Last February, Donald Trump posted a video to his social media accounts, an AI-generated depiction of a postwar Gaza, in which Dubai-style skyscrapers tower over palm-tree lined beaches, and superyachts glide through crystal blue coastal waters. The video was a kind of fever-dream emanation of the Trump id: a Vegas-style casino-hotel called “Trump Gaza”; children, bathed in golden twilight sun, dancing on the beach as dollar bills rain down from the heavens; high end luxury cars; many golden statues of golden president himself.
And over it all a propulsive Eurodance track, likewise AI-generated, in which a voice rhythmically intones a series of Trumpian affirmations: “No more tunnels, no more fear/Trump Gaza is finally here/Trump Gaza shining bright/Golden future, a brand new light/Feast and dance, the deal is done/Trump Gaza number one.”
With its queasily hyperrealist AI-slop aesthetic, its naked depiction of a programme of ethnic cleansing and its insistent repetition of Trump’s graven image, the video amounted to a morbid document of our particular historical moment.
In recent days another, related, document has been brought to light, one which recalls the “Trump Gaza” video in its vision for a postwar redevelopment of the Palestinian enclave. Last weekend, the Financial Times published an investigative report on a plan to build, out of the ruins of a destroyed Gaza, a Dubai-style dynamic trading and tourism hub; hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be paid, via crypto tokens, to leave the enclave.
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The plan is the work of a group of Israeli businessmen, with the involvement of the US consultancy company Boston Consulting Group (BCG). This is the organisation that helped establish the highly controversial and secretive Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which the Israeli government has contracted to run aid distribution centres in Gaza. The organisation has been condemned by the UN and humanitarian groups as running cover for the displacement of Palestinians. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says more than 500 starving Palestinians have been killed near its aid distribution sites.
The development plan has been presented to the Trump administration for approval, and is clearly inspired by Trump’s infamous proposal, announced off-the-cuff during a meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu last February, that the US would “take over” Gaza and redevelop it into a “riviera of the Middle East”.
One notable aspect of the report is that the Tony Blair Institute (TBI), a neoliberal think tank founded by the former UK prime minister with funding from both the US State Department and the Saudi Arabian government, participated in meetings about the plan. (The FT reporters approached the Tony Blair Institute for comment, and were initially told the group had no involvement whatsoever in the preparation of the plan; when the reporters presented evidence that TBI staff were involved in discussions, a spokesperson said they were “essentially in listening mode”.)
As a name, The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change – to give the think tank its full, inglorious title – has the feel of an overly broad satirical gesture. It’s impossible to think of Blair, that is, without remembering the global change he instituted in fronting the invasion of Iraq, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and ushering in an era of regional chaos whose consequences are still playing out.
Two TBI staff members reportedly participated in message groups and business calls on the project. “One lengthy document on postwar Gaza, written by a TBI staff member, was shared within the group for consideration,” write the FT reporters. “This included the idea of a ‘Gaza Riviera’ with artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives, a deep water port ... and low-tax ’special economic zones’.” The destruction of Gaza created, as the TBI document’s authors put it, “a once in a century opportunity to rebuild Gaza from first principles … as a secure, modern, prosperous society.”
The pitch deck laying out the plan contained such developments as “The Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone”, in what is now Beit Hanoun in the north of Gaza; a highway encircling the strip named “The MBS Ring”; something called “The American Data Safe Haven”, in what is now Rafah, and “the Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands”, described as “world class resorts along the coastline and on small artificial islands similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai”.
The slides are bedecked with the logos of corporations such as Tesla, Amazon Web Services, Ikea, and the IHG hotel group – companies the developers hope will be attracted to the new, ethnically cleansed and business-friendly Gaza, though there is no indication that the companies had any awareness of the project. The plan, the developers project, would “increase the value of Gaza to [around] $324bn from $0 today.”
Out of all this emerges the form of a barbarous future, uncannily aligned with the blood-soaked history of Europe and its colonies. Its association with a former British prime minister is almost too on the nose. (The fact that that former PM is Blair, a man whose energy has somehow become even more ghoulish since he left electoral politics, feels entirely appropriate.) What we are seeing here cannot even properly be called neocolonialism, so naked is the exploitation, so grim the equation of stolen land and private wealth. It is really just good old fashioned original-style colonialism.
“There is no document of civilisation,” as Walter Benjamin famously put it, “that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” (Benjamin, a German Jew, wrote these words in Vichy France as he himself was fleeing a genocide; they were among the last he ever wrote.) He was referring primarily to those cultural artefacts whose creation and ownership is so often inextricable from violence and oppression – the Pyramids of Giza, the Colosseum of Rome, the entire contents and institutional history of the British Museum.
It’s tempting to say that these documents imagining the future of Gaza – the AI video posted to Trump’s social media, and the pitch for lucrative development of the enclave – are not documents of civilisation at all, but of barbarism alone. But it’s the duality that is precisely the point. A document of barbarism is also a document of civilisation.
It seems unlikely that the Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone or the Gaza Trump Riviera and Islands will ever come to exist. Their construction would, in any case, surely necessitate an intensification of what is already a genocidal campaign against the Palestinian population. But the plan of which they are a part is itself a vital record of the endurance of the colonial imagination: a document of civilisation, written in blood.
