Ruins To Routes

Gaza Was Always The Endgame

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In Davos last week, Donald Trump unveiled the charter for what he called a “Board of Peace,”presenting it as the next phase of a twenty-point agenda and a mechanism for supervising Gaza’s reconstruction. Membership would rotate on three-year terms, with permanence available for a price: one billion dollars for a standing seat.

The document itself, however, tells a different story. Across eleven pages, Gaza is never mentioned. Instead, it describes a broad international arbitration forum that reads less like a reconstruction authority and more like a parallel institution modeled as an alternative to the United Nations.

That framing helps explain the tone of Jared Kushner’s recent remarks about Gaza, in which “beaches,” and “waterfront opportunity” were described as if he were pitching a coastal development project rather than speaking about a territory actual people. It also explains why the public anger over the absence of Palestinians on advisory boards misses the point. These initiatives are not built around consultation with the population that lives on the land. They are built around managing the land itself.

After years of blockade, repeated military operations, and an invasion that has destroyed most of Gaza’s urban infrastructure, the expectation that residents would be surveyed or consulted rests on a misunderstanding of how these projects are conceived.

This is also where the real estate narrative collapses under its own weight. If the project were truly about luxury waterfront living, or Trump Riviera, the regional market would already be absorbing similar supply. It is not. Israel is currently dealing with a housing surplus. According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, construction accelerated in 2023 even as transactions slowed and unsold inventory grew. That matters because it shreds the “Gaza Riviera” pitch on contact with reality. If Tel Aviv is struggling to absorb luxury supply, why would anyone expect billionaire demand for high-end units in a war-ravaged enclave? Israeli outlets have reported weak absorption even in high-demand areas, tying the slowdown to high interest rates and political instability, and the New York Times notes the paradox of rising construction alongside declining sales.

There’s another part people tiptoe around because it wrecks the fantasy. Nomi Bar-Yaacov at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy said a dense high-rise buildout would not be acceptable to Israel because towers would provide clear sightlines toward military bases near the border, as reported by AP. So are we supposed to believe, that Israel will approve a skyline of observation towers because a few moguls want infinity pools?

In reality, ports, rail spurs, security zones, financing structures, and concession agreements do not materialize in a matter of weeks. They require long lead times, prior modelling, and coordination across states, contractors, and lenders. The Trump Riviera story remains useful precisely because it is offensive. It invites the public to argue about taste and branding, while the real work happens in the architecture of control.

And of course nobody is going to say out loud that this was always the plan, because “luxury development” sounds defensible, even benevolent, while “we bombed Gaza for two years to build a trade corridor in order to beat China” isnt ideal.

What is being built is not a resort. It is a revitalized passage. Control of that passage determines who collects the rents of a multipolar trade system increasingly shaped by competition with China’s Belt and Road. Geography ensures that the Palestinian population bears the cost.

To understand why Gaza keeps resurfacing in corridor plans, you have to start with its older function, long before anyone dressed it up as “reconstruction.” Gaza and the coastal strip were never peripheral spaces in the regional economy.

In antiquity, they operated as a junction territory, the kind of place where routes converge and where trade cultures overlap by default. The numismatic record is a quiet tell. Coins from the 5th and 4th centuries BC show Gaza and Philistine cities participating in long-distance exchange networks, blending Greek, Egyptian, and local motifs in a way that makes sense only for a city that lives on through-traffic rather than isolation. Trade maps from the ancient world place Gaza on the hinge between Egypt, Arabia, and the Levant, tied into incense routes, Red Sea shipping, and Mediterranean exchange, which is another way of saying its value was never simply local but structural.

Gaza sits astride routes that have mattered to empires because they link continents. Ottoman railway projects such as the Hejaz Railway and the coastal lines running south from Jaffa were not designed to benefit the populations they crossed. They were intended to integrate territory into imperial supply chains, move troops rapidly, and centralize tax extraction. The Berlin–Baghdad Railway sought to connect Europe to Mesopotamia while bypassing rival maritime routes.

In the late Ottoman period, that same corridor role was formalized in steel. The Jaffa–Jerusalem railway completed in 1892, connected the port to the interior, turning what had long been a movement economy into a scheduled infrastructure economy, and once the British Mandate took over, the network was expanded and modernized with imperial needs in mind. Rail in that era was not just transportation. It was also logistics, control, and administrative reach, a way to move troops, supplies, and goods while binding territory into a wider system whose priorities were decided elsewhere. Gaza’s own lines linked nearby cities and facilitated the ordinary movement of people and freight, the kind of mundane connectivity that becomes politically volatile the moment it implies independent capacity rather than managed circulation.

That is why rhetoric is important. When contemporary officials and contractors talk about ports and rail in Gaza, they present it as modernization, connectivity, economic opportunity, the usual set of reassuring nouns. Yet the underlying geometry points toward something more familiar: the reconstruction of a junction under conditions that keep decision-making external.

You end up with a familiar pattern once you line up the public statements by geography instead of by PR theme.

On the Egyptian side, official and state-linked coverage has described a revived and expanding rail footprint in North Sinai, including reopening and extending lines that run east from the Canal zone toward Bir El Abd, putting rail infrastructure back into motion on the approach to Rafah and the Gaza seam. At the same time, Egypt’s separate national high-speed network, marketed as the “Suez Canal on rails,” is explicitly designed to move passengers and freight across the country between the Red Sea at Ain Sokhna and the Mediterranean at Alexandria and Marsa Matrouh, which is corridor logic even when it is wrapped in modernization language.

Further north, Turkey and regional partners have been openly talking about reviving Ottoman-era rail connectivity, including the Hejaz Railway revival framed as restoring trade and access corridors through the Levant and toward Red Sea gateways

Then you get the “security cleanup” storyline across Syria, where Turkey’s defence ministry has publicly cited the destruction of hundreds of kilometres of tunnels attributed to militant groups, presented as stabilizing territory and clearing the ground for normal life, a claim that also happens to make future transit and infrastructure projects easier to sell because the corridor is now described as “secured”.

Put those threads together and the shape that emerges is not a single announced mega line called “Rail through Gaza,” but a set of converging capacities that NO ONE SAYS OUTLOUD:

African commodities and freight corridors feeding north, Egyptian rail and ports strengthening the Red Sea to Mediterranean bridge, Levantine routes being reactivated under the banner of historical revival and postwar stabilization, and Gaza sitting exactly where those systems would logically want a controlled outlet, especially if a future port and logistics zone on the Gaza coast is positioned as an additional Mediterranean node tied into the broader Red Sea to Med trade geometry.

Modern planning reflects this same logic. Israeli proposals over the past decade have outlined land bridges linking the Mediterranean to the Gulf. In 2023, the United States and its partners announced the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor as a strategic alternative to China’s Belt and Road. Analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations have described these corridors explicitly as geopolitical instruments. A 2004 World Bank study assessed Gaza’s port potential. Subsequent corridor planning around Rafah remains archived in World Bank documentation. A 2014 UNCTAD report concluded that political control, not engineering feasibility, determined Gaza’s economic outcomes.

The assessments also share a consistent conclusion. Palestinian self-determination is framed as a security risk to economic development, not because it is inherently dangerous, but because it obstructs access to corridors and resources.

Agency itself becomes the liability. This logic appears in a development language. “Security” becomes the filter through which economic life must pass. The security file governs permits, trade flows, and construction rights.

Kushner said his reconstruction plan would only work if Gaza has “security” — a big “if.”

Israeli creation, Hamas and Fatah agreed more than a year ago to step aside in favor of a technocratic administration for Gaza, yet the rhetoric has not shifted. Disarmament is still treated as the central condition, and Gaza is still described as a standing security threat. The question is why. If the political factions were prepared to yield day-to-day governance, what exactly is being neutralized now?

The “armed militia” frame is too useful to retire. As long as Gaza can be cast as inherently dangerous, any action taken against it can be sold as security management rather than political engineering. A permanent emergency justifies permanent discretion, and permanent discretion creates space for permanent Western-trained law enforcement structures to take root. Once the threat is treated as intrinsic instead of contingent, control becomes administrative rather than debatable, and intervention becomes routine rather than exceptional.

And the scale problem is never addressed. Gaza is roughly the size of Detroit. To suggest that it contains a tactically advanced force capable of posing a strategic threat to the combined military power of the United States and Israel is not analysis, it is theater. The story persists not because it is convincing, but because it is functional. It supplies the rationale for control, delay, and intervention, while keeping the real questions about sovereignty, borders, and economic agency safely off the table.

The tunnel narrative plays a related role. Gaza’s underground is almost universally presented as militant infrastructure. Yet UN agencies and engineering assessments have long noted that it includes utilities and service corridors developed under siege conditions. Damage patterns documented by UN OCHA do not conform neatly to a single military classification. Investigative outlets such as The Intercept and Mondoweiss have questioned how the “terror tunnel” label has been applied broadly to justify destruction.

At the larger scale, China enters the picture. Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative has reshaped Eurasian logistics, as this whole thing is part of the U.S. response to promote alternative corridors under Western financing. It’s Gaza’s geography places it near the hinge between maritime chokepoints and overland routes, and what makes it so critical in terms of global hegemony.

This is also where Latin America enters the picture. Argentina’s government under Javier Milei has aligned closely with U.S. and Israeli positions, while Techint, the country’s dominant steel and engineering conglomerate, expands operations in Africa along corridor routes promoted by Western lenders. Julio Cordero’s move from Techint’s legal department into Milei’s cabinet illustrates how corporate and state interests converge around infrastructure. Techint’s subsidiaries in Angola and Mozambique sit directly along mineral corridors backed by U.S. and European financing.

This brings the discussion back to planning and war. Joint U.S.–Israeli exercises such as Juniper Oak rehearsed interoperability, multi-domain coordination, and large-scale operational integration. Official statements from U.S. Central Command and U.S. Fleet Forces describe the drills as the largest in the relationship’s history. Framed as deterrence, they nevertheless reflect urban and regional operational scenarios.

This is why it’s ridiculous to describe the Gaza campaign as retaliatory. It unfolded within long-standing contingency planning. Economic and infrastructural planning for Gaza’s “day after” also predates the war. The Trump administration’s Bahrain conference and its “Peace to Prosperity” program treated Palestinian territory as an economic design object years ago. Jared Kushner’s role matters because it shows continuity between prewar development rhetoric and postwar redevelopment language.

The benefit is not difficult to outline. The war has depopulated areas, destroyed records, and shattered governance. It has also produced moral shock that makes questioning motives politically risky. Yet acknowledging suffering does not require denying political utility.

Gaza’s future will not be decided by beachfront renderings or real-estate slogans. It will be decided by rails, ports, and logistics corridors binding Africa, the Levant, and Europe into a controlled supply chain. Decades of corridor planning reveal the objective of infrastructure without Palestinian sovereignty. Military exercises show that war planning preceded war. Development assessments show that reconstruction planning preceded destruction. The tunnel narrative shows how security language can criminalize economic agency.

What is being built is a passage. Whoever controls that passage controls the rents of a multipolar trade system increasingly organized around competition with China’s Belt and Road, with the Palestinian people left to pay the ultimate price.