“They Come by Helicopter”

I arrive on Sazan hours after Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump make their latest whistle-stop visit. “They came with a big military escort, and our boats had to keep away,” says Arben, a young local sitting on the island dock who makes a living running boat trips from nearby resort Vlorë. “They didn’t consult us, of course. One day our Prime Minister just came on TV and told us the island was sold.”

The island boasts a subtropical climate, crystal waters, a lush covering of ferns — and thousands of Cold War–era bunkers, dating from Enver Hoxha’s ultra-isolated Communist dictatorship. Today, much of the island remains off limits to the public and littered with unexploded ordinance, while a small navy gunship bobs in the port. The island remained in state hands until its 2024 sale to Kushner, with the Albanian government rapidly changing its laws to allow luxury developments even in protected areas. “If you are a ‘strategic investor’, you can break the law, because our government is nothing but a mafia,” says Kosta Xhaho, local officer for an environmental NGO, referring to this convenient loophole. Further sweetening the deal, Kushner’s Affinity Partners will pay no tax during construction, while the Albanian government will underwrite infrastructure costs.

The construction project also sprawls onto the mainland. At dawn, Xhaho and I drive from Vlorë into a neighboring nature reserve where the Vjosë, celebrated as Europe’s last truly “wild” river, disgorges into the Adriatic. The delta has a surreal beauty. Flamingos snooze in salt marshes as pelicans swoop overhead, while protected seals, jackals and turtles are also to be found in this rare undeveloped stretch of Adriatic coast. Xhaho clearly knows the reserve intimately — he points out precisely 281 flamingo eggs laid in a given stretch of the delta, alongside individuals personally known to him and engaged in small-scale building infractions.

But though the Vjosë became Europe’s first Wild River National Park as recently as 2023, Kushner’s parallel development here will wipe away flamingo eggs and beachfront shacks alike. Rooms for an estimated twenty to thirty thousand tourists will cover the lagoons, alongside a Monte Carlo-lite headland casino. Nearby, construction is nearing completion on what Rama claims will be the largest airport in the Balkans, processing seven hundred fifty thousand visitors annually and even boasting direct flights to the United States. Xhaho warns the incoming air traffic will disrupt the region’s rich bird life, but recognizes these complaints are unlikely to deter investors: “[Kushner and Trump] come by helicopter and leave again the same way, because they don’t want to fight with the ordinary people,” he says.

Tourism Boom, for Whom?

Tourism is understandably big business in post-Communist Albania, which attracted nearly twelve million visitors in 2024 — four times its domestic population. Diaspora investment has flowed back in, leaving the once-unspoiled Albanian Riviera swamped in half-finished hotel developments and privatized beach bars. There is certainly money to be made, though corruption and money laundering remain rampant and the cost of living is increasingly impossible. This situation leaves most locals reliant on some combination of remittances from relatives abroad and the tourist summer season. For Xhaho, “through the past ten years, Albania changed completely — but changed more in [terms of] concrete than in a positive way.”

Some locals will undoubtedly benefit from Kushner’s investment. Boat captain and tour guide Arbër, who says he has accompanied delegates from Kushner’s investment organization to Sazan, repeats the same claim, but in a positive light. “Compared to ten years ago, our country is already unrecognizable,” he says, sipping a coffee outside an island monastery within the proposed development zone. “Now [Rama] is taking it to the next level… This area was empty, so it’s good investment is coming here.”

The marshy villages within the Vjosë Delta, where chickens still run in the street even as the airport control tower rises overhead, are a world away from Kushner’s vision. Xhaho argues that the government deliberately targeted the area for development despite its formal protections, knowing poor, elderly locals would be unlikely to oppose the plan: “The government neglected these villages for years, with no electricity or water; and so locals sold off their land for €15 per square meter, while thinking they could set up car parks and so on. But now the land is closed off and they will have to leave.” One elderly shepherd in the neighboring village mistakenly believed he would be able to graze his herd on the airport runway, but is instead being driven away.

For his part, Xhaho says his NGO isn’t opposed to development and human presence within the delta per se: “My father was a fisherman here for 35 years, until it became a protected area — they protected it themselves, from fires and from soil erosion.” But he believes the new developments will be sealed-off package resorts, providing limited employment opportunities while driving up prices to ever more unaffordable levels and shortsightedly destroying the fragile natural resources that are the ultimate source of all the tourist interest.

Affinity — and Beyond

The Vjosë Delta’s sleepy villages and birding sites seem a world away from the horrors of the Gaza Strip. Yet this development too fits into Trump’s vision for the strategic eastern Mediterranean region, from Vlorë across hundreds of miles of ocean right down to Gaza City.

It was Kushner who first floated the unlikely idea of developing the “very valuable … waterfront property” of a duly ethnically-cleansed Gaza, following the deportation of its surviving inhabitants. Affinity Partners, which has received billions from the Saudis, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, and is already investing massively in the occupied West Bank, may thus treat Sazan as a dry run for its plans in a post-genocide, Israeli-administered Gaza. The Israeli press even briefly rumored that ten thousand Gazans would be relocated to Albania.

While Rama denied that rumor, he has steadily established his country as a crucial ally of Israel in the generally hostile Muslim world, rejecting the Hoxha regime’s Iran-style characterization of Israel as the “little Satan” while playing on Albania’s proud heritage of protecting Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. “Albania has traditionally been an unquestioning supporter of US foreign policy across different administrations,” says Alfred Bushi, an activist with Albania’s left-wing opposition Together Movement (Lëvizja Bashkë), pointing to the government’s refusal to vote for a Gaza ceasefire at the UN as a “stain of shame on the country.” As thanks for this steadfast support, Rama recently received Israel’s top civilian award. Albania’s chief Rabbi Yoel Kaplan is an IDF officer who has been seen leading troops in prayer, celebrating the destruction of Gaza.

Where other ports have refused to handle Israeli military hardware, the Albanian coast has remained open for business. This small country is the world’s fourth-largest provider of crucial fuel oil to Israel. The two countries have deepening cybersecurity and defense export ties. Projects like the Israeli embassy’s investment in a local kindergarten, or Israel Culture Week in Albanian capital Tirana, further serve to whitewash the Israeli genocide in Gaza. New direct flights between Tirana and Tel Aviv, plus two new museums celebrating Albania’s Jewish heritage, are predicted to further increase tourism links between the two countries. “When Israel is involved in a kindergarten, in a hospital, in defense and artificial intelligence projects, then this deeply concerns me, as an Albanian,” says local activist Fioralba Duma, who has campaigned against Israeli influence in Albania. “It’s a dangerous, whitewashing politics.”

The Cult Compound and the Pro-Israel Microstate

One particularly striking aspect of this cooperation is Rama’s offer of Albanian territory to serve as a Western staging post against Iran. For the past decade, Albania has hosted several thousand members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), a curious opposition faction which has spent decades in exile growing increasingly impotent, paranoid, and isolated from the realities of contemporary Iran. From 2013–2016, the United States transferred MEK members from one closed compound in Iraq to another on the Albanian coast, where they are sporadically visited by senior US security and political figures, including those around the Trump administration, who continue to groom the group for military action in Iran. (In 2022, Albania expelled the entire Iranian embassy after the latter allegedly launched multiple cyberattacks against the Balkan country.)

Not content with this remarkable gesture of goodwill, in 2024 Rama outdid himself by promising to establish an independent, pro-Israeli Muslim microstate. The ancient Bektashi Muslim religious order draws on both Sunni and Shia traditions, has millions of followers concentrated in Turkey, and is headquartered in Albania. Cajoled by the United States, Bektashi leaders have drifted away from a previous relationship with Tehran and ever closer to the Israeli sphere of influence. Mutual visits, exchanges of awards, Bektashi declarations of support for Israel, and talk of joint economic projects all followed, culminating as the Muslim group warmly welcomed Israeli President Isaac Herzog as their guest at the height of the genocide.

By way of reward, Rama unilaterally declared the unlikely creation of what would be the world’s smallest state, modeled after the Vatican City and physically located in the Bektashis’ Tirana headquarters. “State creation is very problematic in international law,” campaigner Duma says. “Just imagine — Israeli soldiers wanted for crimes of genocide could travel there and be safe from extradition.” Whatever the eventual outcome, Tel Aviv will continue to benefit, as Bektashi leaders doggedly refuse to condemn the Gaza genocide and make continued appearances alongside Kaplan, the Albanian rabbi and IDF cheerleader.

Sovereignty for Sale

Whether it’s the Bektashi state, the MEK compound, or Sazan Island, Albanian sovereignty and territory are up for grabs. Rama recently swept to his fourth successive electoral victory, shrugging off opposition accusations of electoral mismanagement, based on grand promises of European Union membership by 2030 and further integration with the West.

Practically speaking, this means fostering cozy relationships with Trump and Netanyahu, but also figures including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who has just brokered a controversial $653 million deal to set up offshore migrant detention centers on Albanian soil. Similar deals are underway throughout the Western Balkan region. Notably, Kushner’s Affinity Partners is simultaneously engaged in a no less controversial project to turn a site in downtown Belgrade, which currently incorporates a monument to victims of NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, into another $500 million luxury development.

Throughout the Balkans, the Western “integration” on offer constitutes a mesh of business interests linking regional strongmen with global right-populist leaders, as they profit from tax-free investment opportunities or buy up geopolitical influence on the cheap. For the United States and European powers, “what matters more than the existence of a democratic state governed by the rule of law is a submissive [Albanian] government willing to serve their political and economic interests,” says Bushi.

When Israeli president Herzog awarded Rama Israel’s top civilian award, he claimed that Rama’s unwavering support encapsulated the Albanian value of “besa” — a code of honor emphasizing loyalty and hospitality to strangers. Neither spared a thought for the Palestinians being driven from their homes at that very moment.