By Fred Gransville

It should come across as interesting to you: How a man who once sold steaks, vodka, and a gilded illusion of success imagines himself to be now brokering real estate deals with the entire world. Two weeks into his second term, Donald Trump called Gaza U.S. property-complete with boots on the ground. Were audacity not so frequently ignorance's mask, one could have called this the Art of the Deal.

Gaza, over the years, has been many things: haven, prison, battleground, icon of resistance; war-scarred strip of land-and now U.S. real estate? Like Afghanistan and Iraq before it? The consequences are more than just a change of policy, but a cataclysmic declaration that jettisons history and realpolitik in favor of branding and bravado. What does the U.S. hope to gain? A foothold in one of modern history's most politically unstable regions? An exercise in flexing power with an inevitable price? All lessons derived from past interventions into the Middle East have been bloody, expensive, and futile.

The Kushner Factor: Gaza as Luxury Real Estate

To understand Trump's Gaza gambit, you have to consider it through the eyes of Jared Kushner. The self-appointed Middle East peacemaker has always viewed the region like a developer eyeing a fixer-upper. To Kushner, Gaza isn't a geopolitical quagmire or a humanitarian crisis-it's prime land awaiting transformation. As his father, Charles Kushner, once quipped, "It is always better to own the land." That philosophy now extends to Gaza.

Kushner's "Peace to Prosperity" plan, trumpeted during Trump's first term, was less a diplomatic roadmap than a real estate pitch: Gaza as a hub of economic activity, lined with resorts, tech parks, and high-end housing. This vision erases Gaza's harsh reality-a region under blockade since 2007, where more than half the population is unemployed and 80% rely on humanitarian aid (Human Rights Watch, 2020). These, to Kushner, are but minor inconveniences-boulders in his way that he'd bulldoze.

Ivanka Trump is similarly well-aligned, with a brand selling a myth of the magic of being an empowered girl/woman-but rich and plush, of course. Picture it on Instagram-Ivanka Trump strutting, wearing designer shades through some shining new Gaza resort-#blessed. That's grotesque fantasy, at least; however, in this farcical world of the Trump-Kushner universe, this somehow manages to ring eerily plausible.
The problem in this worldview is that it reduces decades of displacement, violence, and suffering into a real estate deal. Gaza is not New York, and the Middle East is not a board game. To treat it as such is not naivete-it's dangerously irresponsible. Those who think of land only as something that can be flipped cannot comprehend the cultural, political, and religious complexities that have created the region.

A Legacy of Disaster: Israel's War Crimes in Palestine

Trump's declaration is highly offensive in the historical context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian people have been facing displacement, occupation, and violence since 1948. In particular, Gaza has been a hotbed of suffering. A partial list of Israel's military actions against Gaza includes:

• The Nakba (1948): Forcible displacement of up to 700,000 Palestinians, entire towns wiped out (The Guardian, 2020).
• The Six-Day War: 1967 marked the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, followed by decades of human rights abuses. This is according to B'Tselem, 2021.
• First Intifada: 1987-1993, a Palestinian uprising that saw brutal clampdowns, mass arrests, torture.
• Operation Cast Lead: 2008-2009, a 22-day invasion that killed over 1,400 Palestinians, hundreds of them civilians; war crimes were alleged. United Nations, 2014.
• Operation Protective Edge 2014: 50 days of aggression in which more than 2,200 Palestinians have been killed, including over 500 children.
• Ongoing war in the Independent Journalists reported a total of 67,188 fatalities and more than 10 000 individuals missing or under the rubble for the period Oct 7, 2023, to Jan 8, 2025.

Military actions, in particular, have been justified by the Israeli government as necessary for national security, while human rights organizations and international bodies have time and again condemned these as disproportionate and, in certain cases, war crimes. This humanitarian crisis in Gaza has worsened due to blockades and airstrikes. Rebranding the territory as luxury real estate without stopping to consider deep historical wounds is cynical and absurd.

The Crusades Revisited: History of Failed Invasions

Trump's decision to send military forces into Gaza isn't only reckless but also is largely historically ignorant. The Middle East has often rebuffed foreign invaders, from the Crusaders to the British Empire.

The closest parallel is that of the Crusades, whereby European powers laid a claim to the Holy Land and, as a matter of fact, were defeated by the determined resistance of local people (BBC, 2019). In much the same vein, noble missions of liberation-actual interventions-also brought nothing but devastation and mayhem: Iraq's invasion saw to the dislodging of state institutions and ushered in the evil force known as ISIS through a resulting power vacuum; 20 years of war and trillions of dollars brought about in Afghanistan little more than a resurgent Taliban. A pattern clearly emerges from here that few invaders end up enjoying any significantly positive results from foreign interventions into the Middle East.

Trump, never to learn a lesson from history, sees the Middle East as tabula rasa for his ambitions. But then, history does have a knack for humbling those who fail to learn from it.

The Global Fallout: Trump's War on Everything

Trump's recklessness is not confined to Gaza alone: his unpredictable policy set wedges with long-time allies-snatching tariffs on Canada and Mexico, abandoning the accord of the Paris Climate Agreement, the World Health Organization, and all while engaging in a trade war in China that laid waste to U.S. farmers along with the manufacturers too. The Washington Post 2020.

His foreign policy decisions have emboldened America's adversaries. Russia took advantage of U.S. vulnerabilities to wage cyberattacks and misinformation while China flourished during Trump's isolationist first term (Foreign Policy, 2021).

A Toy Train Set in the Backyard

Ultimately, Trump's Gaza fantasy is the perfect reflection of his real estate deals: ambitious, reckless, and disconnected from consequences. Just as with his failed projects-from the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City to Trump SoHo-so too his approach to Gaza is transactional: declare victory, extract value, leave behind the wreckage.

The Middle East is not a toy train set, and Gaza is not another piece on the Trump Monopoly board game. He is making real-life decisions, and the world is aghast, watching him threaten to throw peace off the rails before reality inevitably overtakes his delusions. Both Trump and Netanyahu suffer from Narcissism and Unbridled Ambitions.

Sources:

• Human Rights Watch. (2020). Gaza: Israel’s Open-Air Prison.
• B’Tselem. (2021). The Occupation’s Fig Leaf: Israel’s Military Rule in the West Bank.
• United Nations. (2014). Report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict.
• The Guardian. (2020). The Nakba: How the Palestinians Were Expelled from Their Homeland.
• The New York Times. (2021). Jared Kushner’s Middle East Peace Plan: A Real Estate Prospectus?
• BBC. (2019). The Crusades: A History of Failure.
• The Washington Post. (2020). Trump’s Trade War: Who Really Pays the Price?
• Foreign Policy. (2021). How Trump’s Isolationism Is Empowering China.
• Love Property. (2024). Donald Trump’s Biggest Real Estate Wins and Losses.

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