President Donald Trump’s plan for the US to take over the Gaza Strip and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” was so stunning that analysts and diplomats have speculated he was making up much of it as he went along.
When examined closer, it is clear that one of Trump’s closest family members has been discussing something similar for at least a year – and he has the funds and political connections to make it a reality.
“Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable,” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and former Middle East advisor, said in February 2024.
“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” he added.
Kushner was speaking as Israel was weighing an invasion of Rafah, Gaza’s southern border town. He said that Palestinians could be forcibly displaced to the Negev desert in Israel or Egypt. When pressed, he said they would be allowed to return to Gaza.
However, it is no small matter that international law dictates those territorial rights, and the US does not control the property rights for Gaza’s waterfront or its maritime boundaries.
Trump originally said that a US-controlled Gaza Strip would be inhabited by the “world’s people” and that there would be no reason for Palestinians to return. His advisors walked that claim back.
But Kushner’s words matter. He is not just an in-law or even a former White House advisor. After Trump’s first term in office ended, Kushner launched a private equity fund, Affinity Partners.
The fund almost seems tailor-made for Trump’s vision of building a luxury city in Gaza.
Affinity Partners: From Albania to Israel
Kushner got into his Jewish-American family’s real estate business by investing in Boston as a student at Harvard University. Then, he went into the world of New York City real estate. His father, Charles Kushner, was nominated by Trump as the US ambassador to France.
Kushner’s more recent interest in real estate blends a taste for exotic properties, adventure and geopolitics.
He plans to build a $1.4bn luxury resort on Sazan, Albania’s only island in the Mediterranean and a former military base. His fund has already broken ground on converting the old Yugoslav Ministry of Defence building in Belgrade, Serbia, into a posh hotel and luxury complex.
The ghosts of the 1990s Balkan wars are distant, while the Israel-Palestine conflict still rages. But Kushner created his fund to foster deeper economic ties between Arab countries and Israel.
He was one of the main architects of Trump’s Abraham Accords, and he formed an especially close friendship with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Kushner floated a plan dubbed “The Deal of the Century”, which called for Israel to annex 30 percent of the West Bank and a Palestinian pseudo-state to be created with no military. The plan tried to entice the Palestinian Authority by offering $50bn in economic aid. It was rejected.
Saudi Arabia is Affinity Partners’ main backer, with its sovereign wealth fund giving Kushner $2bn dollars. As of December last year, the UAE and Qatar have also contributed a combined $1.5bn to the fund.
With the Gulf money, Affinity Partners has invested in two Israeli companies: Phoenix Holdings, an insurance company, and the car leasing division of Shlomo Holdings, whose parent company, Shmeltzer Holdings, is part owner of Israel Shipyards, the only domestic shipbuilder for the Israeli navy.
‘Salivating to get in’
In an August 2024 podcast, Joseph Pelzman, a little-known professor of economics at George Washington University, said that Kushner “wants to put money in it” and his investors are “salivating to get in”, referring to Gaza.
Pelzman penned a paper on reconstructing postwar Gaza that fit almost word for word with what Trump called for.
The Israeli-American professor said his proposal calling for Palestinians to be displaced and international investors to build luxury resorts “went to the Trump people because they were the ones who initially had an interest in it”.
“The place to start is to dig up the entire place. Then you have to figure out what to do with the local population, you gotta move them around. Everything’s gotta go…nothing vertical stands,” Pelzman said in a podcast called “America, Baby”, hosted by Israeli professor Kobby Barda
“The United States can lean on Egypt,” he said. “Egypt is a bankrupt state. We know that they are broke, really broke”.
Abraham Accords 2.0
Trump’s plan was immediately shot down by Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia, whose money Trump says the US would use to reconstruct the Gaza Strip. His call for the US to become directly engaged in the Gaza Strip had also irked some of his domestic base opposed to foreign intervention.
But on Thursday, Trump doubled down, only clarifying that his call for a “long-term ownership position” in the war-ravaged enclave would require no US troops on the ground. He said the transfer would come after Israel was done fighting and once the Palestinians were gone.
Middle East Eye reported on Wednesday that Trump intends to apply pressure on Gulf states to bankroll the US’s takeover of Gaza.
In exchange for funding the forced displacement of Palestinians and Gaza’s reconstruction, Trump intends to offer Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE waterfront property rights.
In a sense, Trump is taking a page from the Gulf states who he wants to fund the project, who are Kushner’s investors.
The idea to obtain development rights from Mediterranean real estate in return for some kind of investment is what the UAE has done on Egypt’s coast by paying $35bn to develop Ras el-Hekma on Egypt’s northwestern coast.
“Trump is going back to the economic development model while taking the Palestinian political grievances away. That’s what proved insufficient about the Abraham Accords; the Palestinians were on the sidelines,” Marwa Maziad, a professor at the Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland, told MEE.
“The problem is that Netanyahu still thinks he can cut out the Palestinians. That is what is unacceptable to regional players like Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Arab Gulf states. “
