Plans to remake Gaza as an economic project ignore the deeper reality of land, memory and belonging, reducing historical peoples to statistics while denying the political rights and human dignity that cannot be displaced.

Within decision-making circles in Washington, there prevails an unspoken yet deeply rooted belief that real history begins only when settler-colonial interests and corporations intervene. For policymakers there, whether cloaked in liberal Democratic rhetoric or Republican pragmatism, the world is nothing more than a flat landscape of investment opportunities or security threats. This mindset, historically shaped upon the ruins of the idea of “land without an owner,” still perceives national borders as ending where the reach of weapons begins. It views geography not as a reservoir of human memory, but merely as a real estate asset that can be reshaped and repurposed according to the demands of the present moment.

This pattern of consciousness, which disregards the accumulated truths of history, explains repeated “American” failures to understand the will of peoples deeply rooted in their land. This historical ignorance becomes most visible when the US administration approaches the suffering of peoples, as in the Gaza Strip, with the mentality of a real estate developer. When leaders in the United States speak about transforming Gaza into “Dubai” or the “Riviera of the East,” they are not offering political solutions. They are practicing a form of visual arrogance that views the land as an empty plot ready for material investment. They ignore that the land they seek to “improve” is in fact filled with souls and stories.

The attempt to develop Gaza into an economic centre while ignoring the political rights of its people reflects a profound ignorance of the historical continuity of nations. The human being who confronts the machinery of war with a bare chest does not do so for a shopping centre or a glass tower. He dies for an olive tree planted by his grandfather hundreds of years ago, before the United States itself even emerged as a political entity on the map.

This is the existential cultural clash in which American initiatives repeatedly fail; the pragmatic westerner sees land as a means to prosperity, while deeply rooted peoples it as the purpose of existence and the ultimate embodiment of identity.

This blindness toward the “spirit of place” is not confined to foreign policy, but extends to the mentality managing domestic affairs within the United States today. There is a clear thread connecting projects of forced displacement in the Middle East with the deportation systems operated by the US Immigration and........

© Pearls and Irritations