Critical Reading of “Disaster Capitalism” Plans for the Gaza Strip The - Policy Brief (8)

International media has recently reported a USA administration vision for the post-war reconstruction of Gaza Strip, a blueprint whose exact origins and authorship remains unclear. While the reported plan entails ethnic cleansing on a massive, organised and funded scale, many of its financial, economic and governance features can be traced to three “plans” published over the past year by Israeli, US and Arab “think-tanks” and purported planning experts. As documented in a recent MAS report and discussed in a Study Day in July of this year, these and other proposals that have been floated from global sources are accurately grouped under the rubric of “disaster capitalist” schemes, leveraging collapse as an opportunity to restructure politics and the economy according to standards that do not serve the local population. The Director-General of MAS commented that “these have been applied in different global neo-colonial experiences, most recently under the US imposed “Bremer” Transitional Authority in Iraq, with a similar governance model under Tony Blair being mulled by hostile powers for the Gaza Strip.”

From a first reading of the recent document, which appears to have drawn on a number of previously published plans, Khalidi commented that it “includes the Israeli Prime Minister’s hallucinatory vision for an Israeli controlled Gaza Strip and two other such schemes, which essentially rely on expropriating and ethnically cleansing the Gaza Strip under supervision of an international financial consortium, treating this inseparable part of Palestine and its 2 million people as fair game for such rapacious and predatory financial imperatives.”

MAS republishes here for the public interest, the sections of its report on two of the preceding plans that inform and shape the more encompassing document presented this week, which analyses each of them according to a systematic methodology:

• A proposal by a US academic, taken up in 2024 by Jared Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law) and apparently the basis for the first proposal made by Trump in Febriuary 2025 regarding the US “taking over” Gaza Strip

A similar proposal prepared by a UAE research centre which envisages a Gaza Strip owned and managed for 50 years by an international financial consortium and affiliated powers