Jan.26

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GOP 53

Peace Through Skyscrapers

Jared Kushner wants to build 180 skyscrapers in Gaza. It will be a marvelous and peaceful place. It will be Dubai, but with better weather. Tourists and companies will flood in. Gaza will be transformed from the (actual) image of what it looks like now (on the left below) to what some AI bot thinks it will look like in the near future (on the right). What could possibly go wrong?

In Kushner's hallucination vision, Gaza will have a coastal tourism zone with all those modern skyscrapers, many of them hotels or office buildings. There will also be two new cities, New Rafah, with 100,000 housing units, 200 schools, and 75 medical facilities, and New Gaza, which would be a center of industry that would generate full employment. There will also be a modern port and airport. It sounds great, with only a couple of minor problems that need to be ironed out:

• What about the Palestinians?: In Kushner's plan, the 2 million people who live in Gaza play no role. He, his co-developers, and maybe Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), are calling all the shots. Will the locals be happy to let a handful of developers and a foreign dictator redevelop their land as a profit center? The photo on the right above looks more like a real estate ad to show to potential buyers than a plan to build a country from scratch.
  
  
• What will the status of Gaza be?: Will Gaza become a regular country and a member of the United Nations Donald Trump's Board of Peace? Will any other country recognize it? Especially Israel? What will its relation with the West Bank be, if any? If they become separate countries, will people from one be allowed into the other? Does the Palestinian Authority have any future role or will it quietly vanish when the current aged and corrupt leadership dies off?
  
  
• Who will rule Gaza?: Missing in the plan is the small detail of who will rule Gaza. Will it be a democracy? An oligarchy? A colony of Saudi Arabia? Will it have an army? If not, who will defend it? Who will run the show during the many years of construction and who will feed the people during this period? Does it matter if the people there don't especially like whatever arrangement Kushner cooks up?
  
  
• What will Hamas do?: None of this works if Hamas remains an armed terrorist organization bent on driving out all foreigners. Hamas leaders have said they will turn in their weapons only to a functioning Palestinian army that is part of a Palestinian state. Until then, they are planning to hide all their weapons for future use. Also, suppose some hotels get built and Hamas sets off bombs in them once in a while. With people lugging large suitcases into the hotels every day, smuggling in bomb parts won't be that hard. Also, some Hamas members could get jobs in "hotel security" in order to let terrorists in. What will happen to tourism if a bomb goes off every couple of months? Gaza probably won't make Forbes Travel Guide's list of the world's best tourist destinations, in that scenario.
  
  
• Where will the money come from?: Building all this stuff will cost hundreds of billions of dollars (and take many, many years, assuming the current truce holds). Who is going to pay for it? Saudi Arabia could toss a few billion into the pot to start the ball rolling, but it will take far more money than even Saudi Arabia can provide. Also, from MbS' point of view, does he really care if there is another Dubai in the area? What's it to him? Will private developers want to risk building in such an unstable area, where a bomb could destroy a billion dollars' worth of property in a flash, or war could break out at any moment?
  
  
• What industry?: New Gaza is supposed to be an industrial center, making things. New factories could either be fully automated, in which case they do not offer much employment, or not automated, in which case they need a (somewhat) skilled workforce, of which there is currently none. What could Gaza possibly make that Asian countries can't make much better and cheaper?

In short, this doesn't seem to be a serious plan that is going to have the buy-in from the major players in the area: the Palestinian people, Hamas, and Israel. Unless, of course, Trump buys both Gaza and Greenland and ships all the current residents of Gaza to Greenland, which has a couple of problems of its own. But a guy can hallucinate dream, can't he? (V)