The Republicans are great at counterfactual naming. They recently gave us the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which was anything but — it was the gutting of social services all across the country, and the transfer of money to the already wealthy. The newest lie is the GREAT Trust, short for “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation,” which Trump has been pushing for a while. He knows real estate, you know — he’d like to flatten Gaze and rebuild it in his tacky way, and Israel loves the idea.
The Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, otherwise known as the Great Trust, proposes that the 2 million people currently living in Gaza could be paid to be relocated to other countries or secure zones as part of a deal that would also see them receive subsidies to cover four years of rent and a year’s worth of food, The Washington Post reports.
With the current population gone, the U.S.-administered trust then proposes to clear away the rubble and erect six to eight “dynamic, modern and AI-powered smart planned cities,” boasting multi-storey glass apartment complexes, public parks, golf courses, “world-class resorts” along its Mediterranean beachfront plus electric vehicle plants and data centres.
This makes sense, in a perverse right-wing sort of way:
See? Israel is doing the preliminary demolition for the oligarchs, and every Palestinian killed is less money that needs to be spent on relocation, all so they can build this:
That would be the most beautiful cemetery ever made. Here in the US, we have a horror movie trope about haunted houses built on top of Indian graveyards, and Gaza would be prime real estate for stories of hauntings and curses.
I have to ask who profits from this development. Not the Palestinians at all; they get a pittance for their land, and get forcibly marched out of their homes…or shot. Not the neighboring countries, which will suddenly have two million refugees foisted upon them, which they don’t want. It is not a popular idea.
Almost nobody supports this plan.
Almost everyone outside Israel, including Egypt, Jordan, the UN and Palestinian leaders, has rejected the idea.
In addition to those directly involved, a number of other states have also been critical of Trump’s plan to relocate Gaza’s population, including Germany, whose leader, Olaf Scholtz, dismissed the suggestion as “unacceptable”.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot also dismissed the idea, telling France’s parliament on Tuesday that the US president’s suggestion was “absolutely unacceptable”.
Spain, one of the two states within the EU to recognise the state of Palestine, also condemned the notion, with Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares telling the media outlet EuroNews that “Gaza belongs to the Palestinians and the people living in Gaza”.
The Arab League also forcefully opposed the plan, issuing a statement on Monday, stating, “The forced displacement and
Who does like it?
Many right-wing Israelis.
The idea of removing Palestinians from Gaza and replacing them with Israelis has been popular among a significant portion of Israelis ever since the initial illegal Israeli settlements were removed from Gaza in 2005.
It took on new relevance in the eyes of many following the Hamas-led attack from Gaza on southern Israel on October 7 2023, which killed 1,139 people.
A conference, held in Jerusalem in January 2024 and titled Settlement Brings Security, drew 12 cabinet ministers, including the ultra-Zionist minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the far-right former minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir. Both took part in discussions centred around Palestinians’ “voluntary” migration from Gaza and its subsequent resettlement by Israelis.
Along with other right-wing ministers, both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich welcomed Trump’s suggestion of moving Palestinians to neighbouring states this week. Smotrich told reporters on Monday that he was already drawing up an “operational plan” to turn Trump’s idea into an actionable Israeli policy.
It’s also against international law, but that won’t stop Israel or Trump.
And to any Palestinian who tries to collect the promised payments, Trump will reply, “Fuck you. And if you don’t like it you can sue me.”
So much obscene wealth and power controlled by such evil. It must be said and stopped.
“From a demolished Iranian proxy to a prosperous Abrahamic ally”…are they even aware that Islam is an Abrahamic religion?
Stories such as this bring to mind the movie “The Twilight Zone”, specifically the story about the Nazi who finds himself among the other prisoners on the train to a nameless Nazi death camp. The fascists refuse to imagine a world where their identity, their important documents, and their wealth is stripped away, so they can be forcibly relocated to a foreign land, with the constant fear of death both during the trip and forever after their arrival.
Unfortunately, the closest we’ll get to this is their seeing their charismatic leader’s quick decline into the doddering and mentally absent shell of a man, his followers recognizing their sudden plunge into irrelevance and disgrace. My (possibly foolish) hope is that the damage of the Trump regime will be so overwhelming, that the party with a weaker leader will become a warning of what not to fall for. In the same way that Germany took their stance to full rejection of what the Nazis stood for, Republicans will find themselves incapable of escaping their now desperate lives, and reject the party which brought them there. There’s just not enough Flavor Aid for all of the MAGA voters, who are on the verge of losing everything.
I’ll have a genocide with a side order of ethnic cleansing.
That “GREATTrust” picture looks like they want to re-create Manhattan (with farmland, without any docks?).
Do they really think they’ll have enough fresh water to sustain even 10% of all that?
No doubt Palestinians will have lots of jobs, walking around “detecting” land mines and other stray explosives.
This is smacking of what the US and Canada did to indigenous peoples- herd them into the least desirable areas and Westernize the hell out of the remainder. I wonder when they will be proposing special schools to “raise better Palestinians” will be proposed.
And no, I am NOT making the argument that “because we did an evil thing, it is OK for Israel to do the same.” Quite the opposite, actually.
This, er, concept of a plan has been hanging around for months — Jared the Kushner is behind the details while his father-in-law fronts the scheme. Ending a war by killing all your opponents except the ones you can scare into flight is, ah, quite possibly the most obscene plan possible. Doing so for profit is … unspeakable.
Well, it’s long been established that no other countries want them, so… “Secure zones” is an interesting new euphemism, I guess.
Lol. No.
It’s worth remembering what it took to get Germany to that point: abject, utter defeat in a total war waged by much of the rest of the world, followed by occupation and a decades-long programme of rebuilding – and still the spiritual and political heirs of the Nazis are crawling back out of the woodwork as we speak. Meanwhile, the USA still hasn’t adequately defeated the Confederacy… In fact, it’s looking quite like the Confederacy is making a comeback.
The line about “prosperous Abrahamic ally” is to give the impression that ‘the Palestinians’/Muslims will be happily living there (well, some) and that both Israel and the US are perfectly happy with having Muslim friends.
(and that everything will be ‘fine and wonderful if Israel and the US get to have their way’, which is ‘self-evidently best for everyone’.)