Shortly before Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016, Fredric Jameson observed in his American Utopia that “today, all politics is about real estate.” Explicitly referencing Palestine, he advanced the proposition that postmodern politics “is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as a global scale.” Already true enough during the initial ascendancy of the slumlord-in-chief, Jameson’s hypothesis is being further verified today in the most grotesque of fashions in what TheNew York Times—dutifully “sane-washing” every indignity meted out against the Palestinian people—refers to as the “Gaza development plan.” On multiple occasions, and notoriously during the state visit of the Israeli PM, wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump has rehearsed the idea of transferring the entire population of the Gaza Strip to other countries, notably Jordan and Egypt, before clearing the rubble of the genocide and transforming the territory into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan retorted that ‘Trump’s statements about Gaza reveal the nature of the American mindset and its real estate-based view of homelands… Trump’s statements fuel chaos, and if he wants to expand Israel, he should do so in his own country.” Even some NATO allies demurred: French president Emmanuel Macron remarked that “the right answer is not a real estate operation,” while Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez declared that “No real estate transaction can conceal the evil, disgrace, and crimes against humanity that Gaza has witnessed in recent years.”
Even to those long grown inured to the inanities and obscenities that flow ceaselessly from POTUS, the compounded evil and banality of building resorts on mass graves boggles the mind. After decades of obstructing Palestinian claims to self-determination and international law provisions against apartheid, annexation of land, forced population transfer and ethnic cleansing, U.S. complicity in Israel’s genocide under the Biden-Harris administration has now morphed into a complete jettisoning not just of a vestigial “rules-based international order” but of the very idea of sovereignty claims binding together states, territories, and populations.
Sovereignty and property have been conjoined to one another in modern political thought since at least the 16th century. The nature of sovereign power as imperium (supreme executive power) in relation to dominium (absolute ownership) and the question of the extent to which a sovereign could interfere with the property rights of his subjects informed the major theories of the state; the analogy of sovereign (absolute) power and that of a property owner shaped the political imaginaries of European political philosophers from Hobbes to Locke, and from the Spanish through to the British, lay at the foundation of the modern colonial order. Sovereignty as imperium became the basis for the colonial acquisition of Indigenous territory and the making of land into property (dominium).
Property in its financialized real estate form has come to dominate neoliberal economies. The ideology of real estate is now finding direct geopolitical expression, as it shapes the forms of power being exercised by Trump and his entourage. While the United States has, since its very beginnings as a settler colony, been what historian Allan Greer terms a “real estate monopsony,” taking to a logical extension the British imperial tendency to act “as an improving landlord” (in the words of Ranajit Guha), Trump’s approach to dominance without hegemony is rooted more narrowly in the basic mentality of a real estate developer: acquire property, or more accurately a “site” (deracinated from its history), develop it and then lease, rent or sell it for the sole objective of profit.
Historically, the theft of Indigenous lands involved a whole panoply of legal technologies—lawfare, for short—including surveying, mapping, registration of title, in some instances treaties (signed in colonial bad faith), and in others, contracts for sale. All of this was framed as part of a civilizing mission of improvement. The ideology of the real estate empire—be it personal or national—dispenses with this legitimating narrative. Instead, it advances an overwhelmingly bare and explicit profit motive as the alibi for the violence of slum clearances, managed decline, gentrification, and financialization. And although “urban warfare,” as Brazilian architect and planner Raquel Rolnik has analyzed, is a planetary phenomenon, the way it is pushing aside the customary rationales of foreign policy, diplomacy and international law marks a further debasement of America’s neo-imperial designs—albeit one amply rehearsed in the pillage and parcelization of Iraq. But whereas Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority carried out the neoliberal shock doctrine through a form of constitutionalized privatization, here the plunder is even less mediated: appropriation, pure and simple.
Six years ago, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner launched his “Peace to Prosperity” plan for Palestine. It was dismissed by commentators as nothing more than a real estate brochure. A year later, it was folded into the Trump Peace Plan, aka ‘The Deal of the Century,” which sought to consolidate the bulk of Israel’s settler-colonial land grab in the West Bank while establishing a completely subordinate, segmented and “demilitarized” Palestinian Bantustan—basically freezing the Oslo process at its nadir while neutralizing any Palestinian capacities for autonomy or self-defense. In February of last year, while scores of civilians were being targeted and killed by Israel on a quotidian basis, Kushner, holding forth at Harvard’s School of Government, mooted the idea of temporarily displacing civilians from Gaza while Israel “cleaned up” the Strip in view of developing its “very valuable” “waterfront property.” (Kushner’s associated proposal to move Gazans to a site on the Negev was hardly designed to ingratiate him to the theocratic fascist settlers in Netanyahu’s government).
Trump’s recent declarations echo his son-in-law’s, but they also signal a shift into a terrain where even lip service to legality is surplus to requirements. The U.S. President is inviting everyone to fully embrace his vision of property development as a replacement for international law, what we might term his real estate ontology. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One (where he also unveiled his map of the “Gulf of America”), Trump said of Gaza: ‘Think of it as a big real estate site. The United States is going to own it and we’re going to slowly, very slowly—we’re in no rush—develop it and bring stability to the Middle East.” Alternatively speaking of “taking,” “owning” and “buying”—never specifying from whom—Trump also suggested that the rebuilding might involve some kind of leasing. (“We may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it.”)
In a subsequent Fox News interview with Bret Baier, in which he confirmed that this Gaza acquisition would abrogate any right of return for Gaza’s Palestinian inhabitants, Trump seems to have shifted the title to the territory from the U.S. government to himself: “We’ll build safe communities, a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is. In the meantime, I would own this. Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land. No big money spent.”
The uncertainty as to whether or not Trump, like some lurid reincarnation of King Leopold II, would personally own Gaza speaks to a radical break with the notion that the office holder of the President should not be personally enriched while in office, and makes the concerns with “conflicts of interest” that plagued his first term in office seem touchingly naïve by comparison. This 21st century version of imperial conquest appears shorn of any political thought about governance, legal rule, authority or indeed, the “native question” as it would have been cast in the age of empire. Here, Palestinians are meant to disappear in the same manner as residents from a building that has been “decanted” as part of a process of managed decline.
Indeed, while the Israeli government is extremely enthusiastic about this U.S.-sanctioned total population transfer, in keeping with long-held Zionist fantasies, it’s also evident that in Trump’s mind this is just a slum clearance on a larger scale. What is being taken to a logical extreme in this instance is not conquest through lawfare, but a form of genocidal reno-viction, advanced as though the United States were not entirely complicit in the tens of thousands of deaths and the obliteration of most of Gaza’s built environment, as well as the very infrastructure of collective life, from hospitals to water sanitation.
While Israel has long used land-use planning laws and both military offensives and military prerogatives to displace Palestinians from their land, the Trump plan marks a shift from territorial acquisition for sovereign state imperatives to a simple, unadorned land grab for profit. This is not to gainsay that colonialism has always been about accumulation, extraction and exploitation, and has repeatedly involved the agency of private and corporate actors. But it is worth registering a shift in the practice and the self-image of sovereign and imperial power, and the willingness to dispense with juridical understandings of territory, the nation-state and international relations that have held sway—in however attenuated or hypocritical a fashion—for a very long time.
Speaking next to Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House, Trump upped the ante, suggesting that this development no longer required a prior purchase or transaction: “We’re not going to have to buy, we’re going to have Gaza. We don’t have to buy. There’s nothing to buy.” The making of the Gaza Strip into a terra nullius—a crucial legal device in the colonizer’s arsenal—has also apparently exceeded historical antecedents through the deployment of contemporary military technology. Israel has inflicted such violent destruction on the land and its substrata—what the Forensic Architecture agency refers to as “terraforming”—that it is not only the landscape that has been altered but the centuries of human and environmental history that lie beneath it.
The scale of devastation has been intended to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable. But it goes beyond the usual historical settler-colonial precedents of turning land into “waste” through the destruction of indigenous life in ways that render land appropriable by settlers (though it does closely recall what John Llewallen termed the “ecology of devastation” of the U.S. war on Vietnam). Biblical rhetorics of vengeance aside, the Israeli military itself has also drawn on the logic of the production of space as real estate; it has used maps that were originally created in the 1970s to parcel Gaza’s territory into land lots for Jewish settlement. Their new purpose is to instruct Palestinians on where to evacuate to alleged “safe zones”—which were in fact killing sites, as Forensic Architecture reveals in their report “Humanitarian Violence: Israel’s Abuse of Preventative Measures.”
In December 2023, an Israeli real estate company produced a poster that superimposed the diagrams of modern single-family homes onto a photograph of bombed-out Gaza accompanied by the slogan: “Wake up, a beach house is not a dream. Now at pre-sale prices.” In January 2024, the Israeli settler organization, Nachala, led by Daniella Weiss, organized a conference under the title “Settlement Brings Security,” explicitly advocating the “transfer” of Gaza’s Palestinian population and Jewish resettlement. Attended by almost a third of Netanyahu’s cabinet, the conference featured maps inviting participants to “Come Build Your Home in Gaza,” dividing the Strip into new settlements and neighborhoods, with Hebrew names. (Shuja’iyya, the neighborhood from which murdered poet Refaat Alareer hailed, for instance, would be renamed in honor of IDF soldiers who fought in Gaza.) Meanwhile, real estate shows selling properties in the occupied territories have been held across the U.S. and Canada, and have served as an important flashpoint for the Palestine solidarity movement.
Trump’s real estate ontology is thus not wholly sui generis. Arguably, it represents the extreme end of a continuum in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the fragmentation of Palestinian lands, which began in 1948, but intensified dramatically after the signing of the Oslo Accords. The West Bank was dismembered into Areas A, B and C—ostensibly under escalating degrees of Israeli control from A to C, but de facto under complete Israeli control in all areas (with the Palestinian Authority lacking anything approaching sovereignty over non-contiguous Palestinian homelands, and with Israel directly administering 61% of the West Bank). This split has not impeded neoliberal economic policy, and in particular real estate development, in the putatively Palestinian-controlled Area A, as detailed in Kareem Rabie’s Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited.
In the illegal settlements, we find Israelis who do not necessarily fit the stereotypical image of the fanatical religious zealots in outposts (the “hilltop youth”) but are instead often young families priced out of Tel Aviv real estate. Similarly, affordability meant that the so-called “Gaza Envelope” was again leading in home purchases in Israel only months after October 7th. Across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we see a particular kind of real estate development thriving in the absence of territorial integrity and sovereign political authority. This is undergirded not just by the continued propertizing violence of displacement, dispossession, and demolitions but by the appropriation of Palestinian resources: namely, the aquifer. And, as many commentators have noted, the genocide and ecocide in Gaza cannot be disjoined from designs on the gas fields off Gaza’s shoreline, which some analysts have also seen as a desideratum for Trump and the U.S.
Among some of Trump’s cheerleaders, the “Gaza development plan” has been met with enthusiasm. The far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin—cited as an influence by the likes of Peter Thiel, Steve Bannon and J.D. Vance, and recently profiled by The New York Times—has echoed Trump’s proposal, updating it into the anti-democratic “libertarian” tech imaginary of what Quinn Slobodian has termed “crack-up capitalism.” Yarvin’s dystopian fantasy for “Gaza, Inc.” joins Trump’s visions of real estate development to a fully corporatized and privatized conception of sovereignty that “exits” from the very parameters of international law or democratic politics—after the model, say, of Próspera, the “charter city” in Honduras financed by venture capitalists including Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Marc Andreessen.
For Yarvin, a precondition for turning Gaza into “the first sovereign corporation to join the UN” is not just deporting its people but obliterating their property rights to land. As he declares:
“Gaza, without its residents (even more important, without their complex maze of Ottoman-era land titles), is worth much more than Gaza with its residents, even to its residents. This is 140 square miles of Mediterranean real estate, clear of titles, demolished and demined at a cost of perhaps ten billion dollars. This land becomes the first charter city backed by US legitimacy: Gaza, Inc. Stock symbol: GAZA.”
In keeping with his curated persona as a troll provoking “the libs,” adding insult to injury, Yarvin even suggests that the “roadshow” for this IPO should be run by Adam Neumann, the Israeli-American billionaire who co-founded WeWork. For Yarvin, his and Trump’s visions have the virtue of embracing the fact that “normal human history” is now reasserting itself in the twilight of a liberal order. At its core is the proposition that “All real-estate titles have war as a genesis block.” (The genesis block is the first block in a blockchain, the distributed ledger of transactions at the basis of cryptocurrencies.)
Trump’s Gaza proposals have come alongside his efforts to bully the Danes into “selling” Greenland or the Panamanians into “returning” the Canal, bringing into relief a much cruder and openly transactional formulation of American international primacy. It’s the same logic that governs U.S. claims to 50% of the revenues from Ukrainian rare-earth minerals and its “right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” as set out in a prospective contract drafted by private lawyers. The projection of U.S. military power has always been accompanied by plunder and protection-rackets, but it’s notable that American vice no longer feels the need to pay any compliments to international virtues.
Increasingly driven by dominium, this is an imperium which doesn’t know what to do with arcana. It seems to like its state aggressively shallow, not “deep.” To what extent the global projection of American power—on which the country’s economic fortunes so profoundly rely—can survive this turn away from hegemony is one of the many enigmas we face. What is clear is that recoiling from the crudity of global politics-as-property-development while pining for the “rules-based international order”—the reflex of the very centrist international elites that primed the world for Trump and his ilk—is an exercise in futility. ♦