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The Real Estate of Empire: How Colonial Gentrification Fuels Trump's Gaza Plan
Trump, in positioning himself as both a political leader and a real estate mogul, offers a disturbing vision of the future in which state power is wielded to clear land for private enterprise.
Feb 07, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump's latest proposal concerning the future of Gaza has sent shockwaves throughout the international community. The plan, which envisions the mass displacement of Palestinians to make way for large-scale real estate development, has been described by many as a modern form of ethnic cleansing. However, beyond its immediate human rights implications, the proposal reflects a broader and increasingly pervasive trend: the privatization of colonialism. This emerging form of power, which fuses state-backed military interventions with corporate real estate ambitions, is not only reshaping geopolitics but also reinforcing patterns of displacement and profit-driven development that have long characterized capitalism.
In many ways, Trump's proposal is the most explicit articulation of an idea that has been growing within imperialist frameworks: that land is a commodity to be developed, often at the expense of the people who live there. This real estate-driven colonialism extends beyond Gaza, manifesting in urban gentrification, resource-driven land grabs, and international economic policies that prioritize profit over people. Trump, in positioning himself as both a political leader and a real estate mogul, offers a disturbing vision of the future in which state power is wielded to clear land for private enterprise.
Privatizing Occupation: Trump's Gaza Plan and the Business of Displacement
Trump's proposal for Gaza presents itself as a peace plan, but its underlying logic reveals an agenda that prioritizes economic opportunity for private developers over the well-being of Palestinians. According to reports, Trump envisions a future in which Gaza is transformed into a lucrative Mediterranean real estate hub, with its war-ravaged infrastructure replaced by hotels, casinos, and commercial developments. The prerequisite for this transformation? The mass displacement of the approximately 2 million Palestinians who currently live there.
The proposal suggests that Palestinians could be relocated to neighboring countries such as Jordan and Egypt, though neither of these nations has agreed to such a plan. In effect, this would mean the forced expulsion of an entire population to clear space for a new, corporate-friendly urban environment. This mirrors the logic of historical settler-colonial projects, where Indigenous populations were removed to make way for economic and territorial expansion.
Trump's plan for Gaza is not just about development; it is about a worldview in which land is valuable, but the people on it are not.
Trump's framing of the plan as an economic opportunity rather than a humanitarian crisis is key to understanding its ideological underpinnings. He clearly sees Gaza as what one commentator has called "prime real estate," describing it as "a phenomenal location. On the sea. The best weather." Such language makes it clear that he views the region not as a home for millions of people, but as an underutilized economic asset.
Moreover, the proposal fits into a larger pattern within Trump's worldview, in which peace and stability are linked to business development rather than justice or self-determination. The idea that economic investment can resolve deep-rooted political conflicts is a hallmark of neoliberal thinking, but in this case, it is being used as a smokescreen for a violent process of expulsion and reconstruction. In short, Trump's vision for Gaza is one in which real estate developers, backed by the force of the U.S. government, reap enormous profits from the destruction and displacement of an entire people.
Privately Developing the World
Trump's approach to Gaza is not an anomaly; it is emblematic of a broader trend in which colonial ambitions are increasingly expressed through private development. This is particularly evident in Trump's own history as a real estate developer and businessman, a background that deeply informs his approach to politics. Throughout his career, Trump has pursued massive redevelopment projects that often involved displacing existing communities in favor of high-end properties. Whether in New York, Atlantic City, or Florida, his business model has been one of aggressive gentrification, and his policies as president reflect this same mindset on a global scale.
This kind of real estate-driven imperialism has precedent. Historical colonial enterprises often functioned as public-private partnerships, where European powers worked alongside private companies to extract wealth from colonized lands. The British East India Company, for example, was both a corporate and colonial entity, using military force to secure economic dominance. Today, a similar dynamic is emerging, albeit in a more modern form. Instead of explicit colonial rule, nations exert influence through economic policies, real estate development, and financial speculation.
Trump's vision for Gaza exemplifies this shift. His proposal is not framed in terms of direct military occupation, but rather in terms of economic opportunity. In this sense, it represents an updated form of colonialism as led by an imperialist "developer in chief." One that eschews traditional mechanisms of control in favor of the logic of private investment. This shift has significant implications for how global conflicts are managed and resolved. Increasingly, wars and crises are being viewed not as humanitarian emergencies, but as business opportunities. Here the "temporary" displacement of Palestinians is being done in the name of making it the "the Riviera of the Middle East".
Profitable Properties, Expendable Populations
Trump's plan for Gaza is not just about development; it is about a worldview in which land is valuable, but the people on it are not. This is a direct extension of the logic of capitalism, which prioritizes profit over people and often sees human communities as obstacles to economic growth.
In this emerging paradigm, the world is increasingly seen as a series of underdeveloped properties waiting to be monetized. Whether in Gaza, Haiti, Sudan, or urban neighborhoods across major cities in the Global North and South, communities are being displaced under the guise of economic revitalization. The logic is simple: If a population is not financially profitable, it can be removed and replaced with one that is. This perspective transforms entire societies into mere real estate assets, and in doing so, it redefines the meaning of sovereignty, citizenship, and human rights.
Ultimately, Trump's Gaza plan is a warning: If we do not challenge the privatization of colonialism now, we will see this model replicated elsewhere.
This process is not just gentrification in the traditional sense but a form of colonial gentrification—one that operates at a global scale and fuses private development with state-backed displacement. Unlike typical urban gentrification, which displaces lower-income communities within a city, colonial gentrification is an extension of historic imperialism, where entire nations and Indigenous lands are restructured to serve the economic interests of external elites. It is a process in which the destruction of communities—whether through war, economic crisis, or environmental devastation—creates new financial opportunities for corporate actors and ruling-class investors. It does not merely "upgrade" an area for wealthier residents; it systematically removes and replaces populations that have already been subjected to colonial violence and economic marginalization. The same Palestinians whose dispossession began with Zionist settlement in the 20th century are now facing an escalated form of removal under the banner of capitalist redevelopment.
However, it is not just the economic dimension that makes this model so dangerous—it is also the political incentives that come with it. Figures like Trump and other far-right populists have increasingly politically profited from making certain populations expendable. By framing marginalized communities—whether refugees, the poor, Indigenous peoples, or racialized groups—as obstacles to national progress or economic revitalization, these leaders channel popular discontent into reactionary and xenophobic movements. This tactic diverts working-class anger away from the real sources of economic inequality—corporate greed, wealth extraction, and financial speculation—and redirects it toward vulnerable populations. At the same time, the same elites pushing these narratives are also economically profiting from this manufactured expendability, using state power to clear land, remove protections, and privatize resources under the guise of "security" or "development."
In Gaza, the historical injustices of dispossession and occupation have already left the Palestinian people in a precarious position. Trump's plan, far from being an isolated event, is simply the latest manifestation of a global pattern in which communities rendered vulnerable by centuries of exploitation are continually pushed aside in favor of profit-driven redevelopment. This is not just about turning land into a commodity; it is about reinforcing a hierarchy in which certain populations are deemed disposable while others are prioritized as the rightful beneficiaries of development.
The Progressive Struggle Against Global Gentrification
The fight against Trump's Gaza plan is about resisting an entire worldview in which land is nothing more than a commodity to be bought, sold, and developed for profit. The struggles in Palestine are deeply connected to broader struggles against gentrification and displacement across the world. Communities everywhere are being pushed out to make way for wealthier and more politically connected interests. In each case, state power is weaponized through both the police, private security firms, or the military to facilitate the removal of marginalized people, reinforcing systems of inequality while presenting these transformations as "progress" or "revitalization."
To combat this, we need a global movement that recognizes the link between colonialism, capitalism, and displacement. This means fighting not just for the right of Palestinians to remain in their homeland, but for the right of all people to stay in the communities they call home. It requires resisting policies that prioritize profit over people, exposing the ways in which development projects serve elite interests, and building systems that value human lives over real estate speculation. The forces pushing for displacement—whether through military occupation, corporate-led gentrification, or neoliberal economic restructuring—are deeply interconnected, which means resistance must be interconnected as well.
Palestinians, despite facing overwhelming military, political, and economic pressure, are already resisting this plan. Grassroots organizations, activists, and everyday people in Gaza and the broader Palestinian diaspora have long been engaged in a struggle to defend their land, preserve their culture, and assert their right to self-determination.
Ultimately, Trump's Gaza plan is a warning: If we do not challenge the privatization of colonialism now, we will see this model replicated elsewhere. But it is also an opportunity—an opportunity to build new coalitions, new strategies, and new visions for a world in which people, not profits, come first. The struggle against displacement in Palestine must be linked to struggles everywhere, forging a movement that refuses to accept a world in which entire communities are deemed expendable for the sake of corporate and political gain.
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Trump’s Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza Is a Brutal Form of Colonial Capitalism
The U.S. president’s real estate vision for Gaza—despicable and unlawful—epitomizes the modern Western colonial project.
Feb 05, 2025
Standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at joint press conference on February 4, U.S. President Donald Trump laid bare a subtext in his rhetoric about Gaza. According to Trump, the U.S. will “own” Gaza, Palestinians will be forcibly resettled in Arab states, and there never will be an independent Palestinian state. While the American state under Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden provided necessary material and rhetorical support for a slow genocide of the people of Gaza, Biden and his underlings never openly expressed a desire to colonize Gaza. The logical conclusion had been that Israel would complete its own colonization of Gaza, with the U.S. running diplomatic interference.
Now, the U.S. will not only violate the sovereignty of the Palestinian people, but Israel won’t even have a seat at the table: “The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it too… and get rid of the destroyed buildings [and] create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing,” Trump told reporters as Netanyahu stood by. As a consolation to Bibi, Trump seemed to indicate that the U.S. would soon be backing Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Trump now has outdone Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton as the most brazen recent president to conceal an imperialist project rejecting self-determination in the language of a foreign policy averse to intervention and informed by popular antiwar sentiments.
Human rights activists already had been seething with outrage over newly-inaugurated Trump’s comments about Gaza upon commencement of the cumbersome, drawn-out supposed cease-fire. Trump suggested that Palestinians in Gaza could be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, echoing the rhetoric of dispossession long uttered by the Israeli fascist right. According to Trump, Gaza was had already become a “demolition site” through the genocidal bombardment that he and his MAGA allies staunchly cheered on. Why not move the people out, and rebuild the area free from the democratic desires of the people?
Trump, the real estate developer president, understands better than the ethno-nationalist zealot Netanyahu that the real basis for colonization is dispossession and the creation of new property for the colonizers.
Trump’s statements are far from the ideological provocations that they seem. And Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has taken real steps toward being poised to make a fortune “rebuilding” Gaza with Saudi capital in his pocket. This is the art of the deal, not an Itamar Ben-Gvir racist fever dream.
Unfortunately, for Palestinians, there is no real operational difference between the Trumpian and Israeli far-right visions of Gaza’s future. Both amount to forced dispossession and relocation—which some human rights scholars call “ethnic cleansing” but others deem genocide. Both are fully colonial in the domination and subjugation of a people with the express aim of stealing their land. Perhaps both come back together as a closed circle when it comes to generating profits for the possessors, but Trump’s is the vision based wholly in naked real estate capitalism.
Consider Trump’s expressed idea of forcible relocation after the inauguration: “I’d rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where I think they could maybe live in peace for a change.” This is a developer’s callous materialism openly stated: Identify crisis that creates an opportunity to generate capital, offer an attention-grabbing promise (“peace”), find development partners (who will supply the capital), and collaborate with the racialized genocide in order to have a project. Palestinian agency, like the agency of American residents of neighborhoods that Trump and other developers have bulldozed or gentrified, is neither addressed nor acknowledged.
Unfortunately, Trump’s words don’t seem to be abstract ramblings but a cryptic disclosure of actual developments. (A majority of Trump’s critics mistake his overblown rhetoric for deliberate ideological bravado, when in fact it is garrulous self-disclosure of venal actions and desires.) Just before the “cease-fire” began, Israeli authorities permitted Jared Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners’ purchase of a nearly 10% ownership stake in Israeli company Phoenix Financial and Insurance.
Phoenix is the major funder of illegal West Bank and Golan Heights settlements, and the locus of how the racism of the religious extremists creates opportunities for capitalists whose financial motives lead them into consort with the far-right. Kushner has never been a rabid MAGA ideologue, and even is attributed as the lead influence on Trump to sign into law the criminal justice reforms of the First Step Act. His work on the Abraham Accords resonates well with Israeli and American Zionists but also with Arab elites who lately espouse support for the Palestinians. He epitomizes the sorts of capitalists who gladly collaborate with far-right regimes but whose ideological bearings are often unarticulated or even avowedly contradictory to the far-right.
Kushner’s firm is now loaded with $2 billion in equity from the Saudi sovereign investment fund. Thus Trump’s statement about development of new housing with an Arab nation partner has a bearing in potential reality—his own family already has the relationship to make such a project reality. Furthermore, Israeli Channel 12 chief political correspondent Amit Segal reported in late January that Trump’s expressed vision for colonial Gaza may have significant support within Netanyahu’s government. Perhaps Netanyahu’s appearance in the U.S. on February 4 shows an endorsement, with a quid pro quo on the West Bank.
The real estate vision of Gaza—in which its inhabitants are first punished by isolation, then killed through conditions designed to eliminate them, and then lastly relocated away from their land after their have dare to survive—essentially is the modern Western colonial project. Clearly colonization builds its constituency through an invocation of racial superiority than dehumanizes occupants, but what it ultimately does is create land where the colonizers can generate worth capable of creating surplus value. There are many deplorable people who will rejoice if Gaza is cleared of every last Palestinian, but then there are the people who want the clearance in order to reap the profit from the new private property of the land.
As scholar Brenna Bhandar writes in the Colonial Lives of Property (2018): “The ways in which we understand, practice, and perform modes of subjectivity that are rooted in possession and domination are intimately bound to the juridical apparatus of private property. One cannot be undone without dismantling the other.” Trump, the real estate developer president, understands better than the ethno-nationalist zealot Netanyahu that the real basis for colonization is dispossession and the creation of new property for the colonizers.
The colonial creation of private property from stolen land is the American way, from the theft of Indigenous people’s lands to the urban renewal clearance projects that built the modern New York City in which Donald Trump was able to thrive and build wealth. There can be no shock that the developer president’s first public words on Gaza would celebrate the old method of generating “demolition sites” (terra nullius, or empty land). In a way, Trump actually is daring those of us who support Palestinian sovereignty to understand the interdependence of capitalism and genocidal colonialism. There must be a people, and there must be a land. One without the other presents a windfall to the developers.
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Augustus Augustulus Trump
Newly inaugurated President Donald Trump is likely to oversee both the end of the American Republic and the end of the American Empire.
Jan 21, 2025
Augustus liquidated the Roman Republic a generation before Christ by appealing to religion, presenting himself as Apollo’s favorite, placing the senate under his authority, and becoming the first Roman emperor. He promoted upper-class birthrates, traditionalist moralism, and patriotic literature, such as Virgil’s commissioned Aeneid, a classic of political propaganda based on nonexistent facts about Rome’s past greatness.
Augustus capitalized on the social instability of the moment with a charismatic, demagogic, and strategic speech about making Rome great again under the symbol of the Golden Eagle. Half a millennium later, Augustulus was the last emperor of the Western Empire, defeated by the Germanic barbarians.
The American Empire, the most powerful in human history, is probably also the shortest. It has held that title for one-tenth as long as the Roman Empire in Europe and one-hundredth as long as the Eastern Empire.
The problem is not democracy but its substitute: the hijacking of an entire country and the world by the Anglo-Saxon techno-financial oligarchy.
For its part, China will end that rare historical exception called the “Century of Humiliation” and again be the greatest economic power, as it has been for millennia. We hope that what China has learned in those hundred years will not turn it into a Franco-Anglo-Saxon-type empire and that it will continue its oldest tradition of not subjugating peoples on the other side of the planet.
U.S. President Donald Trump is likely to be Augustus and Augustulus at the same time. We might wish that the replacement of hegemonies did not comply with the violent Thucydides Trap, as the replacement of Great Britain by the United States did not, but in that case, there was a strategic continuity of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Hegemony passed from one ally to the other.
Now, the differences are substantial, and above all, the Anglo-Saxon obsession with not allowing any global competition promises us a greater conflict. The Northwest finds itself facing not only a new example of success, that of communist China, but also its own national poverty and its international collapse. It no longer just exports violence, as it has historically done, but consumes it in its internal market. As a solution, it appeals to the same religious-style narrative as always, denying any evidence to the contrary.
One of its most recent sermons has been to justify the success of Chinese socialism with American state capitalism, even though Chinese corporations are below the communist government, while in the West, they are above it and despite the fact that the Chinese economy is planned by the government, not by corporations. China has a market economy (something that capitalism did not invent but rather limited), but it is not a capitalist country. It is a communist country in a still capitalist world.
Beyond its material power, Nonoccident is concerned about what has moved it for generations: the need to abort examples of success that are not “the only possible model”: corporate capitalism. Anglo-Saxon success was not based on capitalism but on overseas imperialism. The capitalist countries that served as colonial suppliers at a pittance were more capitalist than the United States.
Now, the example of Anglo-capitalist success is beginning to deteriorate due to the loss of global power and its profound internal contradictions, which are inherent to capitalism and are crudely coming to the surface: Almost 1 million people living on the streets of the United States; epidemics of addiction and deaths from overdoses; periodic massacres; ethnic hatred to disguise a ruthless class struggle; students indebted to the point of becoming indenture slaves; increasing social differences; crime that cannot be reduced; fascism on the rise; and recognition, until a few years ago unthinkable, that liberal democracy (the political circus of plutocracy) no longer works; recognition (now from the poor right and the wealthy capitalists) that democracy does not work and never worked; that the oligarchs have taken Washington, now without masks, to finish hijacking what was called democracy and multiply their coffers by investing in the wars of the end of the world…
Now, if, on the one hand, the politics of the successful example (the right, to put it in a simplified way) and the narratives about democracy and freedom have entered into a state of panic and catharsis of confession, on the other (the left), some taboos and totems have been broken forever. For example, suddenly, millions of Americans begin to consider apparent things, such as:
- Patriotism is another way of silencing the truth and maintaining justice with blindfolds.
- The problem is not democracy but its substitute: the hijacking of an entire country and the world by the Anglo-Saxon techno-financial oligarchy.
- The failure of the neoliberal dogma that private corporations do it better and cheaper.
- The uncontrolled criminality and corruption of parallel governments like the NSA, the CIA, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.
- The consensus breakdown on the Empire’s benevolent role. Before the confirmation of Marco Rubio as secretary of state, while he was handcuffed in the Capitol, an activist shouted what millions think: “Rubio is bloodthirsty… he only wants to keep us in a state of perpetual war; free Cuba from the sanctions that kill people. Freedom for Palestine.” Other ex-combatants were arrested for shouting to former Secretary of State Anthony Blinken: “We need money here, not to bomb children in Gaza.”
- The purchase of politicians, senators, and representatives by the biggest lobbies in Washington. In January 2025, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), referring to Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu and the Israeli lobby AIPAC, said: “Most Americans don’t want us to support a government that kills children, but if you say that, you’re going to face AIPAC and other millionaires and you’re going to lose the election… Many senators tell me, ‘God, what Netanyahu is doing is monstrous, but I can’t vote against him because they’re going to destroy my political career.’ They know that if the corporations are not pleased, they will lose the election…”
None of these criticisms and ideas are new. Many of us have been writing about this since the 1990s. Not before, because we weren’t born. What is new is that, at the same time that the fascist politics of the super-rich takes power in the White House, supported by a majority of the population that consumes their products, a new and growing minority has come out of the closet with a greater awareness of the de facto class struggle.
On Monday the 20, Donald Trump retook office. His grim face alone says much. His followers are not even hopeful. As Jorge Luis Borges would say, they are not united by love but by fear. As the Italian Oriana Fallaci wrote in 2001, which we criticized as the beginning of a dangerous era (“The Slow Suicide of the West” 2002), they are united by “rage and pride.”
Now, we must not lose sight of the fact that the more the nationalist, fascist, and feudal capitalist right progresses, the more evident a break becomes that will turn to the left, as always―and, as never before for a century, in a radical way.
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