Kushner is pitching a “new,” gleaming resort hub. But scratch the surface, and you find nothing less than a blueprint for ethnic cleansing.
President Donald Trump’s son-in-lawJared Kushner during the World Economic Forum n Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, January 22, 2026.(Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Last week, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner formally announced the US government’s long-awaited “master plan” for the future of the Gaza Strip—one Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has said was in the works for two years. Kushner could not have chosen a more fitting venue for the spectacle: the World Economic Forum at Davos, where the powerful gather to congratulate themselves for expressing concern about crises they have no intention of resolving.
The picture Kushner painted of a “new” Gaza—replete with looming luxury high-rises and sprawling resorts—is unrecognizable not only from the morbid expanse of rubble that Israel has turned the territory into during more than two years of genocide, but also from the once-teeming city that endured, despite all odds, under a suffocating Israeli blockade for decades. But there is something even more sinister at the heart of Kushner’s vision: the effective absence of Palestinians.
Kushner has never been shy about his support for Israel’s most extreme fantasies for Gaza—fantasies that begin with ethnic cleansing. But he also knows that a single, overt act of ethnic cleansing on the scale that many Israelis openly dream of might be too controversial to launder through Davos-speak—and that the prospect of a mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza in one fell swoop has already triggered international backlash that the architects of this project would rather avoid. So the Kushner plan is built around something more marketable, more reproducible at scale: attrition. Or, to put it another way, the fulfillment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reported order to close aides to “thin out” Gaza’s population.
The euphemism Israel has been selling to the world is “voluntary migration,” as if Palestinians would suddenly wake up with wanderlust and decide it would be nice to leave their homeland forever for no other reason than restlessness. The reality, of course, is that Israel has turned Gaza into an unlivable graveyard so it could offer migration as the only remaining option for those who have lost everything.
Those who stay in Gaza—because they have nowhere else to go, because they refuse to surrender their claim to the land, or because leaving represents its own kind of death—will find that Kushner’s vision doesn’t make room for them as people. It holds them captive as a problem to be managed and tucked away. They will become effectively invisible: cordoned off like cattle into hyper-surveilled “planned living communities,” where their every move will be policed under Israel’s omnipresent panopticon.
These camps would not even qualify as bantustans—they are open-air prisons where Palestinians’ biometric data will be collected, their movement tightly controlled, and their days reduced to a series of permissions and checkpoints. Their hunger will be quantified, their calories counted, their sustenance dispensed at the discretion of their jailers. Healthcare would be stripped down to the bare minimum—clinics that keep bodies functional, but not much more. Education would be engineered the same way: a sanitized curriculum for children already traumatized by genocide, designed less to heal and educate than to pacify. In this Gaza, mobility has only one direction: out.
Someday, once the rubble has been cleared and the dust has settled enough for investors to swoop in, the Palestinians warehoused in these enclaves may be deemed useful again—not as citizens with rights, but as cheap labor to serve the vultures who will reap the profit.
If investors don’t choose to hire labor from abroad, Palestinians might be given the honor of building the resorts and high-rises where their homes once stood. Maybe even over the graves of their loved ones, or the mangled remains of bodies that were never recovered from the ruins. And if they are very lucky, a small number may be permitted to stay on as a permanent underclass, cleaning rooms, washing dishes, and serving cocktails on terraces that overlook the sea and the mass graves beneath. But they’ll always remain invisible to those they serve.
Will Kushner’s plan come to fruition exactly as he and his cronies imagine? No one can perfectly predict Gaza’s future, and there are plenty of reasons this fantasy may never escape the conference halls of Davos. Kushner expects nations throughout the region to foot the bill for much of the project, but what government is going to sink billions into an initiative that cannot guarantee stability? What insurer will underwrite it, what developer sign on without ironclad guarantees, what political coalition keep it alive when the news cycle shifts and the donors move on?
And who knows whether the appetite for a Trump-branded Gaza will outlive the president’s second and, hopefully, final term, or whether it will become another hulking, half-built monument to hubris? But most importantly, the plan’s core assumption is one that history keeps disproving: that Palestinians will roll over and accept being engineered out of their homeland and forgotten. I shouldn’t have to remind anyone of the consequences of writing Palestinians off. Resistance in its many forms will continue, whether it’s in response to continued Israeli occupation or to the vulture capitalists trying to transform Gaza into their experimental playground.
Whether or not Kushner’s absurdist vision for Gaza materializes exactly the way he hopes, what we can be sure of is that Israel is busily implementing its own exterminationist agenda as we speak—establishing the “facts on the ground” before any international plan is finalized. Much of this plan overlaps with Kushner’s—Israel’s far right has been openly salivating over the prospect of rebuilding settlements in Gaza. And if the fantasy requires a little help from multinational developers—if sharing beachfront property with resort corporations makes it more “viable” to the world—then so be it.
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But while the rest of us argue over international law, the contours of Trump’s Board of Peace, or what humanitarian aid provision should look like, Israel is entrenching and expanding its control of Gaza past the so-called “yellow line” meter by meter, demolishing the few remaining buildings still standing in areas Israeli forces control, and massacring Palestinians at will. Israel’s ultimate objective in Gaza is and has always been Palestinian erasure. And erasure can come in many forms: genocide, ethnic cleansing, and now perpetual imprisonment.
In the face of total erasure, people will no doubt call Palestinians ungracious for not groveling at Kushner’s feet. They’ll say we should be grateful that someone, a man whose qualifications consist of nepotism and a real estate portfolio, has deigned to imagine a future for Gaza at all. Grateful that, amid the devastation, there exists a “plan,” any plan, even one that treats Palestinians as an inconvenient afterthought at best. We will hear the familiar, lazy refrain: “Fine—so what’s your alternative? At least he has a vision.”
The demand for gratitude is not incidental; it is part of the architecture of oppression. Gratitude is what the powerful demand when they are trying to paint coercion as benevolence, dispossession as “opportunity,” a prison as a “living community.” But what exactly is there for Palestinians to be grateful for? The beachside boardwalks, the glistening resorts, and the glass towers are not for them. The “New Gaza” being marketed at Davos is not a Gaza where Palestinians can finally live freely, with an airport that is theirs, borders they control, and a government that answers to them rather than to their occupiers. What Palestinians are being offered is the “opportunity” to survive, but as little more than servants to their genocidaires in perpetuity.
This is why the “vision” talk is such mind-melting bullshit. Because there is no shortage of Palestinian-led visions for Gaza. There never has been. Palestinian engineers, planners, economists, public health experts, and municipal workers have been thinking about Gaza’s future for decades, not from a podium in Switzerland but from under siege, bombardment, and starvation—conditions that would break most societies. The Phoenix plan, for example, is just one of several Palestinian proposals circulating, and starts from a premise that Kushner cannot even fathom—that reconstruction must be a political project rooted in self-determination. It asks basic questions that the Davos crowd refuses to ask because the answers implicate Israel: Who controls borders? Who controls materials entering the territory? Who controls movement? Who controls airspace and maritime access? What happens to the refugees? Perhaps most importantly, what is owed to a people who have survived a genocide?
Of course, Palestinians who are more than qualified to reconstruct Gaza will do their best with the insufficient tools they have, just as they always do. For the last two years, Gaza’s municipal workers and engineers have sacrificed their lives to repair roads, fix water pipes, and rebuild whatever they can while under Israeli fire, and they’ll keep going. Even the newly appointed technocratic committee operating under President Trump’s sham Board of Peace will do what they can, because Palestinians do not have the luxury of nihilism. But as always, they will operate at the will of an entity bent on their erasure. And they will be ignored, co-opted, and overruled not because they are incapable, or their visions unrealistic or unreasonable, but because they epitomize what Israel and its patrons have spent decades thwarting: liberation.
What Palestinians are being offered is the illusion of life inside a cage—a chance to survive, but only invisibly at best and maybe, just maybe, the chance to walk again on blood-soaked beaches, blood that only they seem able to discern.
Tariq Kenney-ShawaTwitterTariq Kenney-Shawa is a US policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank and policy network Al-Shabaka and a producer at AJ+.