Jared Kushner’s reference to Gaza’s “waterfront potential” was therefore not a proposal seeking immediate approval. It was a signal—an early articulation of intent. Such ideas are rarely launched when conditions are hostile; they are stored, normalised quietly, and reintroduced when the political climate permits. What cannot be sold today is simply deferred until tomorrow, wrapped in the language of reconstruction, opportunity, and inevitability.
To speak of a Riviera in Gaza while the territory is being starved, bombed, and emptied of life is not merely tone-deaf. It is ideological clarity. It reveals how colonial logic survives in contemporary language – no longer expressed through racial superiority, but through the abstractions of real estate, security, and post-conflict redevelopment. Gaza, in this imagination, is not a homeland. It is a location with unrealised value. Intruders with no groundedness in the cultural and special can never assimilate this sense of belonging and identification with land. Much as it is for tribes, so too original inhabitants hold land as a living entity, central to their existence, identity, culture, and social structure, rather than a mere economic commodity. Gaza has a profound spiritual and emotional connection to their ancestral lands, which they view as a sacred, ancestral gift to be protected and passed down to future generations.
Kushner is not even remotely fluent in this idiom. His politics have always borrowed the vocabulary of commerce to mask the exercise of power. Conflict becomes inefficiency, occupation becomes “complexity,” and mass displacement becomes a regrettable but manageable externality. Palestinians are not erased outright; they are quietly written out of relevance, reduced to a demographic inconvenience in someone else’s investment horizon. That this worldview comes from a man with no political or diplomatic experience, unread in history or international law, holding no constitutional authority and elevated solely by virtue of being the President’s son-in-law, makes its influence not just alarming but grotesque.
This is not new. Colonial history is filled with moments where destruction precedes rebranding. Cities flattened by empire are later marketed as opportunities for renewal, provided the original inhabitants are removed, managed, or forgotten. Kushner’s remark belongs squarely in this lineage. What distinguishes it is not cruelty but counterfeit self-assurance – the assumption that Palestinian presence is temporary, negotiable, and ultimately dispensable.
“Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip; it turns to the past of the oppressed and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it.”
(Frantz Fanon, was a political radical, and Pan-Africanist, concerned with the psychopathology of colonization.)
That confidence was cultivated through policy. The Abraham Accords, celebrated as diplomatic breakthroughs, were less about peace than about rearrangement. They normalised Israel’s regional standing while severing it from any obligation to resolve the Palestinian question. Palestinians were excluded not by oversight but by design.
By redefining peace as an elite transaction, the Accords bypassed public consent and moral reckoning. Arab regimes were encouraged to trade solidarity for surveillance systems, arms deals, and geopolitical favour. Justice was reframed as an obstacle to progress. Historical responsibility dissolved into pragmatism.
Kushner played the role of facilitator perfectly—never demanding rights, never invoking law, always smoothing the terrain for acceptance without accountability. It was diplomacy stripped of conscience, conducted as a series of transactions in which the most vulnerable party was not invited to the table.
This fragmentation of Arab consensus did not yield stability. It yielded impunity. Israel emerged freer to escalate, Gaza more exposed to erasure. What we witness today is not the collapse of this model, but its consummation. When occupation is normalised, violence intensifies. When apartheid is rewarded, it hardens.
The current war did not begin on 7 October 2023. It is the culmination of a siege that has lasted over sixteen years, and before that, a dispossession that began in 1948. Since 2007, Gaza has been subjected to near-total control of its borders, airspace, coastline, population registry, electricity, water, fuel, and imports. Calories were counted, movement reduced to permits, survival outsourced to humanitarian exemptions. Gaza was turned into a laboratory of managed deprivation.
Repeated assaults—in 2008–09, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now—ensured that destruction outpaced reconstruction. Each cycle reinforced dependency. What distinguishes the present moment is intent. The language has shifted from deterrence to elimination, from containment to erasure. Hospitals have become battlefields, aid convoys targets, starvation policy. International law has not merely been violated; it has been treated as an inconvenience.
And yet, while Gaza persists, the echo of the words of the Late poet Mahmoud Darwish ring: “We suffer from an incurable illness: hope.”
This persistence is what the Riviera fantasy cannot comprehend. Gaza is not merely rubble; it is continuity. It is families rebuilding homes they know may fall again. It is doctors operating without anaesthesia, journalists reporting while burying their own children, teachers holding classes in tents amid ruins. Survival itself becomes an act of refusal.
Resilience here is not romantic. It is costly, exhausting, and soaked in grief. But it is also political. Each act of endurance contradicts the colonial assumption that destruction clears the way for reinvention by others. The people remain, and in remaining they rupture the fantasy that land can be detached from those who belong to it.
The endurance of this fantasy in Western capitals requires confronting Europe’s unresolved history. Antisemitism was not born in the Arab world. It was cultivated, institutionalised, and industrialised in Europe. Yet Europe displaced its guilt, transforming Zionism into redemption while transferring the cost to Palestinians.
This displacement continues today through political brokerage. European leadership—particularly under Ursula von der Leyen—has offered Israel moral cover while emptying international law of meaning. Alignment has replaced principle. Power has replaced accountability.
What unites Kushner’s Riviera illusion and Europe’s diplomatic posture is a shared logic: legitimacy can be manufactured after the fact. First comes force, then normalisation, then redevelopment. Violence clears the terrain; diplomacy sanitises it; capital consolidates the outcome. The original inhabitants, if they survive, are rendered marginal to their own land.
This is why the Riviera will never rise in Gaza.
Not because capital is insufficient or security arrangements incomplete, but because the foundations required for such a fantasy do not exist. You cannot build leisure atop mass graves. You cannot sell sunsets over ruins that still scream. And you cannot erase a people simply by imagining their absence profitable.
Kushner’s vision will collapse under its own emptiness. It mistakes exhaustion for surrender and devastation for consent. It confuses money with permanence. No amount of investment can launder genocide into development, and no rebranding can convert ethnic cleansing into opportunity.
Gaza remains – without marinas, without luxury hotels, without the vulgar promise of a Riviera—but with something far more durable: a people rooted in their land, armed with memory, and unwilling to trade existence for someone else’s fantasy.
Empires do not fall when they lack power. They fall when they believe that that very power is not enough to sustain their reign.
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