Blogger Najm Al Din argues that Donald Trump and his real estate and Big Tech friends are planning to exploit Gaza’s reconstruction for massive profits, leading to further marginalisation of Palestinians through neoliberal policies, surveillance and land grabs.
With the latest round of hostage releases underway following a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the sheer scale of destruction in Gaza is dawning on policymakers.
As satellite imagery reveals the extent of damage caused by Israel’s bombardment, rebuilding the world’s largest open-air prison is a mammoth undertaking.
For many years, Israel imposed severe restrictions on construction materials from entering the Gaza Strip under dubious security pretexts.
Not only has this made international coordination on Gaza’s reconstruction fraught with challenges, bureaucratic hurdles have compounded the humanitarian catastrophe and prolonged the suffering of displaced families.
The majority of Gaza’s communications, healthcare and water systems have been rendered non-functional and its human development index has been set back almost seven decades according to the UN.
Since rebuilding could take decades and cost billions of dollars, who will foot the bill for such a daunting project?
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Before answering this question, it’s important to acknowledge that a standard operating procedure of capitalist economies is the corporate reengineering of societies which are reeling from shock.
Shock therapy
The origins of “shock therapy” can be traced back to neoliberal free market policies advocated by the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman.
Shock therapists are represented across several non-governmental agencies in the City of London, Wall Street and major financial hubs across the world and have amassed a reputation for seizing on the disorientation and destabilisation of indigenous communities in order to trial radical economic reforms, geared towards the rapid liberalisation and privatisation of industries.
We saw this shock therapy in Chile after the CIA-orchestrated coup against Salvador Allende led to austerity, deregulation and the capitalist makeover of an entire nation.
In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the same window of opportunity was exploited by free-market economists who pushed for the privatisation of key national enterprises and a slew of neoliberal reforms.
Throughout the War on Terror, the U.S., UK and leading NATO countries aggressively pursued the privatisation of treasured public holdings such as oil refineries and energy pipelines in conflict zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, culminating in an unhealthy concentration of national wealth in the hands of foreign oligarchs.
In more recent years, the pandemic exposed the rot at the heart of Britain’s political establishment, as the government awarded £4bn of Covid-related contracts to private companies, while neglecting essential public services.
Therefore, it would be naive to think that international agencies overseeing Gaza’s redevelopment have the interests of Palestinians at heart. Like the aforementioned crises, those with deeply embedded connections in the world of finance are not about to part with the neoliberal tradition of privatising profits and socialising losses.
Rather, Gaza is about to become another blueprint in the disaster capitalism archive, where a cross-section of the world’s elite administers shock therapy on a voiceless people.
So how might this play out under Donald Trump’s second term?
Real Estate
While many were encouraged by Trump’s insistence on brokering a ceasefire, the reality is that his transactional approach to politics is opposed to norm-based multilateralism.
Simply, Trump acts out of self-interest and not principal.
He will pursue long-term relationships with the highest bidders promising him and his close coterie of oligarch friends the biggest returns on investment. This explains the decision to lift restrictions on the supply of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel and informs the Republican leader’s policy on Gaza’s future, which Trump will determine on a quid pro quo basis.
It’s hardly surprising that Trump floated the idea of ethnically cleansing Gaza’s population by forcing them to the neighbouring states of Egypt and Jordan. Although his suggestion to “clean out” Gaza was met with rebuke in Cairo and Amman, property developers affiliated with Trump will be buoyed by the lucrative prospect of building seaside resorts for wealthy vacationers and neighbourhoods for illegal settlers, while Palestinians are transported like cattle to their new abode.
This heartless sentiment was echoed not long ago by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and established property tycoon, who urged Israel to “finish the job” and made no secret of his ambition to capitalise on the chaos by sizing up the potential of Gaza’s waterfront properties, reinforcing suspicions of private equity firms exploiting the crisis by adding another asset to their portfolios.
Big Tech
Property moguls aren’t the only vultures waiting to avail themselves of the opportunity presented by Gaza’s genocide.
Israeli tech firms who have built an entire economy around cybersecurity will be joined by Silicon Valley technocrats to rebuild Gaza through invasive surveillance technologies, most likely under the benevolent guise of climate change and counterterrorism.
There is already discussion about metaverse engineers leveraging geospatial mapping abilities of emerging technologies like digital twins to determine efficient ways of overhauling Gaza’s urban landscape and mitigate the adverse effects of climate change. While this offers innovative solutions as part of disaster preparedness, these speculative designs can also be weaponised against restive Palestinians.
At face value, reimaging Gaza as a hi-tech green space sounds appealing.
However, it will cede a significant portion of urban planning to tech monopolies who can scan copious volumes of data for behavioural patterns and micromanage an already beleaguered population as data commodities to feed ESG investors in future “smart cities.”
This full spectrum biometric surveillance will only add to the Gazan’s dystopian nightmare, who can be used as an early test case for geofencing and blockchain enabled social credit scoring.
Already a tech powerhouse playing a pioneering role in the World Economic Forum’s Fourth Industrial Revolution, a large concentration of technological power is converging in Tel Aviv and Gaza may well become ground zero for a new 21st century digital panopticon and data-driven eco-friendly urban centre controlled by cloud computing technologies.
Sadly, this grants the Zionists a granular picture of the behaviour, movement and digital footprint of every surviving Palestinian.
Therefore, any optimism regarding the current ceasefire shouldn’t deflect from how the region’s descent into chaos is being carefully managed to enrich asset holding conglomerates and Big Tech, as per the shock therapist playbook.
