President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, along with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, briefed the White House late last month on a plan for postwar Gaza, NBC News, citing two White House officials, reported last week. The proposal, to put it plainly, is an unserious, politically ignorant, economic-centric pipe dream, a la Trump’s vision of a “Gaza Riviera.” And it further highlights Kushner’s decidedly overrated reputation as a successful diplomat in Middle East relations.
First reported by The Washington Post, which also published the document in full, the “GREAT* Trust (*Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation)” prospectus includes graphics that envision rolling green hills and skyscrapers standing on what’s currently a wasteland of destruction and starvation. It provides a glossy sheen to ethnic cleansing and places no responsibility on Israel to make meaningful steps toward a political solution that ends the larger conflict — including Palestinian self-determination in Gaza.
It further highlights Kushner’s decidedly overrated reputation as a successful diplomat in Middle East relations.
Despite being presented to the White House by a former U.K. prime minister and the president’s son-in-law — whose investment firm has received billions in investments and fees from the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia — it’s unclear if this plan is what the Trump White House has in mind, as the White House didn’t respond to MSNBC’s request for comment on the matter. It’s also not clear what, if any, involvement Kushner had in creating the “GREAT Trust” proposal, but the fact that he presented it to the White House telegraphs at least some support.
The plan sees Gaza (not Hamas, but Gaza itself) as “an Iranian outpost in a moderate part of the region,” but also a potential “Abrahamic Ally,” which appears to be a reference to the “Abraham Accords,” the 2020 agreements that normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries, and which were brokered by Kushner during the first Trump administration. According to the plan, the trust will govern Gaza “for a transition period until a reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity is ready to step in its shoes,” adding that the “reformed Palestinian Polity will join the Abraham Accords.”
Lovely idea, but how will that work? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long insisted a Palestinian state will “never” happen and has even ruled out the possibility of a future Gaza government led by the Palestinian Authority — the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people, which also recognizes Israel’s right to exist, supports a two-state solution and correctly blames Hamas for starting this horrific war.
So how will this “reformed Palestinian Polity” come into existence? The “GREAT Trust” doesn’t have time for such pesky details. The Israeli-Palestinian crisis might be approaching its ninth decade — and a two-state solution has never looked less likely — but this proposal only sees the money to be made. The fate of Gazan civilians is rendered as a minor and temporary impediment to untold economic prosperity.
The plan includes something called “The Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone” and vague references to high-speed rail lines that would connect Gaza with other “Abrahamic” states (presumably referring to the Arab countries that have normalized relations with Israel). But, crucially, the plan aims to have as few Gazans in Gaza as possible.
As The Guardian summarized, “Palestinians would be encouraged into ‘voluntary’ departure to another country or into restricted, secure zones during reconstruction. Those who own land would be offered ‘a digital token’ by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property, to be used to finance a new life elsewhere. Those who stay would be housed in properties with a tiny footprint of 323 sq ft — minuscule even by the standards of many non-refugee camp homes in Gaza.”
According to the Post, the proposal “was developed by some of the same Israelis who created and set in motion the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) now distributing food inside the enclave. Financial planning was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group,” but “BCG has said that work on the trust plan was expressly not approved and that two senior partners who led the financial modeling were subsequently fired.”
Even though the White House hasn’t said if it supports the GREAT prospectus, the plan does comport with Trump’s previous statements that he wanted to “clean out Gaza” and move people from there to Jordan and Egypt. Trump’s use of “clean out Gaza” was a euphemism for ethnic cleansing that, as I noted in February, obliterated any pretense that the U.S. would be an objective mediator in resolving the seemingly intractable conflict.
“If ethnic cleansing is on the table at all, Trump has already done his job. He has not only moved the Overton Window; he has opened it wide for humanity’s worst instincts to become just another political issue, as worthy of consideration and debate as any other,” I wrote at the time. And some of the more extreme members of Netanyahu’s government have been disturbingly candid about the government’s intentions — to make Gaza unlivable, with the hopes that Gazans will submit to “voluntary relocation,” clearing the path for the resettlement of Gaza.
Kushner’s crowning diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, is at risk because of the continued bellicosity of his good friend Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.
Kushner has been hailed by many pro-Israel partisans for his statesmanship, but as a senior adviser in the first Trump administration, his 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” plan leaned so heavily in favor of Israeli interests, it was effectively a nonstarter. At the time, Ilan Goldenberg, a former State Department official who served as the chief of staff to the special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, said the proposed land swaps gave Palestinians “a bunch of desert entirely disconnected from the rest of their state while taking prime real estate in the middle of the West Bank [for Israel].”
And the Abraham Accords — Kushner’s crowning diplomatic achievement — came with one major flaw: Almost nothing was advanced to end the Israeli blockade of Gaza or the occupation of the West Bank, leaving millions of Palestinians under Israeli control, but lacking basic civil rights.
Just days after Hamas’ savage attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Nicholas Grossman wrote that rather than bringing about the “dawn of a new Middle East,” Trump actually “threw America’s weight behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s squeeze-and-ignore approach to the Palestinians as if the fundamental problem of people displaced and living under occupation would just go away.” And Hamas has been open about the fact that it launched the Oct. 7 offensive in large part to upend further Israeli-Arab normalization efforts.
Now the UAE, an Abraham Accords signee, has warned the Trump administration that the accords could collapse if Israel goes through with its threatened annexation of large parts of the West Bank in response to several Western countries recognizing a Palestinian state. Axios, citing two Israeli officials, reported Wednesday that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had signaled in private meetings that he wouldn’t oppose such annexations.
Axios quoted a senior Emirati official as saying, “These plans, if carried out, will do substantial damage to the UAE-Israel relationship. And they will irreparably damage whatever remains of the vision of regional integration. In many ways, the choice before Israel right now is annexation or integration.”
At a news conference in Ecuador on Thursday, Rubio said that “as far as what you’re seeing with the West Bank and the annexation, that’s not a final thing. That’s something that’s being discussed among some elements of Israeli politics. … I’m not going to opine on that today. What I am going to tell you is it was wholly predictable.”
Kushner’s crowning diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, is at risk because of the continued bellicosity of his good friend Benjamin Netanyahu and his government. And by presenting the “GREAT Plan” to the White House — which includes plans for the “voluntary” relocation of Gazans to other countries — Kushner himself is putting the Abraham Accords at risk.
