By James Mackenzie
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision of a Gaza Strip cleared of its Palestinian inhabitants and redeveloped into an international beach resort under U.S. control has revived an idea floated by his son-in-law Jared Kushner a year ago.
The idea, outlined by Trump in a press conference on Tuesday, has drawn shocked reactions from both Palestinians and Western critics who say it would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing and illegal under international law.
But it was not the first time Trump has spoken of Gaza in terms of real estate investment opportunities. In October last year, he told a radio interviewer Gaza could be “better than Monaco” if rebuilt in the right way.
The idea of a radical redevelopment of Gaza was aired soon after Israel began its campaign in the narrow coastal enclave following the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, most prominently by Kushner, who as special Middle East envoy in Trump’s first term helped drive the “Abraham Accords” normalizing relations between Israel and a number of Arab countries.
“Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable, if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner, who once described the entire Arab-Israeli conflict as “nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians” said at an event in Harvard 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 said. Kushner was himself a property developer in New York prior to Trump’s first term.
A spokesperson for Kushner did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.
There were also doubts about how literally Trump’s proposal should be understood, given his reputation as a freewheeling dealmaker used to unsettling his negotiating partners with attacks from unexpected angles.
Saudi Arabia, the predominant power in the Arab world, “will not take this statement very seriously,” a source close to the royal court in Riyadh said. “It has not been thought through and is impossible to implement, so he will eventually realize that.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry said the kingdom rejected any attempt to displace the Palestinians from their land. Both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas also condemned the remarks.
Reuters could not establish whether Kushner, whose private equity firm has taken investments from Gulf countries including $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, has engaged in any discussions in the region about Gaza investment.
For Palestinians, however improbable the idea of Gaza as a waterfront resort may sound, such talk recalls the “Nakba” or catastrophe after the 1948 war at the start of the state of Israel, when 700,000 fled or were forced from their homes.
Early on in the war, internet memes showing mocked-up images of beachside condominiums along the Gaza shoreline were widely shared on social media, often by pro-Israel posters looking to mock Palestinians in Gaza, where health officials say 47,000 people have died during Israel’s retaliation for the Oct. 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people, according to Israeli tallies.
Israeli politicians have often reproached Palestinian leaders for focusing on fighting Israel rather than developing a new Dubai or Singapore in areas like Gaza, which for the past two decades has been under blockade that severely limits access to finance and basic materials.
In former years, the coastal enclave was a popular destination for Israeli tourists and even after the takeover by the Islamist movement Hamas in 2007, there was a laidback scene of smart beachside restaurants and cafes along the seafront.
But the practicalities of realizing Trump’s vision of creating “The Riviera of the Middle East” in Gaza, where the Islamist movement Hamas is still firmly in control and where there has been a furious reaction to his comments, remain unexplained.
Land ownership in Gaza is covered by complex mix of regulations and customs drawn from Ottoman, British mandate and Jordanian laws as well as clan practices, with land title sometimes backed by documents from previous legal regimes. There are currently heavy restrictions on foreigners buying land.
For the moment, after 15 months of bombardment, Gaza is a “demolition site” in Trump’s words, that will require 10-15 years of reconstruction, according to his special Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, himself a former real-estate developer who last week became the most senior U.S. official to step foot in the enclave since the war began.
Estimates of the cost of reconstruction go as high as $100 billion.
However, Gulf countries, a potential source of investment in rebuilding Gaza, have strongly rejected offering any finance while a pathway to an independent Palestinian state remains closed.
For other potential investors, the uncertainties appear to outweigh any potential benefits, at least for the moment, according to analysts contacted by Reuters. Many of Israel’s largest construction companies and the builders association declined to comment.
“Large-scale redevelopment in post-conflict areas generally requires significant investment, stability, and long-term planning, but beyond that, it’s impossible to assess anything concrete right now,” said Raz Domb, an analyst at Leader Capital Markets in Tel Aviv, an investment bank.
SETTLEMENTS
One group which has reacted with enthusiasm is Israel’s settler movement, which has long dreamed of returning to settlements in Gaza that were abandoned 20 years ago under former Israeli prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Trump’s own administration contains a number of officials close to the settler movement and although Trump said he did not see Jewish settlements being rebuilt in Gaza, his comments were seized on immediately.
Settler groups say their interest in returning to Gaza is motivated by the Biblical connections they feel with the land but, for the moment at least, such considerations were secondary to the prospect of moving out Palestinians.
Last year the Nachala Movement, which promotes Jewish settlement in the West Bank, helped organize a conference at the edge of the Gaza Strip called “Preparing to Resettle Gaza”, where politicians in Netanyahu’s Likud party and others discussed plans to “encourage emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza and rebuild the settlements.
“Assuming Trump’s comments about transferring Gazans to other countries are translated into practice, we must hurry and establish settlements throughout the Gaza Strip,” the group said on the social media platform X.
“No part of the land of Israel should be left without Jewish settlement.”
(Additional reporting by Steve Scheer in Jerusalem, Maha El Dahan in Dubai and Pesha Magid in Riyadh; Additional reporting by Aram Roston)
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