By any measure, Gaza’s devastation calls for pressing and critical reconstruction. Properties, hospitals, colleges, farms, cultural heritage, and fundamental infrastructure lie in ruins. Whole neighbourhoods have been erased. The humanitarian want is simple. However urgency ought to by no means turn out to be an excuse for phantasm, spectacle, or political shortcuts.
The distinction between rhetoric and actuality couldn’t be sharper. Whereas United States President Donald Trump and a bunch of world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to signal the constitution of the so-called Board of Peace and unveil shiny reconstruction plans, the killing in Gaza continued.
Because the ceasefire got here into impact on October 10, no fewer than 480 Palestinians have been killed. 4 of them were killed on the very day the constitution was signed by 19 ministers and state representatives, lots of whom had been much less within the concern of Gaza and far more in being seen alongside Trump.
Towards that backdrop, the board’s rigorously staged optimism seems like efficiency reasonably than transformation. It resembles a sandpit the place these signing up get to construct sandcastles with Trump that can wash away with the primary actual wave.
The proposals might look spectacular and sound hopeful, however structurally, they’re hole. They sidestep the actual drivers of the battle, marginalise Palestinian company, privilege Israeli navy priorities over civilian restoration, and align uncomfortably with longstanding efforts to take care of the occupation, displace Palestinians, and deny the appropriate of return for the inhabitants uprooted in 1948 and 1967.
Gaza isn’t an actual property prospectus
The shiny imaginative and prescient of presidential adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner treats Gaza not as a traumatised society rising from catastrophic violence, however as a clean funding canvas for luxurious housing, business zones, knowledge hubs, beachfront promenades, and aspirational gross home product (GDP) targets.
It reads much less like a restoration plan and extra like a real-estate prospectus. Improvement language replaces political actuality. Smooth displays change rights. Markets change justice.
However Gaza isn’t a failed start-up in search of enterprise capital. It’s dwelling to greater than two million Palestinians who’ve endured siege, displacement, repeated wars, and power insecurity for many years. Reconstruction can’t succeed whether it is indifferent from their lived experiences or if it treats Gaza primarily as an financial asset open to speculative funding, together with by excessive Zionists, reasonably than as a human neighborhood struggling to protect its identification and social cloth.
For a lot of households, even modest houses in Gaza’s formal refugee camps represented a fragile bridge price holding on to as a step in direction of an eventual return to locations from which they had been pressured to flee, in what’s at present often known as Israel.
These houses had been valued not for his or her consolation or market price, however for the social networks they sustained and their symbolic hyperlinks to continuity, reminiscence, and political claims. Palestinians are due to this fact unlikely to be swayed by presents of glitzy towers, luxurious villas, or guarantees of a “market economic system” underneath siege. Their expertise over the previous many years has taught them that no degree of fabric enchancment can substitute for deeper aspirations tied to dignity, rootedness, and the appropriate of return.
A future designed with out Palestinians
A obtrusive flaw of Trump’s plan is the systematic exclusion of Palestinians themselves from shaping the imaginative and prescient of their future. These plans are unveiled in elite convention halls, not debated with the individuals whose neighbourhoods have been flattened.
With out Palestinian possession, legitimacy collapses. Expertise from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere has proven repeatedly that reconstruction imposed from the skin — nonetheless properly branded — reproduces the very energy imbalances that gasoline instability within the first place.
Equally troubling is the plan’s deliberate avoidance of addressing the foundation causes of Gaza’s struggling: occupation, blockade, and navy management. You can’t rebuild sustainably whereas persevering with to protect and fund the equipment that repeatedly destroys what’s constructed.
No quantity of concrete, branding, or international funding can substitute for political decision. A territory that is still militarily besieged, economically sealed, and politically subjugated won’t ever obtain sturdy restoration.
Prosperity can’t flourish inside a cage. The European Union realized this lesson the onerous approach by means of a number of reconstruction cycles it funded in Gaza, which can assist clarify why none of its members rushed to affix the board, regardless of with the ability to afford the everlasting membership price and regardless of the political incentives of cultivating a extra cordial relationship with Trump in gentle of the battle in Ukraine and his threats on Greenland.
Aiding Israel’s navy management by means of spatial redesign
There may be additionally a critical threat that the proposed physical design of Gaza would entrench Israeli navy technique reasonably than restore Palestinian life. The plans envision buffer zones, segmented districts, and so-called “inexperienced areas and corridors” that may break up the territory internally.
This type of spatial engineering would facilitate surveillance, management, and speedy navy entry. City planning would turn out to be safety structure. Civilian geography would flip into militarised area. What’s bought as modernisation would represent a complicated system of containment, identical to the unlawful settlement networks and highway programs within the occupied West Financial institution.
The emphasis on reclaiming land from the ocean utilizing rubble might repeat the issues of Beirut’s reconstruction after the civil battle, the place newly reclaimed areas attracted disproportionate funding as a result of they had been freed from unresolved possession claims, finally permitting elites to applicable town’s waterfront and pull it away from public use.
The demographic implications of the plan are equally profound. Shifting Gaza’s inhabitants centre southward — nearer to Egypt and farther from Israel’s settlements — would quietly alter the political and social centre of gravity of Palestinian life.
It could ease Israeli safety anxieties, however it might achieve this on the expense of Palestinian continuity, identification, and territorial coherence. Inhabitants engineering underneath the banner of reconstruction raises critical moral issues and dangers externalising Gaza’s long-term humanitarian burden onto neighbouring states. This may increasingly additionally assist clarify Egypt’s absence from the signing ceremony and its determination to restrict participation to its intelligence management.
No quantity of political theatre can change freedom
The Board of Peace itself additionally deserves cautious scrutiny. Its branding suggests neutrality and collective stewardship, but its political framing stays extremely personalised round Trump, with little readability about how it’s meant to function in follow.
This isn’t the type of multilateral peacebuilding mechanism envisaged by United Nations Safety Council Decision 2803 of November 2025; it’s political theatre. Peace mechanisms anchored in personalities reasonably than establishments and worldwide regulation hardly ever survive political change.
On the coronary heart of all this lies a well-known however harmful assumption: that financial development can substitute for political rights. Historical past teaches the other. Individuals don’t resist just because they’re poor; they resist as a result of they lack dignity, safety, freedom of expression, and self-determination. No grasp plan can bypass these realities. No skyline can compensate for political exclusion.
This doesn’t imply Gaza should anticipate the right peace earlier than rebuilding. Restoration should proceed urgently. However rebuilding should empower Palestinians reasonably than redesign their constraints. It should dismantle programs of management, not embed them into concrete and zoning maps. It should confront the political roots of destruction reasonably than cosmetically repackage its aftermath.
Till these foundations exist, the Board of Peace and Kushner’s imaginative and prescient threat turning into precisely what they resemble — a type of sandcastle diplomacy: spectacular to the worldwide public, comforting to elites, and destined to clean away when the primary critical wave of political actuality arrives.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
