Barf Bag: Haunted real estate Ken and husband to Ivanka had a big presentation in Switzerland!
I’m deeply saddened to report that this is not a headline from The Onion but is rather real life: Haunted doll Jared Kushner made a presentation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, outlining a disgusting “master plan” to rebuild the Gaza Strip that he believes should attract public and private investors and result in tourism.
In his little PowerPoint on Thursday, Kushner—who is married to President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka—presented splashy renderings of waterfront luxury high-rises and hotels in Gaza City that he claimed could be built in two to three years if there are security forces in place.
The Associated Press explains:
In Kushner’s vision of a future Gaza, there would be new roads and a new airport—the old one was destroyed by Israel more than 20 years ago—plus a new port, and an area along the coastline designated for “tourism” that is currently where most Palestinians live. The plan calls for eight “residential areas” interspersed with parks, agricultural land and sports facilities.
The AP spoke to two men whose houses have been destroyed and are now living with their families in displacement camps in Khan Younis. They said the best-case scenario is they would have a small apartment in the new buildings; that is, if any Gazans live there at all.
Then there’s the matter of where Gazans would live during the rebuilding. The AP notes that Kushner didn’t mention “where Gaza’s residents would live as their areas are being rebuilt.” Huh! Kushner claimed that the Middle Eastern countries have built cities like the one he’s envisioning in three years, but the United Nations says it will take more than seven years to clear out the 60 million-plus tons of rubble, which is enough to fill nearly 3,000 container ships. And there are unexploded weapons amid all that wreckage.
It also bears repeating that the “ceasefire” is very tenuous: Israeli troops have killed at least 470 Palestinians in Gaza since October 10. So yeah, this slide deck feels like an outline of the next phase of ethnic cleansing via displacement and gentrification.
This isn’t the first time Kushner sounded creepily interested in developing Gaza—after removing all the remaining residents, of course. He first floated the contours of this evil idea in early 2024, at which point we compared him to a Ken in a MAGA version of the Barbie movie whose job is “real estate.”Speaking at a Harvard Kennedy School event in February 2024, less than six months after the October 7 attacks, Kushner said that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable…if people would focus on building up livelihoods.” Buddy, the far-right factions in control of the Israeli government are focused on something else entirely.
Kushner called a two-state solution “a super bad idea,” which tracks, and claimed that Palestinians could simply come back after Gaza gets cleaned up. “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out [of Rafah] and then clean it up,” he said in 2024. “But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.” It was a laughable comment then, and is even more ludicrous now.
His grand idea at the time was to forcibly relocate Gazans to Egypt or a literal desert in southern Israel while developers spruce up the place. “I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there,” he said, adding, “I do think right now opening up the Negev, creating a secure area there, moving the civilians out, and then going in and finishing the job would be the right move.”
Now, about two years later, with his father-in-law back in the White House, Kushner is swooping in. He doesn’t technically work for the second Trump administration, but he serves on the executive committee of the Board of Peace, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and others. (The Kremlin claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin was invited to join, because we all know that he loves peace.) Kushner and Witkoff are also on the “Gaza Executive Board,” which is tasked with deploying international security forces, disarming Hamas, and rebuilding the occupied territory.
But I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised that this proposal is coming from the guy who said in a 2021 Wall Street Journal op-ed that the Israel–Palestine conflict was “nothing more than a real-estate dispute.”
Glad Jared is on the case!
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