The Israeli military is already occupying over 75 percent of Gaza. It’s launched its most deadly, destructive and genocidal offensive against the Palestinian people yet. As we write, the few apartment buildings in Gaza City left standing are being demolished. Israel is dropping U.S.-made bombs on innocent civilians, obliterating whole families. Starving people have nowhere safe to go. 

Meanwhile, Israel and its key backers in the fascist Trump regime are discussing their plans for “the day after” Israel takes full control of Gaza.¹

One plan circulating within the Trump regime, leaked this week by the Washington Post, aims to make real Trump’s often repeated call to turn post-genocide Gaza into a modern, high-tech “Riviera” on the Mediterranean—under U.S. and Israeli, not Palestinian, control.²

The plan, spelled out in a 38-page booklet, is an imperialist predator’s vision of feasting—and profiting—off the broken bones, slaughtered children, and smoking ruins of the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza. Already, Israel has murdered 64,300 people and wounded over 162,005, with many, many more buried and uncounted amidst the rubble.

It’s a plan that would be carried out by a U.S.-led, and disgustingly named “Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation”—the “GREAT” Trust. It is a plan that displaces Gaza’s entire Palestinian population (initially inside or outside Gaza) and robs them of their national and human rights. It’s a plan that openly tramples on international law.

It should be renamed “Fascist Vampire’s Dream, Humanity’s Nightmare.”³   

It is not known whether this particular plan was discussed at Trump’s August 27 meeting on “post-war Gaza” with his son-in-law Jared Kushner, U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and others. (The Times of Israel reports that the fascist Trump regime is “weighing” the “GREAT” plan.) 

Whether or not this “GREAT Trust” scheme is ever implemented, the fact that it’s apparently being considered at the highest levels of the U.S. and Israeli governments is a damning exposure of the monumental crimes both are committing in Gaza, the fascist nature of both regimes, and of the bankruptcy and illegitimacy of the entire capitalist-imperialist system.

“A Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism”—run by the U.S.

The 38-page plan, laid out like a prospectus pitched to potential investors, was reportedly developed by some of the Israelis who initiated the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), as well as the Boston Consulting Group.⁴ The American- and Israeli-backed GHF is the organization responsible for the "aid sites" in Gaza which double as killing fields.⁵

Under this plan, Israel would have full security control over Gaza for a year, and then hand it off to the U.S.: “It can start as a U.S.-Israel bilateral agreement taking control from Israel to the US (once Hamas is disarmed) and evolve to a formal multilateral trusteeship.”⁶

It promises Gaza—where Israel has razed whole cities to the ground and destroyed 90 percent of the homes—can “transform into a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets... resources, and a young workforce all supported by Israeli tech and [Persian Gulf oil states’] investments.” It envisions investor-financed “mega-projects”—modern highways and rail lines, a new port and airport, solar arrays and a water desalination plant. There would supposedly be high-tech (“smart”) industrial zones and data centers for U.S. and Israeli companies, and a “Gaza Trump Riviera” of “world-class resorts” on the coast. All that and new urban centers with housing, schools, clinics and hospitals to boot.

The prospectus promises substantial—obscene would be a better word—returns for investors: nearly four times their initial investment and yearly revenue of $4.5 billion within a decade.⁷

This glimmering imperialist dream would literally be built on soil soaked in blood and terror of the Palestinian people, universities and hospitals demolished, homes and farms destroyed, skyscrapers built on the broken bones of children and poets.

The Fate of Gaza’s Palestinians—"From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally" 

The lead headline of the prospectus is “From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally." So right off the bat, Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians—with their own rich culture and history—are being smeared and reduced to "proxies" for the Islamic Republic of Iran.⁸   

The “GREAT” Trust calls for "a U.S.-led multilateral custodianship" lasting a decade or more and only then—supposedly—leading to a “reformed Palestinian self-governance” after Gaza is "demilitarized and de-radicalized." In other words, a Palestinian puppet government that has given up struggle for Palestinian liberation, and is completely subordinate to the U.S. and Israel.

The plan claims that no Palestinians would be forced to leave Gaza—but this is thinly veiled bullshit. Initially they would all be given "the choice" between two forms of displacement. One, leaving Gaza and receiving $5,000 and other incentives. Two, leaving their homes and being “temporarily” confined to a “secure zone” in Gaza—in other words a concentration camp—where they would supposedly be safe and taken care of.⁹ Property owners would be forced to give up their homes in return for a token they could supposedly turn in at some time in the future for one of the new apartments that will supposedly be built, or funds to leave Gaza.¹⁰

So according to the global exploiters who’ve concocted the “GREAT” plan, Palestinians who’ve been bombed, terrorized, starved, and displaced for over 700 days, who’ve seen their homes and communities flattened and their loved ones slaughtered or maimed, are now being given a real “choice”?

While the “GREAT Trust” plan makes all these claims, in reality and on the ground, Israel is moving to purge Gaza of ALL or nearly ALL Palestinian people—something which Trump has repeatedly given backing to.

One only has to recall Israel’s flagrantly broken promise during the 1948 Nakba that Palestinians could return to their homes to understand what a sham and a lie this is all likely to be. Nakba means “the catastrophe” in Arabic. It refers to the founding of Israel in 1948 where the racist, Jewish supremacist Zionists unleashed a massive wave of violence and terror against the Palestinians who had inhabited the land for centuries. About 750,000 Palestinians—more than 80 percent of the population in what would become the state of Israel—were expelled or fled and became refugees. Some 400 Palestinian towns and villages were either completely destroyed or repopulated by Jewish settlers and given new Hebrew names.

Palestinian refugees were driven into Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Egypt. Many still wear the keys to the homes they were forced to leave—with no right to return.

Gaza at the Crossroads of a New, Pro-American Region

The GREAT plan isn’t only about “massive” profits for investors. A key and explicit goal of this plan is to further entrench U.S. control of one of the world’s most strategic regions—the Middle East, and to bolster Israel and its regional reach as well. 

The plan argues that Gaza is located at what could become “the crossroads” of a restructured, more fully “pro-American” region, and a logistics hub for the India-Middle East-Europe Economic (trade and investment) Corridor.¹¹ This, the plan argues, would enable the U.S. to "strengthen" its "hold in the east Mediterranean and secure US industry access to $1.3 trillion of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf," as well as greater access to energy sources.

As the “GREAT” Trust prospectus puts it, “Gaza is a regional trade hub at the crossroads of the ancient Sea Route (Egypt ↠ Gaza ↠ Babylon) and the Incense Trade Route (India ↠ Yemen ↠ Arabia ↠ Europe). It can thrive once again at the center of pro -American regional architecture.” 

Imperialist Vultures Feeding on Gaza and Threatening Humanity

We do not know if this specific U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza into an imperialist "Riviera" will be carried out. But ever since taking office, Trump has repeatedly called for a U.S. takeover and the expulsion of the Palestinian population: “With the United States being in control of that piece of land, you’re going to have stability in the Middle East for the first time,” he said on February 11. “And the Palestinians, or the people that live now in Gaza, will be living beautifully in another location.”

These statements weren’t hot air. They were marching orders and a massive green light for Israel to escalate its genocide in Gaza and its violent ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian West Bank. And now the existence of this plan can be a further spur and justification for Israel’s genocide—a genocide that's being live-streamed to the whole world. 

Trump’s pronouncement, his actions, and now this plan underscore the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian’s analysis of the nature of the fascist Trump regime and the extreme danger it poses for humanity:

Trump fascism is a regime that openly and aggressively strips away basic rights and blatantly declares that there is no rule of law and due process of law other than what it dictates, and that raw destructive power is what must rule in the international arena, without even the pretense of adherence to international law or concern about the sovereignty, or even the right to exist, of less powerful peoples and countries.

It is a regime that is bent on unleashing unregulated and unfettered capitalist plunder, and in the pursuit of that takes a sledgehammer (or chainsaw) to crucial programs and services that people depend on—ruining livelihoods, wrecking science and health care, undermining and perverting education, and creating chaos that will cause huge numbers of people to suffer, here and all over the world.