SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
oslo accords
The Painful Irony of Trump’s Plan to Build an American-Owned Gaza Riviera
Attempts to develop independent Palestinian economic growth through the Builders for Peace program 30 years ago were derailed by Israeli restrictions.
Mar 10, 2025
When I first heard President Donald Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” scheme, it brought back memories of the hopes Palestinians had three decades ago during the heyday of the Oslo Accords. Back then, I was serving as co-chair of “Builders for Peace,” a project launched by then-Vice President Al Gore to encourage American businesses to invest in the Palestinian economy to support the fledgling peace process.
We had prepared for our mission by reading the exhaustive World Bank study on the pre-Oslo Palestinian economy. The observations and conclusions were sobering, and yet hopeful. It noted obstacles that stifled the development of a Palestinian economy—problems like: Israel’s control of Palestinian land, resources, and power; its refusal to allow Palestinians to independently import and export; and the impediments Israel had created to Palestinian travel and even to conducting commerce within the occupied lands. The bank, however, concluded that if these Israeli restrictions on Palestinian entrepreneurs were removed, external investment would provide opportunities for rapid growth and prosperity.
We also read Sara Roy’s brilliant study of the cruel measures Israel had implemented to “de-develop” Gaza so as to stifle the development of an independent economy, thereby creating a cheap pool of day laborers for Israeli businesses or a network of small workshops that produced items for export by Israeli companies.
When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia.
We also made a few exploratory visits to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to meet with business and political leaders to assess the possibilities before us and the challenges we would confront. In short order, both became quite clear.
When the project was ready to launch, my fellow co-chair, Mel Levine, and I led the first of a number of delegations of American business leaders (which included both Arab Americans and American Jews) to the Palestinian lands. Our first exposure to the problems we would encounter came as we attempted to enter via the Allenby Bridge from Jordan. American Jews and others passed easily, while Arab Americans were separated from the group and forced to undergo humiliating screening.
We convened a session in Jerusalem for Palestinians to meet with the Americans interested in investment opportunities, only to discover that in order to enter the city Palestinians had to secure a pass from the occupation authority. Since the passes only permitted them a few hours in the city, the time they were able to devote to our discussions proved limited.
Entry into and exit from Gaza was equally problematic. One scene on leaving Gaza has stayed with me. Hundreds of Palestinian men filled what I can only describe as cattle chutes, waiting in the sun for permission to enter into Israel. Straddling these chutes were young Israeli soldiers shouting at the Palestinians below, ordering them to look down and hold their passes above their heads. It was deeply disturbing.
In both Gaza and the West Bank, our meetings with Palestinian business leaders were hopeful. They were eager to discuss possibilities with their American counterparts, and the Americans were impressed. A number of partnerships were discussed.
Two projects were notable. One sought to manufacture leather products and another to assemble furniture. Both sought to take advantage of Gaza’s proximity to Eastern Europe so as to export there. As both projects required that the Israelis permit import of raw material and export of finished products, both projects failed. It appeared that the Israelis might have been willing to entertain such projects but only if the Americans and Palestinians operated through an Israeli middleman, thereby reducing the profitability of the ventures.
Even opportunities that the U.S. government tried to implement failed. One day I received a call from an official in the Department of Agriculture who told me that they had provided 50,000 bulbs for Gazans to develop a flower export industry. These bulbs he told me had been sitting in an Israeli port for months and were rotting. He said that the department was able to send another 25,000 bulbs but could only do so if the Israelis ensured their entry. This too proved fruitless as Israelis wanted no competition with their flower export industry, and therefore wouldn’t allow a competing Palestinian industry to develop.
After a few frustrating years, I saw then-President Bill Clinton who asked me how the project was developing. I told him about the frustrations we were encountering due to the Israeli impediments on investment in independent Palestinian economic growth. He appeared troubled and asked that I write him a detailed memo. The letter I sent to the president both outlined the specific problems we were facing and my complaint that his peace team was not taking these challenges seriously, as they insisted that any U.S. challenge to the Israelis would impede efforts to promote negotiations for peace. I told the president that since Oslo: Palestinian unemployment had doubled, poverty had risen, and Palestinians hope for peace was evaporating. To my dismay, the response I received from the White House appeared to have been drafted by his peace team, and was no response at all. At the end of Clinton’s first term, Builders for Peace (BfP) was disbanded and with it the hopes for Palestinian independent economic growth.
Over the next decade, absent any U.S. pressure on the Israelis to change their behavior, negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians continued to falter, Palestinians became poorer, Israeli became more emboldened and oppressive, and Palestinian attitudes hardened, leading to renewed violence.
There are two other memories from that period that need to be recalled.
One of the more optimistic projects BfP endorsed was a proposal by a Virginia-based Palestinian-American company to build a Marriott resort on the Gaza beachfront. Securing initial investment, they began construction, starting with the foundation and a massive parking garage. Because of the risks involved, they sought risk insurance from OPIC, the U.S. agency created to guarantee investment against risk. The project was endorsed by then-Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, a champion of our BfP, and supported by PLO head, Yasser Arafat—both of whom saw the resort hotel as laying the foundation for the future economic growth of a Palestinian state.
When Yasser Arafat spoke to us of the future of Gaza, he would say that with investment and freedom from occupation it could become Singapore; if denied both, it could become Somalia. Israel did everything it could to guarantee that Gaza would become Somalia—and they appear to have succeeded.
Against this backdrop, it was painful to hear of Trump’s insulting plan to build an American-owned Gaza Riviera. It reminded me of what might have been, but, three decades later, is being discussed without benefiting any Palestinians from its development.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Israel Plans 1,000 New Settlement Homes as West Bank Raids Intensify
"The Netanyahu government is operating on steroids to establish facts on the ground that will destroy the chance for peace and compromise," said one group.
Feb 17, 2025
Israeli authorities are planning to expand a Jewish-only settlement in the West Bank by nearly 1,000 homes, a Tel Aviv-based peace group said Sunday as Israeli soldiers and settlers escalated attacks on Palestinians in the illegally occupied territory.
Peace Now said Israel's Civil Administration has issued a new tender for the construction of 974 new housing units in Efrat, a Jewish-only colony located about 7.5 miles south of Jerusalem between Bethlehem and Hebron. The planned expansion will increase Efrat's population of approximately 11,800 residents by 40% and geographically isolate Palestinian communities in the southern West Bank.
Emboldened by U.S. President Donald Trump's return to power, far-right members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Cabinet have vowed to annex the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967 in violation of international law.
On Sunday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that "the goal for 2025 is to demolish more than the Palestinians build in the West Bank," according toAl Jazeera. This, following the largest Israeli seizure of Palestinian land in the West Bank in decades last year.
"The Netanyahu government is operating on steroids to establish facts on the ground that will destroy the chance for peace and compromise," said Peace Now, referring to the longtime Israeli practice of violating international law by colonizing and annexing Palestinian land to establish what one legal scholar has described as "de facto possession with the aim of attaining de jure possession."
Peace Now continued: "It is now clear that military action alone will not bring a solution to the conflict or security to Israel, and that ultimately we will have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. The Netanyahu government is harming Israeli interests and torpedoing the only solution that can bring us security and peace."
In the United States, the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement Monday that "the ongoing de facto annexation of the illegally occupied West Bank through the expansion of racially segregated illegal settlements is just one aspect of the far-right Israeli government's ethnic cleansing of the entirety of historic Palestine and of its relentless efforts to block justice for the Palestinian people."
Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at the Israel-based peace group Ir Amim, toldAl Jazeera that "since the start of 2025, Israeli authorities have demolished 27 structures in East Jerusalem, including 18 residential units, in what appears to be a systematic effort to remove Palestinians from their homes while simultaneously expanding Israeli settlements."
The Israeli settlement population has increased exponentially from around 1,500 colonists in 1970 to roughly 140,000 at the time of the Oslo Accords in 1993—under which Israel agreed to halt new settlement activity—to more than 500,000 today. Last July, the International Court of Justice, which is also weighing a genocide case concerning Israel's annihilation of the Gaza Strip, said that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must end "as rapidly as possible."
News of the Efrat expansion came as Israeli soldiers and settlers escalated attacks on Palestinians across the West Bank over the weekend. Occupation forces carried out raids in the towns of al-Issawiya and Salfit, near East Jerusalem, as well as the village of Nabi Saleh near Ramallah. Israeli troops also continued their siege and assault on Jenin and the Nur Shams refugee camp, where two young women, one of them pregnant, were shot dead last week.
Armed Israeli settlers from the Mikne Avraham colony also invaded al-Minya, south of Bethlehem, wounding 16 Palestinians including a pregnant woman who was attacked with clubs and rocks, according toMiddle East Eye. The Israeli newspaper Haaretzreported Saturday that settlers sicced dogs on al-Minya residents, wounding two people.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed 876 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
Since launching "Operation Iron Wall" on January 21, Israeli forces have killed at least 53 Palestinians across the West Bank. The Israeli offensive has forced around 40,000 people from their homes in what experts say is the largest displacement in the West Bank since more than 200,000 Palestinians were expelled during the 1967 conquest and occupation.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Gaza War Won’t End by Imposing a "Solution" on Palestinians
The place to start is to demand a cease-fire and end the crippling occupation. Palestinian views should be heard. The burden should be placed on Israel and its policies that created this mess and not on victims.
Nov 18, 2024
One century ago, when Western European powers were planning to carve up the Arab East, the US attempted to convince them to take a different path. Supporting the belief that the peoples recently freed from colonial rule should have the right to self-determination, the US sent a commission of prominent Americans to survey Arab public opinion to discover what they did and did not want for their future. The commission concluded that the overwhelming majority of Arabs rejected division or partition of their region, European mandates over them, and the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine. What they hoped for was a unitary Arab state.
The commission report also warned of conflict if the planned partition moved forward. The British Lord Balfour rejected these findings saying that the attitudes of the indigenous Arab population meant little to him, especially when weighed against the importance of the Zionist movement.
In the end, Lord Balfour got his way, and the dire prediction of the US commission has been borne out. The Arab East was partitioned, and a Mandate was established in Palestine, which the British used to foster Jewish immigration leading to the establishment of Israel. Since then, Palestinians have been dispossessed, displaced, and subjected to unceasing violence. Because they have resisted, the last century has been one continuous conflict culminating in the unfolding genocide in Gaza and crushing repression on the West Bank.
At present, the problem faced by the Palestinian people is that during the past three decades they have lost even more control over the circumstances of their lives. Since signing the Oslo Accords, Israel has taken steps to make impossible the establishment of a unified Palestinian state in the territories they occupied in 1967. The Israelis have severed what they call East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, distorting its economy and forcing its population to become dependent on Israel for employment and services. In the West Bank, the Israelis followed a plan to expand settlements and use “Jewish only” roads, infrastructure, checkpoints, and security zones to divide the Palestinian territory into small controlled areas. Gaza has been de-developed and subjected to economic strangulation for decades. It too has been cut off from the rest of Palestine. The dream of what had been hoped for after Oslo has been crushed.
Still, the Western world pays little attention to the needs and aspirations of the Palestinian people. Instead, led by the US, plans are being put forward to govern the future of the Palestinians without the consent of the governed. What is being proposed is a Gaza ruled by a “reformed” Palestinian Authority, with security provided by an Arab-Islamic force, and nothing more than a commitment to negotiate a future two-state solution. The proposal is a non-starter for two reasons.
Despite being designed to meet Israel’s needs, Israelis themselves have rejected the terms of this “day after” concept. They refuse to leave Gaza or allow Palestinians to return to areas of Gaza from which they have been “cleansed.” The Israelis also reject the role of outside forces to provide security. And they are refusing to entertain any discussion of a Palestinian state that involves connecting the divided Palestinian areas, especially if that includes ceding land, removing settlers, surrendering security control, or expanding the role of the Palestinian Authority.
More importantly the “day after” plans fail to take into account Palestinian views.
Instead of prioritizing what Israel (or the US) wants or requires and imposing plans on the Palestinians to meet Israel’s security needs, a shift is needed to an approach that challenges those Israeli policies that have led to Palestinian displacement and anger; distorted Palestinian political and economic development; and made it impossible to build Palestinian institutions that can earn respect.
The place to start is to demand a cease-fire and end the crippling occupation. Palestinian views should be heard. The burden should be placed on Israel and its policies that created this mess and not on victims.
There are some encouraging signs that public opinion in the US is shifting in a more pro-Palestinian direction. Americans are more supportive of Palestinians, and more opposed to Israeli policies that violate Palestinian rights. They are receptive to changing policies that would help Palestinians. But this where the conversation gets stuck, precisely because there is no clear Palestinian vision for the future and no leadership that can articulate it.
With this in mind, a group of Palestinian businessmen commissioned Zogby Research Services to measure the impact of Israeli policies in Gaza, the threats facing those on the West Bank, and to ask Palestinians what they identify as the best path forward to achieve their rights and peace.
What the poll reveals is that despite the different circumstances the Israelis have imposed on the Palestinians in each of the three regions under their control, there remains the common threads of identity, desire for freedom, and unity that continues to bind them together. What they want is that the knee of the Israeli occupation be lifted off their backs so that they can finally have freedom and independence in land of their own. Because they have lost faith, in varying degrees, with the performance of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, they favor: holding a popular referendum to elect a new generation of leadership that can advance a new vision for Palestine; unifying the Palestinian ranks to create a functioning government that can earn respect and recognition; while continuing to hold Israel accountable for its crimes in international bodies.
Of course, all of this must be developed further, but it is the better path to take precisely because it recognizes that instead of continuing to impose “solutions” on Palestinians, the place to begin is to ask them what they want, listen to what they say, and then work to make their aspirations a reality.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular