The idea of turning Gaza into a Riviera has few open buyers today. It is too obscene, too exposed, too closely shadowed by mass death to be sold in daylight. For now, it lies concealed – set aside, muted, awaiting a moment when outrage dulls, memories fade, and the world’s attention shifts. But this concealment should not be mistaken for abandonment. It is merely a pause in an agenda that believes time, not justice, is the decisive ally. It is one where the tangible present of a community could possibly be destroyed in favour of speculative future gains for investors or developers. 

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........

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