Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are seen before a press conference with President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC on September 29, 2025. [Stringer - Anadolu Agency]
Jared Kushner, the boy Prince of the Empire, has often been dismissed as an over-promoted son-in-law: a real estate heir, a political novice, and a "deal maker" with no grasp of history. Yet to trivialise him as a "know-nothing" is to miss the larger danger he embodies. Kushner's role in shaping US and Israeli policy toward Palestine and the broader Arab world is not accidental. It reflects a deeper logic of imperialism's new face -- outsourcing conquest to private interests and unelected power brokers. He is not a rogue actor but a conduit for a system that merges corporate real estate logic with state power to seize land, suppress peoples, and re-engineer the region's political future.
Kushner's so-called "Deal of the Century" contained a shocking sub-plan: to turn parts of Gaza into a "Singapore on the Mediterranean" or a "Gaza Riviera." At first glance it sounds like an escape from poverty; in reality, it is a blueprint for erasure. Palestinians would be reduced to low-wage service workers on their own dispossessed land while investors and foreign regimes extract profits. This is textbook "accumulation by dispossession" (David Harvey): transforming a people's suffering into an opportunity for capital. His slogan resembled this sound: The Gaza Riviera: From Open-Air Prison to Tourist Playground
Like the "model villages" of colonial Africa or the "development corridors" in occupied Kashmir, the "Gaza Riviera" represents the aestheticisation of occupation -- a spectacle of modernity masking the theft of sovereignty. It is not an economic plan but a civilisational insult: the coloniser's dream of making the colonized serve tourists in the very place of their trauma.
Kushner sold the Abraham Accords as a "peace" achievement. In his restricted brainpower, he believes that the Abraham Accords were a counter-revolution. In reality, they were a counter-revolutionary project to neutralise Arab resistance, sideline Palestine, and normalise the annexationist agenda of Israel. In political theory terms, it was an exercise in creating a "comprador bloc" (Samir Amin): elite regimes trading their legitimacy at home for security guarantees abroad. By pulling the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan into deals without even symbolic gains for Palestinians, Kushner hollowed out the OIC and shredded the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002. Foolishness is the currency of colonialism.
This is classic imperialism in its 21st-century form: instead of direct military occupation, the US brokers elite pacts that deliver markets and land to its allies while suppressing mass politics. But such arrangements are inherently unstable. They rely on authoritarian rulers who cannot control their own populations indefinitely.
Kushner's team didn't just shift embassies; they redrew maps. It was the height of arrogance (and insanity) to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. It was re-christened "Trump Heights" without any religious authority to bless the stunt. It signalled a doctrine: facts on the ground trump international law. This doctrine unravels the fragile legal fabric of West Asia and turns it into a playground for annexation - or, call them cartographic coups. As political geographers argue, maps are not neutral -- they are instruments of power. By erasing Palestine from the map and normalising settlements, Kushner's policies accelerated a process of geo-legal dispossession that destabilises the entire region.
Kushner's background in real estate speculation is not incidental; it is methodological. His pattern of real estate empire masquerading as diplomacy is doomed to a fall even as he digs and falls into his own oil well. The dealmaker's mindset reduces land to parcels, people to demographics, and history to a marketing problem. This is a neoliberal form of what Hannah Arendt called "administrative imperialism": the governance of territories without the responsibility of sovereignty. It is also a continuation of what Edward Said called "the geography of power" -- the way empire remakes spaces to fit its own narratives.
The long war on Arab sovereignty will end. It must. It shall. From the CIA's coups of the 1950s to the Iraq War of 2003, US policy has been to prevent any independent, unified Arab power from emerging. Kushner's plans fit seamlessly into this lineage. By promising investment zones, tech hubs, and "modernisation," the US cultivates a class of Arab elites tethered to Western capital while denying the masses their political agency. This is why the Accords feel brittle: they were imposed from above, not negotiated from below.
The Arab youth who have watched Gaza burn and Jerusalem besieged are not buying the "new Middle East" narrative. We saw the Arab Spring. This is Gen Z in action and, even if it may take time, it will arrive with a surprise - with rulers out of tune and completely out of sync with reality. They are digital natives with a deep memory of injustice and a growing post-sectarian consciousness. They see Palestine not as an isolated issue but as a mirror of their own disenfranchisement under regimes aligned with Washington. This generation, like the anti-colonial movements of the mid-20th century, is incubating a new politics of authenticity and ownership that no amount of normalisation can contain.
Kushner's project is not simply about land and oil. It is about whether a corporate-imperial civilisation -- one that commodifies everything from holy cities to refugee camps -- will define the 21st century. The US, a nation built on stolen indigenous lands and implicated in 225 wars, has never truly "won" a just war. It has specialised instead in decay and destruction, in turning the periphery into zones of chaos and the core into a citadel of wealth. This is why its empire is morally exhausted. As political theorists like Achille Mbembe argue, such regimes ultimately descend into necro-politics - the management of death rather than life. In a brief judgement it is civilisation at stake
One thing is irreversibly certain and that is the coming karma of empire. History shows that empires built on extraction and dispossession eventually implode under their own contradictions. The Abraham Accords were meant to be a masterstroke; they are already fraying. Even regimes that signed them face domestic unrest and are hedging toward multipolarity. The "rules-based order" is no longer unchallenged. The non-West -- from Latin America to Africa to Asia -- is beginning, after immense suffering, to retrieve its own agency.
In this sense, Kushner's vision of Gaza as a Riviera is not the future. It is the last gasp of a dying order -- a real estate brochure for a colonialism that no longer has a moral home. The West, facing its own crises of inequality and legitimacy, may indeed return to its own barbarity, as you put it. But the seeds of an alternative are germinating elsewhere: a world where peoples rather than empires decide the fate of their lands.
This is all a mirage and this mirage will dissolve. The tragedy is that Palestinians and other Arabs will suffer greatly before this order collapses. But collapse it will. Because no "deal," however glossy, can overwrite the reality that a people cannot be bribed or coerced out of their history. Kushner's "know-nothing" schemes are part of a larger theft masquerading as peace, but they will be remembered as such -- and resisted as such. In the long arc of history, the "Gaza Riviera" will stand not as a triumph but as a mirage: a symbol of imperial arrogance dissolving under the heat of justice.