World News

Last week, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner formally announced the US government’s long-awaited “master plan” for the future of the Gaza Strip—one Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff has said was in the works for two years. Kushner could not have chosen a more fitting venue for the spectacle: the World Economic Forum at Davos, where the powerful gather to congratulate themselves for expressing concern about crises they have no intention of resolving.

The picture Kushner painted of a “new” Gaza—replete with looming luxury high-rises and sprawling resorts—is unrecognizable not only from the morbid expanse of rubble that Israel has turned the territory into during more than two years of genocide, but also from the once-teeming city that endured, despite all odds, under a suffocating Israeli blockade for decades. But there is something even more sinister at the heart of Kushner’s vision: the effective absence of Palestinians.

Kushner has never been shy about his support for Israel’s most extreme fantasies for Gaza—fantasies that begin with ethnic cleansing. But he also knows that a single, overt act of ethnic cleansing on the scale that many Israelis openly dream of might be too controversial to launder through Davos-speak—and that the prospect of a mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza in one fell swoop has already triggered international backlash that the architects of this project would rather avoid. So the Kushner plan is built around something more marketable, more reproducible at scale: attrition. Or, to put it another way, the fulfillment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reported order to close aides to “thin out” Gaza’s population.