Jared Kushner Still Thinks Gaza Is a Real Estate Deal

Donald Trump’s so-called 20-point Gaza “peace plan” is not a diplomatic breakthrough. It is a sales pitch. If it looks like a property prospectus and reads like one, that’s because Jared Kushner’s fingerprints are all over it.

For Kushner, Gaza isn’t a war zone suffocating under blockade—it’s beachfront real estate waiting for redevelopment. Two million Palestinians are barely mentioned as political actors. Instead, they are treated as tenants in someone else’s project, passive recipients of desalination plants, foreign investment, and donor cash overseen by Gulf monarchies. It is not statehood or sovereignty on offer. It is managed dependency, dressed up as prosperity.

We’ve seen this script before. In 2020, Kushner unveiled his “Peace to Prosperity” plan at a flashy Bahrain conference. Palestinians were promised $50 billion of infrastructure and investment if they gave up on sovereignty, refugees’ right of return, and Jerusalem. Glossy renderings showed new highways and tourist resorts, as though a few projects could erase decades of displacement and violence. The plan collapsed on impact. Palestinians boycotted, Arab governments shrugged, and the world rightly condemned it as an insulting buyout attempt.

Trump’s new Gaza blueprint is the sequel nobody asked for. Strip away the marketing and it is Kushner’s 2020 plan in miniature: desalination projects, logistics hubs, investment zones. Copy-paste the same failed formula, this time applied to a shattered enclave. Kushner has not learned a single lesson—because the conceit of both documents is identical. He believes prosperity can replace politics.

But history is not on their side. The “economic peace” playbook goes back decades. Oslo in the 1990s offered donor-driven development instead of sovereignty; it ended in disappointment and revolt. Netanyahu’s 2009 vision of “economic peace” promised jobs instead of independence; Palestinians saw through it. Time and again, Washington and Jerusalem have tried to tranquilize political demands with aid packages. The result is not peace but deeper resentment.

Gaza cannot be rebuilt on real estate logic. It cannot be bought into silence with Gulf checks and investor councils. You cannot bulldoze away occupation or pave over statelessness with investment zones. Palestinians do not want to be a distressed asset managed by outsiders. They want what every people wants: dignity, freedom, and the right to decide their future.

Trump’s 20-point plan, like Kushner’s failed “deal of the century,” is theater for audiences elsewhere. It gives MAGA rallies a talking point and flatters Gulf monarchs eager to showcase influence. But it has nothing to offer the people of Gaza. To them, it is just another in a long line of colonial insults, recycled as a sales brochure.

In the end, what Kushner offers is not peace but placation by ledger—a cruel, banal technocracy that sees human catastrophe as a redevelopment opportunity. Palestinians have rejected this logic for half a century. They will reject it now.

Because Gaza is not a distressed property. It is a people under siege. And no plan built on erasure will ever secure peace.