After Donald Trump had finished talking about his concept for Gaza at the White House on Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu looked delighted. Trump was willing to “think outside the box with fresh ideas”, he said. “You see things others refuse to see. You say things others refuse to say.”
But while American control of Gaza would be unprecedented, Trump’s proposals are, in other ways, extremely conventional – above all in the attempt to use construction to reshape political reality. “There are many examples of this thinking both in Gaza and beyond it,” Eyal Weizman said. “Trump is not only thinking well within the box on Israel’s policy in relation to refugees in Gaza – but also within the box of settler colonial practices.”
His intervention should also be understood in the context of the growing consensus that a genocide is underway in Gaza, Weizman said. “There’s a clause in the genocide convention that is particularly architectural: ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’. Violence is applied to the environment because the environment is what maintains life - and so the killing is indirect. To simply erase Gaza and turn it into a riviera is a way to continue the work of destruction by construction, instead.”
The historical precedents
One of the weirdest features of Trump’s second term has been his embrace of a series of eccentric causes that have a distinctly colonial and expansionist flavour. From his threat to cut funding to South Africa over Elon Musk’s claims that white farmers there are the victims of “openly racist ownership laws” to Canada, Greenland and the Panama canal, “these are the type of politics you’d expect of the British empire in the 19th century,” Weizman said.
You can see similar precedents to the Gaza plan. In Kenya during the 1920s, the British colonial administration demolished “African villages” in and around Nairobi as part of an effort to segregate the city on racial lines, and only allowed locals to live there as registered labourers in low-quality public housing. In Algiers in the 1840s, the French army was only able to subjugate guerrilla resistance by razing entire neighbourhoods, organising the city around new roads and markets instead.
“There is a long historical relationship between counterinsurgency and architecture,” Weizman said. “It rests on the idea that architecture can ‘solve’ a political problem and change one’s identity.”
In Gaza, the very fact that so much of the territory is given over to refugee camps is often considered to be the source of the problem. “The refugee camp is viewed not only as the location of the insurgency, but the condition that breeds it,” Weizman said. “A camp is conceived as temporary – it is not a city. It holds within it the idea that someone there is a refugee, who has a right of return. And so the thinking is to turn someone who is a refugee into an urban dweller.”
Versions of that idea in Gaza can be dated back to the 1950s and a plan to resettle tens of thousands of Palestinians to the Sinai desert. “There were grandiose designs of a water canal from the Nile to northern Sinai with a string of villages and towns along it where Palestinians would live,” Weizman said. “But the Palestinians understood that if they left Palestine to go there they could forget about right of return.” The resulting uprising put an end to the project.
The vision of the future
Hong Kong. Singapore. Monaco. Dubai. Even NEOM, the $1.5tn city that Saudi Arabia is attempting to build from scratch on the Red Sea. At some point or other, all of these places have been floated as models for what Gaza should look like.
Trump’s idea that Gaza should be reconfigured as the “riviera of the Middle East” goes a step further. It even exceeds the proposal from his son-in-law Jared Kushner – who said last year that Israel should “clean up” the strip because “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable”, but stopped short of saying that residents should be permanently resettled elsewhere. But Trump’s theory also makes literal something that is implicit in all of these proposals: that Gaza should be deracinated, and modelled on one of those strange 21st-century places that seem untethered from their physical location.
This kind of thinking is part of the “colonial imaginary”, Weizman said – the fantasies and narratives that occupying forces project onto others to justify their control. “They are all enclaves,” he said. “These are places which are jurisdictional or legal islands, places where you can believe you can ignite an economy through suspension of regulations. And, of course, Gaza’s weather and environment is not unlike Florida’s, and Trump’s imagination is also that of a real estate person.” His Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, is also a real estate developer.
Dubai and the French Riviera have something else in common, too: they are better known for who goes there than who’s from there. As Trump said at a press conference: there will be jobs “not for a specific group of people, but for everybody”.
In his description of Gaza as “the site” and promise to “get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out”, he also conjured a vision of a blank canvas – a “demolition site” without specific history or significance.
“We tend to think about Gaza as a concentration area for refugees or as an open-air prison,” Weizman said. “But as my friend the Palestinian filmmaker Basma al-Sarif never tires of reminding me, it is also a place. It is a city along one of the most ancient coastal routes in human culture. The Romans called it the Via Maris, connecting the kingdom of the Euphrates with the kingdom of the Nile. If you dig a few metres under the ground, you find the evidence of thousands of years of continuous habitation.”
The practical reality
Trump gave no specifics of how his idea might become a reality, but if he was trying to do so, he would have to solve a litany of apparently intractable problems: universal regional condemnation outside of Israel; the likelihood that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza would resist; the domestic political difficulty of putting American boots on the ground; and a financial burden that Andrew Miller of the Center for American Progress said would “make the $40bn foreign assistance budget that Trump and Elon Musk call a waste look like a rounding error”.
Even if all of those geopolitical problems were somehow resolved, there is the question of the project itself. Even finding the architects would be a vexed process, Weizman said. “The moral nadir of architecture is when design is no longer seen as something to serve people who live in a place on their own terms,” he said. “There is an instinct to go after a project, no matter its origin. I really hope my colleagues would not jump on this.”
None of this is to say that there is a neatly packaged alternative vision for Gaza. “Any plan for the future has to come from Palestinians themselves,” Weizman said. But quite apart from the monumental scale of the task, “there is a dilemma in the fact that two-thirds or more of the people in Gaza are refugees: they’re there because this is where they or their ancestors were expelled to, not where they want to stay. So there is always a need to negotiate between the political right and the humanitarian need.”
