The Neom Model

As Alberto Toscano has written, Gaza is being reimagined 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.” The reference to the miracle cities of the Middle East is often explicit in plans for Gaza’s future, with Neom, the planned city being constructed at enormous cost on the northwestern coast of Saudi Arabia, serving as a frequent point of reference.

The region where Neom is being built has been described as a “blank canvas” by bin Salman, much in the way the architects of Trump’s plan appear to be conceiving of Gaza. Neom, too, has been imagined as a gleaming new regional hub for industry, trade, and pleasure, complete with a ski resort and a soccer stadium suspended above the ground. But the region is not a blank canvas at all. The government has already destroyed multiple villages in the process of clearing land for construction, Last year, it authorized the use of lethal force against villagers to facilitate the ongoing and potentially doomed construction of the Line — a 110-mile-long, glass-encased smart city that was initially supposed to be able to accommodate a quarter of the total population of the country.

The Neom project is notable not just for its dizzying ambition — a floating industrial city! a luxury island resort! an “ultra-luxury upside-down skyscraper”! — but for how it incorporates the same logic animating the plans for Gaza: that the land is a blank slate waiting to be transformed, not in the name of nation-building but in the name of creating special economic zones that can only be accessed by the wealthy and function, Quinn Slobodian has suggested, like the “cruise ship or the theme park.”

We have already seen versions of this vision enacted in places like Dubai. Though Palestine is often used as a laboratory for the future, the Trump plan for Gaza is not so much a preview of the future to come but a gruesome extension of a future that has already arrived — not only in the Gulf but also in Central American countries like El Salvador and Honduras.

Religious Zionism Meets Global Capital

The GREAT Trust plan was predictably excoriated by Palestinians and much of the rest of the international community, but in Israel it proved quite popular with key players in the Netanyahu government. In September, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich suggested at a real estate conference in Tel Aviv that the cost of the assault on Gaza would ultimately pay for itself. “The demolition, the first stage in the city’s renewal, we have already done,” Smotrich said. “Now we need to build.”

Smotrich is far from the only leading figure to back the spirit, if not the exact letter, of Trump’s Gaza Riviera plan. Over the summer, Smotrich spoke at a Knesset conference titled “The Gaza Riviera — from Vision to Reality” to a crowd that reportedly included other government ministers, members of the Knesset, security personnel, relatives of the hostages, and a variety of other researchers and activists like the notorious “godmother” of the Israeli settler movement, Daniella Weiss. Smotrich assured his audience that Trump supported the effort “to turn Gaza into a prosperous strip, a resort town with employment.” That, he said, is “how you make peace.”

The fact that Smotrich and members of his far-right Religious Zionist coalition party support the resettlement and annexation of Gaza in the aftermath of the war is not surprising; territorial expansion has long been a primary objective of the religious Zionist movement, and Smotrich himself was arrested for plotting to bomb an Israeli highway in protest of Israel’s withdrawal of settlers from Gaza in 2005. Smotrich grew up in the Beit El settlement in the West Bank; his father is Rabbi Chaim Smotrich, who similarly protested the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza two decades ago and has remained a highly visible figure in religious Zionist politics as dean of a yeshiva in the settlement of Kiryat Arba outside Hebron.

What is notable is the enthusiasm Smotrich and his allies have shown for the project of reconceiving Gaza in precisely the way Trump does: as an opportunity for capital extraction and accumulation. It is almost as if Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the similarly extreme minister of national security, understand that this is a particularly effective framework for rallying the international support they need to complete the resettlement and annexation. This notion did not begin with Trump’s intervention: last year, prior to Trump’s reelection, Netanyahu promoted a plan that similarly proposed rebuilding Gaza “from nothing” into a prosperous free-trade zone that could serve as a hub for the wider region.

The plans have more in common than their shared desire to turn Gaza into a techno-futurist hub for extraction and free trade. PowerPoint presentations detailing the particulars of the plans feature the exact same AI-generated image of a rebuilt Gaza gleaming with angular glass skyscrapers, extensive rail lines, bright green fields, and a fleet of oil rigs idling just off the Mediterranean shoreline. There is nothing identifiably Palestinian in the image; this transformed Gaza could be anywhere with a coastline and a suitable development policy.

Netanyahu’s “Gaza 2035” proposal had several notable elements. One was its focus on oil extraction, as evidenced by the ominous presence of the rigs on the Mediterranean. The United Nations has estimated that there are 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil sitting in the Mediterranean’s Levant Basin, along with 122 trillion cubic feet of gas. Another was its reference to Neom, which would be connected to Gaza by high-speed rail. The plan, Shane Reiner-Roth has argued, “demonstrates how unbounded the settler colonial imagination is when the subject of containment is perceived as a thing of the past.”

Plans of this nature abound. Last April, the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman put forward his own proposal — featuring a global competition among architects, planners, and “technologists” vying for the right “to build a new city from a blank sheet of paper” that would be governed by the United States and a consortium of allies from the Gulf. In the Ackman fantasy, Gaza becomes not only habitable, but a “model city.” There is no question of self-determination for the Palestinian residents of Gaza, and certainly not of Palestinian statehood. That is similarly the case in plans released by the RAND Corporation and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America: Gaza can and will be resurrected, but only as a sanitized conduit for capital and a playground for the global elite.

Blair and the Billionaires

Trump has since backed away from the Gaza Riviera plan, and his twenty-point peace plan makes no mention of beach clubs or Haussmannian redesigns of Gaza City. It is rhetorically mellower, if no less ominous — not least because it garnered the support of the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and the major Gulf states. It remains to be seen whether the latter points of the twenty-point plan will ever become operative; Israel has reportedly already violated the terms of the cease-fire nearly three hundred times, and Palestinians are well aware that the latter stages of peace plans often never see the light of day. There is already evidence that the United States has no intention of adhering to the terms of the twenty-point plan.

Nevertheless, the Trump plan, in theory, calls for a “de-radicalized” Gaza to be transformed into a “special economic zone” with “preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.” This special economic zone will be governed for an interim period by a “technocratic, apolitical” Palestinian body overseen by an international committee chaired by Trump himself.

The committee will also include former UK prime minister Tony Blair. The oversight body would “set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza” until such time as the Palestinian Authority was deemed fit to take control, governing in a manner that is “conducive to attracting investment.” This vision of Gaza does not explicitly endorse further ethnic cleansing, but, as Oliver Eagleton has argued, it still resembles a “colonial protectorate.”

Blair’s involvement in the project is not limited to some future horizon. The former Labour leader’s London-based think tank reportedly consulted on Trump’s initial Gaza Riviera plan, and Blair reportedly helped draw up the twenty-point plan at a White House meeting with Trump, Middle East advisor Jared Kushner, and Israeli minister of strategic affairs Ron Dermer in late August.

Another plan, discussed prior to the announcement of the cease-fire agreement, was for Blair to run a transitional authority for Gaza for a three-year period with a board composed largely of billionaires like Wall Street financier Marc Rowan and Egyptian tycoon Naguib Sawiris.

Blair’s presence, his public service record notwithstanding, may have something to do with who his friends are. Since 2021, Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison — a longtime backer of the Israel Defense Forces — has donated or pledged to donate in excess of $300 million to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain have contracted the Blair Institute for work as well, and Blair, in his previous service in the region, has always been a devoted advocate for opening Palestinian land up to foreign investment.

The medley of plans for Gaza’s reinvention appear farcical in their ambition, but there is no reason to believe that some version of some combination of them won’t be executed. The world that was unable or unwilling to stop the genocide in Gaza until this fall may not have any greater success stopping the next phase of the erasure of the people of Gaza and the theft of their homes, natural resources, and rights.

This is, of course, not necessarily incompatible — at least in the short term — with the goals of the Israeli far right. And so we arrive at a moment when the religious Zionist movement, seeking the expropriation of Palestinian land on Jewish supremacist grounds, finds common cause with a global right-wing power structure seeking to create frictionless, authoritarian, supranational spaces for capital extraction and exchange.

This alliance suggests that, despite all that was exceptional about the circumstances of Israel’s creation, the state must be primarily understood as an in-progress settler-colonial project that is now part of a network of states and business interests attempting to remake the world for its enrichment. Gaza, agonizingly, remains in its crosshairs.