Photograph Source: Raul Jusinto – CC BY-SA 2.0
Donald Trump spoke to reporters for over three hours on Air Force One on his way to see the Super Bowl in New Orleans on 9 February 2025. It was not clear to the reporters who broadcast his comments whether Trump was speaking as the President of the United States, a member of the United Nations, or as a real estate magnate. Gaza, he said, is a “demolition site” that needed to be “leveled out” and “fixed up”. Since Gaza is on the Mediterranean Sea, Trump said, it could be developed into a new French Riviera. According to him, it is not the crime scene of a genocide but “a big real estate site”. The United States, he said with his presidential smile on, “will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too”.
Palestinians from Gaza listening to this commentary could have imagined that the United States would be funding the reconstruction of Gaza, which has been estimated by the United Nations to be – at a minimum – $53 billion (the cost after the 2014 pulverization of Gaza by Israel was $2.4 billion). In 2023, total US Overseas Development Aid was $66 billion, and, with the cuts proclaimed by President Trump, it is unlikely that the US can muster anything near the bill for the reconstruction of Gaza. There was nothing humanitarian in Trump’s comments about the making of the Gaza Riviera (or since this appears to be a gift to Israel, it is more likely that Trump imagines it to be the Azzah Riviera, using the Zionist name for Gaza, meaning “strong city”). The Israeli establishment has, from the start of this genocidal campaign, said that it wants to annex Gaza, which seems to be aligned with the Trump vision to make Gaza American or to develop Gaza as a beachside resort for U.S. tourists and Israeli settlers. Knowing Trump, he will likely want to reserve a section of the beachfront for himself and to build a Trump International Hotel and Tower that has a casino attached to it for good measure.
Zionist Gentrification
None of this is a surprise and nor are these ideas original to Trump. The entire Zionist project imagines an Eretz Israel that stretches from the borders with Egypt to that of Iran. The real estate deed for this is a line in the Bible, “To your descendants, I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river the Euphrates” (Genesis 15:18). It is not clear which river in Egypt this line refers to, whether the Nile or Wadi el-Arish (in the Sinai Peninsula). But if the Euphrates is taken as its border, then the land that Zionists claim includes the entire West Bank and Jerusalem, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and the western half of Iraq. There are maps of this kind that can be seen in the offices of far-right Israeli politicians (on 19 March, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich spoke in Paris from a podium that displayed an Israeli map that included Jordan). This is utterly normal in the world of the illegal settlements in the West Bank (part of the UN-mandated Occupied Palestine Territory), which the settlers call Judea and Samaria. Their geography has been different since at least when their spiritual guide Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote in The Iron Wall(1923) that Zionists must build Eretz Israel behind an “iron wall, which is to say a strong power in Palestine that is not amenable to any Arab pressure”.
Trump is not much of a reader. He probably has never heard of Jabotinsky or of Theodor Herzl. He probably cannot define Zionism. But he knows a real estate opportunity when he sees one, and that is how he has understood his solution to the problems facing Israel. In his first term, Trump made the “deal of the century”, the Abraham Accords, which brought a series of states to normalize relations with Israel: Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (September 2020), Sudan (October 2020), and Morocco (December 2020). With Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) having already made peace deals with Israel, the map had begun to shift away from the Palestinians and toward the Israelis. The new governments in Lebanon and Syria are not far from making their own separate agreements, and Saudi Arabia has already said that it would normalize with Tel Aviv. Trump is a “bazaari” (marketplace) politician, one who tosses outlandish agreements in the air (for Morocco, the acceptance of its illegal occupation of Western Sahara) in utter disregard for international law. He is now doing the same with Gaza.
“I think that it’s a big mistake to allow people – the Palestinians, or the people living in Gaza – to go back yet another time”, he said on Air Force One. “We don’t want Hamas going back”, Trump said. “The United States is going to own it”. It did not take long for all the UN Special Rapporteurs to sign a strong letter condemning Trump’s comments. They made the correct argument that his idea, if implemented, is a war crime. Trump does not understand international law. He thinks like a gentrifier. This is what he has been doing across the United States: evicting ordinary people and building hideous buildings as a monument to the fabulous wealth of the few. Trump, like the illegal settlers, conducts Zionist gentrification.
Silence
Marwan Bardawil is an engineer with the Palestinian Water Authority. At a little-noticed press conference in Ramallah, Palestine, Bardawil said that 85% of the water and sewage facilities in the Gaza Strip were destroyed by the Israeli genocide. It will cost $1 billion to repair and replace the water and sewage facilities in Gaza. Polio, which was eradicated in Gaza a quarter of a century ago, has returned because of the collapse of the water system.
The Palestinians are being silenced as the debate around Gaza unfolds. If they want a Trump International Hotel and Tower, that is up to them, not up to Trump or Netanyahu. But they are not clamouring for a golden tower. What they want are their homes. And their universities. And their hospitals. And the photographs of their family members who are now all dead.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
