♦
