Gaza-sur-Mer

Urban Renewal at the Psychopathic Edge

Fars Agency, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to Gaza. I’m Donald Trump Junior, but you can call me Freddo.

Now I know that some of you guys have driven all the way from Tel Aviv, and others have flown into Trump International Airport in Khan Yhounis, and you’ll be looking forward to some sushi and a cold beer. I hope the air conditioning is to your satisfaction, because Gaza can be hot this time of year. I’m so excited to show you round the greatest construction site in the Middle East.

Over there on your left you can see the Trump Peace Hotel: 170 floors and tipped with solid gold - Burj Khalifa eat your heart out! And that’s the Trump End-of-Conflict Casino - high rollers only! That glass dome over there? That, my friends, is my sister Ivanka’s Wellness Spa - check out the infinity pool! And over there you can see the white sails of the Jared Kushner yachting club. Surfing, jet skis or just a day out with the kids - we’ve got you covered. Ignore the gas pipeline, just watch the current.

We’re now passing the golden statue of my father receiving his Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm in 2026. What a moment! OMG!

Now some of you might remember a time when all this looked very different! But I can tell you that all remaining ordnance has been cleared in a joint US/IDF operation - and the body parts have gone along with the rubble. The guys on camels - hey don’t worry! They’re just actors - this is the Arab world, right? But I can assure you that there are no Palestinians in Gaza, because they are all living in the beautiful homes that my father gave them.

What we have here is an oasis of peace and pleasure where you can kick back on the beach and watch the sun go down, while you wait for the clubs to open.

Such was the vision - not exactly stated in these terms - that the gangster-president of the United States presented to an astounded world during last Tuesday’s joint press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu. Like a geopolitical jazz impro played by an ape, Trump riffed that the US would ‘take over the Gaza Strip’, ‘level it out’ and create an economic development that would transform Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East.’

After all, as the Great Man pointed out, ‘The Gaza thing has not worked; it’s never worked. It’s a pure demolition site.’ And as for the people who live there:

If we could find the right piece of land or numerous pieces of land and build them some really nice places … I think that would be a lot better than going back to Gaza, which has had just decades and decades of death.

Standing next to the man who has done more than any other single individual to inflict death and destruction on the people of Gaza, Trump told his audience how the US would work ‘with great development teams from all over the World’ to build ‘one of the greatest and most spectacular developments of its kind on Earth.’ As for the Palestinians - a category that Trump seemed to believe included ‘people like Chuck Schumer’ - they would be resettled in ‘far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region.’

Few politicians have ever used the word ‘beautiful’ so often, without the remotest idea of what beauty is. Trump knows nothing about Gaza, and like everything else, he doesn’t care what he doesn’t know. But the smirking supplicant who stood beside him knew that this ape-in-a-geopolitical-china shop had effectively given Israel a green light to do exactly what he has always wanted to do - remove the Palestinians from Gaza and destroy once and for all the possibility of any kind of Palestinian state.

This is why, on returning from the US, Netanyahu boasted that that he had secured ‘additional incredible achievements that can guarantee the security of Israel for generations’ and declared:

I am not exaggerating. I’m not overstating. There are opportunities here for possibilities that I don’t think we ever dreamed of — or at least until the last few months, they didn’t seem possible, but they are possible.

No wonder Netanyahu gifted Trump with a golden pager to commemorate last year’s attacks on Hezbollah - this touching memento of an operation which blew heads and faces off, blinded and maimed some 3,000 people was guaranteed to appeal to Trump’s vulgarity as well as his vanity.

Trump isn’t the first person to see the destruction of Gaza as a real estate opportunity. In March last year, Trump’s son-in-law and former Middle East adviser Jared Kushner hypothesized that ‘Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable…if people would focus on building up livelihoods.’ Kushner, like Trump, was clear that this objective could only be achieved by the removal of Gaza’s population:

From Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out [of Rafah] and then clean it up….I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there, I know that won’t be the popular thing to do but I think that’s the better option to do so you can go in and finish the job.

Out of power, Kushner’s opinions didn’t make much of a splash. But it’s another matter when these fantasies come spilling out of the mouth of the mad criminal-rapist who occupies the White House. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace suggested turning Gaza into ‘Gaz-a-Lago’. Other commentators praised Trump’s lunatic proposal as an expression of visionary strategic brilliance and a breath of fresh air. David Friedman, Trump’s former ambassador to Israel, hailed a ‘brilliant and out of the box creative and frankly the only solution I’ve heard of in 50 years that has the chance of actually changing the dynamics in that troubled part of the world.’

No one will be surprised to find Nigel Mosley-Farage in this chorus line of the damned. Asked what he thought of Trump’s proposal, the sycophant-in-chief replied:

I love ambition, the thought of a wealthy, wonderful, thriving place with well-paid jobs, casinos, nightlife... it all sounds very appealing to me.

‘Wealthy’ is the key word here, because wealth is the only thing the Trumps and Farages of this world have any any respect for, and there’s nothing that wealth can’t fix - or at least erase. Unlike Kushner, neither of them spelt out how two million Palestinians might be induced to leave Gaza and make way for the construction of this dystopian playboy pleasure dome.

Others were less reticent. The Israeli defence minister Israel Katz, claimed on X that ‘The people of Gaza should have the right to freedom of movement and migration’ - an offer that only applies to Palestinians wanting to leave Gaza - not to the Palestinians who were expelled from their land and have never been allowed to return to it.

This is the kind of freedom of movement that the Bosnian Serbs once gave to Bosnian Muslims and Croatians, and that Croatia later gave to the Krajina Serbs. In the same way, Trump’s ‘beautiful’ plans for the redevelopment of Gaza are the kind or real estate opportunity that the Romans might have taken advantage of after razing Carthage to the ground, or the Nazis might have considered after the destruction of Warsaw.

In a twenty-first century context, Trump’s proposals represent a form of urban renewal at the psychopathic edge. It’s disaster capitalism on steroids, that unproblematically contemplates the devastation of whole societies in order to construct desirable waterfront properties. As Omar Barghouti wrote yesterday, Trump’s proposal is:

Beyond depraved; it is sheer evil. It is a desperate attempt to normalize the commission of atrocity crimes and to achieve through US imperialist bullying what Israel’s military prowess has utterly failed to accomplish after 15 months of genocide.

Because Trump and his acolytes lack the moral conscience to even know what evil is, they are able to articulate possibilities that more genteel politicians would never say out loud. Indeed, the brazen cynicism, inhumanity and downright geopolitical madness of these fantasies has provoked a storm of outrage from many of the same governments that allowed Israel to kill 62,000 people and injure 111,588, according to the most recent figures by the Gaza Health Ministry.

Last week Dropsite News published a horrifying article by Abubaker Abed, a Palestinian from Deir al-Balah camp, describing a walk through northern Gaza for the first time in fifteen months.

The picturesque buildings and cafes along the coastline where I used to go are all gone—they have simply vanished. Al-Aqsa University, where I should have graduated from in 2024, lay in ruins. All that remained were some torn books and broken chairs. The buildings that were still standing were burned and partially destroyed, their foundations fragile. There were no lights anywhere.

Returning to northern Gaza, Abed described scenes of barely-imaginable devastation:

As people tried to move back into their houses, Israeli forces were burning everything around. The piles of rubble were like mountains blocking our sight. The skyline was darkened by plumes of black smoke from fires set by the Israeli troops, presumably as they were withdrawing from their stations. The camp should be renamed the city of rubble. That is what it has been reduced to. A nuclear bomb dropped on the camp wouldn’t have caused this much damage.

This is the ‘demolition site’ that Trump described. But unlike the members of the ‘international community’ who are now criticising him, Trump was not in power when it was actually being demolished.

They were the ones who provided Israel with diplomatic cover, and in some cases, with weapons. They responded to the mass killing of civilians and the systematic dismantling of Gaza society with silence or furrowed brows. They supported or refused to condemn an Israeli turkey shoot that was unconstrained by the laws of war or humanity and makes no strategic or political sense.

In January, the outgoing Secretary of State, Tony Blinken warned that ‘Hamas, or something just as abhorrent and dangerous, will grow back’ in Gaza without a ‘post-conflict plan and a credible political horizon for the Palestinians.’

When was there ever a ‘post-conflict plan’? Blinken accused Hamas of having ‘cynically weaponized the suffering of Palestinians’, but who inflicted that suffering? How did the ‘international community’ think that Gaza would be rebuilt, when virtually every institution that holds Gaza society together has been destroyed? What agency did it think it would take the place of UNRWA, which Israel has now banned from the Palestinian territories? What ‘political horizon’ did its members expect Palestinians to embrace, after Israel had killed their relatives and neighbours, and destroyed their schools, hospitals, homes, and mosques?

Yesterday, Trump told reporters once again that he was ‘committed to buying and owning Gaza’ and invited his audience to think of Gaza as a ‘big real estate site’ that the US was ‘going to own.’ Once again he promised that this ‘demolition site’ would be ‘reclaimed. It’ll be leveled out, and fixed up. There won’t be anybody there. Hamas won’t be there.’

According to US intelligence, Hamas has gained 10,000-15,000 fighters since the war - easily replenishing the fighters it lost during the conflict. Many of these ‘Iran-backed fighters’ as Reuters calls them, will be young men - and women - whose families and houses were annihilated. Many will be traumatized. All of them will know who killed their families, friends and neighbours - they don’t need to be ‘Iran-backed’ to know that. Israel, backed by the ‘international community’, has turned Gaza into a Stalingrad.

If Trump wants Hamas to disappear, then Israeli troops will have to fight for every inch of the rubble they have created, or use weapons that will make Gaz-a-Lago uninhabitable even for the property developers even as they set the Middle East on fire.

In his Dropsite News dispatch, Abubaker Abed wrote:

I am still in northern Gaza—sleeping inside the wreckage of one of my friends’ homes. The rain is torrential and threatens to waterlog us at any point. Israeli drones are buzzing overhead. The nightmare hasn’t ended. I am desperate for a cup of clean water here, for a plate of food. Donald Trump should know that these living conditions are better for me than living in a castle anywhere else in the world.

Neither the gilded ape who is promising to ‘buy’ Gaza, nor his sycophants and minions will ever understand the meaning behind these words. He has no understanding of the dreams and hopes of a brutalized people who the world has tried for more than a century to erase. Tragically, and unforgivably, many of the governments who do understand these dreams and hopes have no interest in realising them either.