Illustrative Image: Donald Trump in 1980s gazes over a model of his planned Television City to replace Hudson Yards on the Hudson River in New York City; the Hudson Yards before they were renewed (Images: Supplied) | Gaza Map ( Image: Sourced / brittainica) 
At his recent press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, in a seemingly unexpected riff, floated a plan to totally rebuild the entire Gaza territory – from scratch. This plan would include – presumably forcibly – relocating its beleaguered inhabitants elsewhere.
Once Gaza was a giant vacant lot, property developers would clear the now-ruined landscape and then rebuild the entirety in a phantasmagorical version of a Miami Beach on the Eastern Mediterranean coast.
Trump called that dreamscape a beautiful Riviera, hinting it would have row after row of glittering hotels, casinos, theatres, entertainment zones, restaurants and beautiful homes, apartments and mansions for the international smart set to set up their housekeeping in this new paradise. In such a development there would undoubtedly be gleaming harbours for all the super-yachts to dock while their owners are touring the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean.
Naturally, that part of the world has a deep history of mega-developments. The Philistines built their temples of the Pentopolis (the five cities), including one that Samson had reportedly pulled down the pillars of in a suicidal fury. Centuries later, up the coast from Gaza, Roman-era King Herod had built his brand-new port of Caesarea, as well as a new temple in Jerusalem (the remnants of which, the Wailing Wall, still remain), and a massive castle and mausoleum and the fort of Masada in the Judean Desert. Later builders during the European Crusades against the Muslim kingdom added yet other massive structures such as their seaside castle at Acre.
Read more: United Nations chief warns Trump against ethnic cleansing in Gaza
When President Trump made his announcement, almost immediately there were scowls of disapproval and still stronger expressions of opposition, or just amazed puzzlement globally of what he actually had in mind.
The plan – or more realistically, what Trump probably would have called “the germ of an idea of the concept of a potential plan” if it had come from someone else – seemingly had been drafted without any of the usual government staffing and study regarding the details needed for something of this magnitude, as well as a weighing of broader policy implications.
Instead, it was spoken of in defiance of the usual way major foreign policy initiatives are thought through. But, hey, this is the improvisational way Donald Trump rolls: Talk first; sort it all out later, or just move on when the plan disintegrates after it runs into reality.
But reality has a way of intruding on Donald Trump’s plans. This particular pop-up plan triggered David Aaron Miller, the veteran Mideast expert and negotiator, to say the plan was a fantasy from a galaxy far, far away.
Would-be financiers of its massive cost – especially the guardians of the Persian Gulf oil sheikdoms’ massive wealth – have already given a rather public thumbs down on the project, linking their demurrals to the necessity of making tangible progress on achieving that ever-elusive two-state solution between Arabs and Israelis.
Meanwhile, no Western financiers appear to have stepped up to offer support either – not even Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his multibillion-dollar investment fund bankrolled by the Saudis.
Classic Trump
But since we are talking about Donald Trump, even though some people believe he has the attention span of a goldfish and doesn’t bother to read or listen to briefings, it is also true that once he has an idea in his sights, he can be truly obsessive about something that interests him. If an idea, a thought, a fact, or factoid intrigues him, he can hang on to it like a proper Rottweiler or Jack Russell terrier.
One of those ideas has been with him for decades – right from the time he began his real estate development career. That is making massive, attention-grabbing statements via real estate developments that have everyone talking about them – and about him. Perhaps in addition to his narcissist syndrome, he also suffers from an edifice complex as well.
Back in the 1980s, when he was riding high as that young, would-be master of the universe-style property developer, Donald Trump developed a plan to totally rebuild a vast expanse of prime real estate, an old railroad marshalling yard in mid-town Manhattan, fronting on the Hudson River.
His new city-within-a-city would house a major television network’s studios and offices, with Manhattan-style tower block apartments, parks, office buildings, shopping complexes – the works. There is a photograph of a grinning Donald Trump, arms spread, encompassing an architect’s model of the development, as if to say, “This is what I can build; I can build anything I want to bring into being. I can build a whole new city if I want to do so.”
In November 1985, Trump announced the plans for his Television City complex. It would have nearly eight thousand apartments. Right in the middle would be a 150-storey tower with a 750-room hotel and 60 floors of residences in what would have then been the world’s tallest building. All the other towers would flank the central tower, north and south along the Hudson River.
Ultimately, however, between financing issues, environmental impact issues and city planning concerns, Trump lost control of the proposed development and the land on which it would be constructed. Thereafter, other development partners took over the project and built it on a less monumental scale and without that monumental building as the central focus. But as the years went by, he developed other projects and, sometimes, actually constructed them. It seems the impulse to build something truly monumental never seems to have left him.
Then came the Gaza conflict and the widespread devastation of the territory from Israel’s sustained bombing campaign, following the Hamas attack on an Israeli music festival on 7 October. Thus it came to pass that the circumstances of the conflict offered a unique opportunity for the globe-spanning master builder president to mix pouring concrete with reshaping the geopolitics of the Middle East. Such an effort would build upon the earlier Abraham Accords signed during his first term of office.
We might have thought the massive Gaza reconstruction had come to the president in a flash at two in the morning, was written on a scratch note he carried into that press conference, and then ad-libbed about it during the media conference. From media reports, it had not been discussed with the Israeli prime minister, and if one could judge from the look on Netanyahu’s face of wry astonishment as Trump was describing his plan, it took the Israelis by surprise.
Netanyahu did eventually say the plan could “change history.” But, surprisingly, a deeper dive shows an all-encompassing Gaza redevelopment plan had actually been offered to Donald Trump before he was elected.
‘A purely economic perspective’
George Washington University (GWU) economics professor Joseph Pelzman had actually sent a Gaza population relocation and development plan to Trump aides in July 2024, saying about it, “you have to destroy the whole place, restart from scratch”.
Pelzman is head of GWU’s Center of Excellence for the Economic Study of the Middle East and North Africa. He commented, “I figured, well, why don’t I write sort of an out-of-the-box perspective on how to fix Gaza after the war is finished?
“The paper went to the Trump people because they were the ones who initially had an interest in it – not the Biden people. I was asked [by Trump’s team] to think outside the box on what do we do after [the war], as nobody was really talking about it.” A version of his plan appeared in the October issue of the Global World Journal.
The Times of Israel described Pelzman’s plan, saying it, “…presents a viewpoint whereby Gaza’s economy has reached absolute rock bottom. Pelzman cites World Bank data, which states that between 2007 and 2022, Gaza’s annual GDP growth averaged 0.4%, while per capita GDP declined by 2.5% per year due to high population growth … no private or international investment entity would enter Gaza as things stand.”
The paper noted further that by March 2024, about 1.2 million people in Gaza were homeless and destitute “due ‘to Hamas actions’. Additionally, 62% of the buildings still standing had sustained severe damage that rendered them uninhabitable and 90% of the main roads had been destroyed.” There obviously is lots of work to be done there.
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Pelzman has added, “You have to destroy the whole place, you have to restart from scratch. And then you have an economy which actually has three sectors: you have tourism potential, you have agriculture potential, and then you have – because a lot of them are smart – high tech.”
He adds that his plan treats Gaza “from a purely economic perspective” which seeks “the investment solution to a failed experiment”.
Moving on to some actual numbers, Pelzman calculated that a total reconstruction of the territory “will range from $1-2-trillion and will take five to 10 years to complete”.
That is real money, and so far at least, there is not even a hint of where it would come from. The plan’s author admits carrying out this gargantuan task would need “the complete excavation of the terror tunnels.” (Much of that has already happened from the relentless bombing campaign, of course.) The plan also calls for a thoroughgoing installation of e-government and e-economy systems, a complete renewal of the educational system and the imposition of an entirely new security regimen to replace Hamas’ control.
No plan for Palestinians
Not surprisingly, neither Pelzman nor the incumbent president have offered any ideas for reestablishing security in the territory, actually planning a way to move two million Palestinians to “temporary” residences somewhere else, especially if they refuse to go, or in figuring out how those people would be able to return to Gaza at some point in the distant future.
There apparently is no discussion about how housing would be made available to those dispossessed and eventually allowed to return, rather than to the putative investors who would want dibs on one of those penthouses fronting onto the sea or just down the road from the yacht club.
Read more: Anger, despair and a sliver of hope for Gaza – the road to ceasefire is scarred with suffering
Naturally, too, there is nothing in either proponent’s scheme of anything that speaks to the political realities of carrying out any of this massive enterprise, let alone who would finance it, who would build it, who would design it, what kind of infrastructure would be created or even how it conceivably would interconnect somehow with an Israel that just happens to be down the road.
And, of course, there is no discussion in either of the Pelzman or Trump plans about the yet further humanitarian crises that would inevitably ensue in forcibly moving such a population already suffering from the devastation of the conflict and the loss of their blasted homeland, let alone the legality of such a forcible removal to somewhere else while this years-long reconstruction is carried out.
But for Trump, the idea of a massive building project on the Mediterranean Sea coast, an Emerald City right in the centre of the Middle East and carried out at his command, and the fulfilling of his thwarted Television City dream for the Hudson River, seems to be too tempting an opportunity for him to reject – even if it is the very definition of pie in the sky. DM
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