At the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Donald Trump's son-in-law and former senior advisor Jared Kushner presented a vision for what Gaza would look like. The vision was presented under the title "Empowering Gazans with Jobs, Training, and Services."
The planning includes extensive tourism zones with "180 mixed-use towers," green parks, sports and agriculture complexes, brown zones with industrial complexes, data centers, and "advanced manufacturing" facilities. Additionally, there would be more than 180 cultural and vocational training centers and more than 75 medical centers.
The vision, which sounds remarkably logical to Western ears, sounds to sober Israeli ears like a painful echo from the past. This vision, which integrates well with Donald Trump's business approach, is based on real estate deal logic: property improvement, value creation, and bringing prosperity. But beneath this glittering wrapper lies a dangerous, almost tragic return to the "economic peace" concept – the same concept that shattered on the morning of October 7.
The foundational assumption of Trump and Kushner, as well as many in the West and even in Israel in the past, is that humans are first and foremost "homo economicus" – rational economic creatures. According to this view, the root of the conflict lies in poverty, despair, and lack of employment prospects. The conclusion they draw is that if we just provide Gazans good livelihoods, luxury hotels, a port, and factories – the motivation for terror will decrease until it disappears. After all, who would want to risk a seaside villa and high salary for a military adventure? This is precisely the concept that enabled bringing workers from Gaza and Qatari cash suitcases, based on the belief that Gaza residents have "something to lose."
But Middle Eastern reality, and Palestinian reality in particular, proves again and again that the struggle is not about quality of life, but about national life itself in this land. The critical mistake of the Trump-Kushner approach is the attempt to reduce a deep national, religious, and identity conflict to a cash-flow and urban-development problem. The Palestinian national movement, and especially its extremist branches controlling Gaza, have never placed economic welfare at the top of their priorities. If they had wanted that, Gaza could have become the Singapore of the Middle East a decade ago, with the billions of dollars that flowed to it. But that money didn't go to building hotels, as in Kushner's vision – it went to building terror tunnels, rockets, and death machines.
The insistence on seeing the solution through an economic prism reveals a deep Western blindness to the ideological character of the enemy. Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian movements are driven by an ideology that sees eliminating Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel as a lofty goal, sanctifying any sacrifice – including poverty and hunger of their own people. For them, the land is not real estate waiting for a developer, but waqf land that must be liberated. When offered prosperity in exchange for giving up the dream of return and Israel's destruction – they see it as humiliating bribery, not an opportunity.
Moreover, history teaches that terror is not the exclusive domain of the poor. Many terror leaders came from established backgrounds, and jihadist ideology flourishes even in places not suffering from dire hunger. The thought that money will buy quiet is an optical illusion. Trump and Kushner's vision – with all the good intentions and desire to see a more stable world – ignores the most basic component: this is a national struggle. The other side is not seeking a business partnership, but historical victory.
The return to discourse about "the day after" in terms of economic development and real estate, without first neutralizing the nationalist-religious aspiration to destroy Israel, is a recipe for repeated disaster. As long as there is no clear decision and understanding on the other side that the dream of eliminating Israel has been crushed – no luxury hotel on Gaza's coast will prevent the next massacre. Quiet will be achieved only through security deterrence and national victory, not through checkbooks, however fat they may be.
Dr. Nissim Katz is an expert in communications and politics.
