Opinion: When a Real Estate Magnate Discovers Settler Colonialism
Trump’s Gaza vision is a developer’s land grab, backed by American military might and Israel’s scheming intelligence services
The figure of Donald Trump in January 2026 stands at the junction of two powerful traditions: American real estate capitalism and Western-backed settler colonialism. In Gaza, those traditions appear to have fused into a single project. The president is no longer merely a political actor managing alliances and conflicts. He increasingly resembles a colonial administrator in a business suit, treating devastated and occupied land as a distressed asset to be cleared, restructured and monetized.
The announcement of the so called “Board of Peace” for Gaza in mid January 2026 distilled this convergence with unusual clarity. The body is presented as a vehicle for reconstruction and peacebuilding, yet its composition reads more like a corporate board for a large development venture. Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law, is a central figure. His record on Gaza is well known. In 2024 he publicly described Gaza’s Mediterranean coastline as “very valuable” waterfront property and suggested that, from Israel’s perspective, the best course would be to move Palestinians out and then “clean it up.” That remark, widely criticised at the time, now reads like a mission statement.
Joining Kushner are figures such as Tony Blair, whose Middle East legacy is inseparable from the Iraq invasion and a post political career embedded in consultancy and advisory roles for powerful states and corporations. An Israeli real estate billionaire has been brought into the fold, alongside the president of the World Bank and a Trump aligned property magnate appointed as special envoy. Notably absent are any Palestinian representatives or human rights organizations. The people whose land is under discussion are kept outside the room while developers, financiers and political veterans shape their future.
This board did not emerge in a vacuum. Just days before its unveiling, the Trump family announced billions of dollars in new Saudi real estate and leisure projects, including Trump branded developments and golf courses anchored in long term partnerships with Saudi backed firms. The deals, worth up to ten billion dollars according to corporate and financial reports, anchor the Trump Organization more deeply into Gulf economic and political structures at the precise moment when Riyadh is being courted as a central funder of Gaza’s reconstruction.
The pattern is familiar to observers of Gulf American relations. Gulf monarchies understand that investment in American branded projects translates into access in Washington. With Trump back in the White House, the transaction is even more direct. The president’s family business negotiates mega projects with Saudi partners while American policy simultaneously positions Saudi Arabia as a central pillar of a new Gaza order, a state that will help pay the bills for reconstruction, purchase more U.S. arms and seek further nuclear and security cooperation.
At the core of the Gaza scheme lies a simple logic. Gaza is treated not as a political and human catastrophe requiring justice, but as prime coastal land inefficiently occupied by an unwanted population. The destruction wrought by years of blockade and repeated wars, culminating in the latest escalation, has left whole districts in ruins. The rubble is now folded into the development plan itself. Proposals circulating within the new framework describe using Gaza’s debris as landfill to create new artificial land in the Mediterranean, increasing the territory available for future development. The homes, schools and hospitals shattered in bombardments become foundation material for new real estate, new hotel sites, new waterfront strips.
Here, the language used by planners and advisers is revealing. Gaza is envisioned as a “Riviera of the Middle East,” a Mediterranean resort corridor lined with hotels, marinas and commercial districts. The image is seductive for investors: a Gaza stripped of its current residents and their political claims, transformed instead into a sanitized coastal zone. In this vision, Palestinians appear not as rights bearing inhabitants but as a demographic problem standing between investors and the sea.
Removing or reducing that population is therefore central to the plan. Policy documents and analyses surrounding the Trump initiative describe a system of incentives for “voluntary” relocation. Cash payments of several thousand dollars per person are floated as a way to induce permanent departure. Internal projections assume that roughly a quarter of Gaza’s population, around half a million people, could eventually be resettled abroad under such schemes. Potential host states mentioned in these discussions include Libya, Jordan and Egypt. The vocabulary is of voluntariness and opportunity, but the context is a population traumatised by war, impoverished by blockade and facing an international order that is offering money to leave and little prospect of enjoying equal rights if they stay.
Scholars of settler colonialism have been quick to identify the familiar patterns. Military force renders life untenable or reduces territory. International bodies then step in to manage reconstruction and transition. Economic incentives are used to dress displacement as choice. Legal frameworks cement new territorial arrangements and security regimes. The Trump plan for Gaza follows this script almost textbook style, with one key twist: the centrality of branded private real estate and the personal financial entanglements of the American president.
The proposed governance structure for post war Gaza is emblematic. A new trust vehicle, branded with an uplifting acronym and promoted as a mechanism for “reconstitution” and “economic acceleration,” would steer reconstruction funding and oversight. Administration would initially rest in American and Israeli hands, before transitioning to some form of international arrangement that nonetheless preserves Israeli “overarching security rights.” The phrase is deliberately vague, but the practical effect would be to formalize long term Israeli control over borders, airspace, and security operations, even under the cover of international governance.
To police this order on the ground, an International Stabilization Force is envisaged. Such a force would operate in close coordination with the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli intelligence. It would be mandated to secure reconstruction sites, manage movement and enforce whatever political arrangement emerges from Washington and its allies. Stabilization is the chosen term, but this would in effect be foreign military deployment over a shattered, heavily surveilled territory whose population has been partially dispersed and partially pacified.
The American military becomes, in this configuration, an extension of the real estate security apparatus. Its role is not solely to deter external threats or counter regional adversaries, but to guarantee that a particular redevelopment project in Gaza proceeds undisturbed. Israeli intelligence services, with their decades of experience monitoring and infiltrating Palestinian society, form the other arm of this apparatus, supplying granular control and targeting. Between them, they provide the shield behind which the Board of Peace and its associated investors can operate.
Trump’s personal and familial entanglement in this architecture strips away what remained of earlier diplomatic pretence. Previous administrations, even when enabling Israeli expansion and protecting Israel at the United Nations, maintained a rhetorical commitment to Palestinian statehood, opposed settlement construction on paper and paid homage to the notion of a fair mediated peace process. Under Trump, the veil has largely been removed. His administration openly privileges Israeli priorities, coordinates intensively with Israeli leaders and security services, and openly entertains ideas that earlier U.S. governments would have avoided stating publicly, such as population transfer masked as compensation based relocation.
The intellectual underpinning is clear in the public record. Kushner’s comments about Gaza’s waterfront made no attempt at diplomatic language. He framed the Strip in pure real estate terms, a parcel of valuable land whose current residents were an obstacle to be moved. Trump, in turn, has repeatedly invoked imagery of high end coastal resorts when describing what Gaza could become. At the same time, his organization signs agreements in Saudi Arabia worth billions, embedding his name and family brand across luxury developments in a kingdom seeking greater regional influence and American backing.
The Saudi component is central to the wider regional calculus. Riyadh’s investment in Trump branded projects is not merely commercial. It consolidates personal ties with the president, reinforces a shared interest in regional economic schemes and ensures the kingdom a seat near the head of any reconstruction table. The same Saudi leadership that seeks to position itself as a major underwriter of Gaza’s rebuilding also seeks advanced U.S. weaponry, a civilian nuclear program and continued tolerance of its internal repression. The interplay of these interests is hardly hidden. When Saudi money flows into American branded developments, it also circulates into the bloodstream of American politics and policy calculation.
Faced with these developments, Palestinians understand that the struggle is entering a new phase. For decades, the dominant struggle was against military occupation, settlement expansion and the erasure of political rights through legal and administrative mechanisms. That struggle has not disappeared. But it is now joined by a new front: the battle against being priced and planned out of existence by an alliance of developers, financiers, generals and intelligence chiefs.
The proposed cash payments for departure encapsulate this new phase. A price tag is effectively placed on the right of return and on residency itself. Take the money, leave, and lose any claim to the land. Stay, and face a future under a regime in which your community’s presence is tolerated only as long as it does not interfere with the larger project of turning Gaza into an internationally managed economic corridor under permanent security supervision.
Within this configuration, references to peace or prosperity bear the hollow ring of marketing slogans rather than genuine political commitments. Peace, in the language of the Board of Peace, does not mean a just settlement between two peoples on equal footing. It describes the pacification of a dispossessed population to a level compatible with investment. Prosperity refers not to the economic flourishing of Palestinians in control of their own territory, but to returns on capital for those backing the redevelopment.
Observers of Israeli politics recognise that the Trump approach aligns closely with the current priorities of the Israeli leadership. For Israel’s government, any arrangement that reduces the Palestinian population in Gaza, secures long term international acceptance of Israeli security dominion and allows cooperative development on the Strip’s coastline is highly attractive. The Trump administration offers precisely that: uncritical coordination, diplomatic shielding and the promise of U.S. leadership in institutionalising a new order in Gaza that cements Israeli strategic gains.
What emerges, then, is a modern face of colonialism. The repertoire is updated, the language polished, the mechanisms globalised. Yet the essentials remain familiar. A powerful state and its local ally use military means to create new realities on the ground. The indigenous population is fragmented, displaced, or subjected to management protocols. International institutions and foreign troops give the process an aura of legitimacy and order. Private capital moves in to transform the cleared land into profit generating assets. Throughout, the original injustice is reframed as a technical problem to be solved with smart policy, infrastructure and investment.
Trump sits at the center of this web as both head of state and ultimate brand ambassador. The skills honed over decades in property speculation, branding and deal making are now applied to territories under occupation. The presidency supplies tools no ordinary developer could dream of: control over the world’s most powerful military, command of intelligence networks, veto power in international forums and access to the public finances and diplomatic leverage of the United States.
The Gaza project, as currently framed, is thus more than a policy initiative. It is a template. It signals that in this era, occupied territories and war torn regions may be recast as development zones under the stewardship of political financiers, with the occupying power and its international partners turning wreckage into opportunity. It demonstrates that settler colonial logic has not disappeared; it has migrated into the language of trusts, boards and investment frameworks.
For Palestinians, that logic is not abstract. It means the possibility of being transported to a foreign country in exchange for a one time payment. It means seeing the remains of destroyed homes compressed into seawalls and artificial land for future marinas. It means growing up under the watch of foreign soldiers and intelligence agencies tasked not with defending their rights, but with safeguarding a redevelopment program that was designed without them and will be implemented over them.
For the wider region, it raises a question. If this template succeeds in Gaza, where might it be applied next.