WHEN Jared Kushner unveiled Trump’s “Gaza development plan” at the signing ceremony in Davos on January 22, the vision was unmistakable: gleaming skyscrapers rising from rubble, data centres and manufacturing hubs, seaside resorts transforming devastation into opportunity.

The “Board of Peace,” chaired by Trump himself, would oversee this transformation. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister infamous for the illegal Iraq war, was appointed to the oversight committee. The architecture of empire had been completed, dressed in the language of reconstruction. What was presented as peace was, in fact, occupation perfected.

In 2010, then prime minister David Cameron outraged supporters of Israel by describing Gaza as a “prison camp” and an “open-air prison.” He was right. Israel’s blockade of Gaza then had deprived the people of Gaza of freedom and subjected them to the whims of an occupier who had become a captor, controlling the movements of both supplies and people.

The situation now is, of course, infinitely worse. What was a prison camp has become a death camp in which Israel, according to some estimates, has killed over 100,000 people. Two-thirds of them are women and children. Approximately 330,000 homes — nearly every residential structure in Gaza — lie destroyed or uninhabitable.

The entry of food and vital supplies is not just controlled but strangled — including tents and shelter materials as Israel uses winter and disease as weapons alongside bombs and missiles, despite the “ceasefire” notionally still in place.

And now, the death camp is about to become a labour camp, if Donald Trump is able to implement his Orwellian, imperial “Board of Peace” plan to complete the colonisation of Gaza. 

Under this, Gaza will become a waterfront resort for the wealthy, a facade behind which will be data centres and fragmented, segregated living quarters for Palestinians not killed or driven out. They will have survived genocide for the “privilege” of becoming essentially slave labour for the elites who run Gaza. If this dystopia sounds like the height of apartheid South Africa, that’s because it is. If it looks like the slaughter and oppression of indigenous American tribes, that’s because it is. If it also sounds like the “banality of evil” plot of the Oscar-winning film Zone of Interest, in which the privileged live comfortable lives while horrors take place behind the concentration camp walls next door, that’s because it is.

A number of governments have called this what it is and refused to participate, but all too few. The Starmer government refused to take part in the signing ceremony, but only — according to a No 10 spokesperson — because Russian President Vladimir Putin had been invited. So far, the British government is still considering whether to participate on the board itself. Starmer’s mentor and role model Tony Blair is, of course, already confirmed.

The inclusion of a single Palestinian in the plan — not on the board, but under both it and its subordinate “executive board” — is worse than tokenism. Ali Shaath will run a group of 15 technocrats — the so-called National Committee for the Administration of Gaza — who will report to the board. A Palestinian administration without Palestinian political authority, a government without sovereignty.

But Shaath served as a deputy minister in the Palestinian Authority (PA). Set up under the 1993 Oslo Accords, the PA is frequently accused of functioning as Israel’s collaborators and enforcers in the West Bank and has no authority or standing in Gaza. It will inevitably be argued that the mere fact that it is collaborating in Trump’s plan is enough to substantiate those accusations. The Palestinian Authority, already lacking democratic legitimacy, is further hollowed out, reduced to implementing technocratic solutions designed by international consultants.

Kushner said he and his “board” are planning for “catastrophic success.” It’s not how he meant it, of course — he was referring to his hope that resistance will be completely crushed or neutralised.

But he was right to use the word “catastrophic.” The plan, if implemented, will be a disaster for the Palestinian people and their legitimate hopes of statehood, self-determination and ultimately freedom. Those hopes would be buried.

This “master plan” may have been officially communicated last week, but it has been in place since the very beginning of Israel’s latest genocide of Gaza. In a CBS interview in October 2025, Kushner and US envoy Steve Witkoff talked of their master plan to exploit Gaza and develop it. Witkoff gave away that the plan had been in preparation for “the last two years.” The wholesale destruction of Gaza had begun less than two years earlier. Kushner’s words were chilling. He said he and Witkoff had decided that “with all of this chaos can come an opportunity.”

In this context, the Gaza plan runs like the plot of a gangster film: force the locals out of a neighbourhood to build a hotel, shopping centre and upmarket condos for the rich. This scenario is not fiction. It’s been played out in one form or another for decades in every major city in capitalist countries, as areas have been gentrified and the people born and raised there have been driven out by unreachable prices.

But in Gaza, the scene is being played out in its most sinister form. The Palestinian people wouldn’t leave and Israel’s blockade and occupation meant they couldn’t leave. Instead they have been murdered en masse and their homes demolished around them and on top of them. Now those behind the destruction and murder aim to collect their ill-gotten gains.

If there could have been any doubt that the “peace board” is in reality a council of gangsters, each looking for their “cut” of the stolen gains, understanding this train of events removes it.

Unsurprisingly, Trump is even looking to exploit the exploiters, charging a $1 billion fee for a permanent place on the council that he will personally control. A billion dollars buys a vote for the “donor,” but even that is subordinated to Trump’s personal casting vote on all matters, regardless of how other members vote.

That this plan would mean brutal repression for any genocide survivors still in Gaza is beyond doubt. The late, great Tony Benn said that Britons could tell how their government would treat them, “if they thought they could get away with it,” from how it treated refugees. Trump, ever brazen, has turned this on its head.

The Gaza plan’s framing as “peace” obscures a reality happening simultaneously in the West Bank: the accelerating colonisation of Palestinian territory. In 2025 alone, a record-breaking year, Israel approved 41 new settlements and advanced plans for 28,163 housing units. This represents the highest settlement expansion rate since 2017. In October 2025, the UN documented that 46,597 dunams of Palestinian land had been confiscated in 2024 — a staggering rate of land theft.

While international attention focused on Gaza’s ceasefire negotiations, Palestinian land was being systematically transferred to Israeli settlers at record pace. Over 770,000 settlers now occupy the West Bank, making Palestinian territorial contiguity — a basic requirement for Palestinian statehood — increasingly impossible. The strategy is transparent: saturate Palestinian territory with settlers and infrastructure until Palestinian self-determination becomes geometrically unfeasible.

The West Bank becomes increasingly fragmented, with Palestinian territory interspersed among Israeli settlements and military zones. Together, these policies ensure that no Palestinian state can emerge.

Gaza’s “reconstruction” under international oversight, combined with the West Bank’s intensifying colonisation, locks Palestinians into permanent subordination. Gaza becomes a reconstructed territory dependent on international handouts, unable to exercise political sovereignty or economic autonomy. Development imposed under occupation is not development — it is colonialism wearing the costume of modernisation. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Mustafa attempted to frame the situation optimistically, but the reality remained stark: Palestinians would administer services, but external powers would determine policy. Palestinians would implement decisions, but others would make them.

The right of Palestinian self-determination is codified in international law. In November 2025, the UN general assembly voted 164 to eight to reaffirm Palestinian self-determination, with only the United States, Israel, and six other nations voting against. The International Court of Justice has been unambiguous: any peace plan that fails to centre Palestinian self-determination violates international law. Yet Trump’s plan does exactly that — it centres development, reconstruction, technocratic efficiency and international oversight, while Palestinian self-determination remains peripheral, conditional and perpetually deferred.

Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary theorist who chronicled colonialism’s machinery, understood that “colonialism is not a thinking machine. It is naked violence.” Neocolonialism simply obscures that violence behind the language of development, efficiency, and international co-operation. The Board of Peace is the Board of Occupation. It is occupation perfected — managed, internationalised and justified through the rhetoric of reconstruction.

What happens in Gaza will set a precedent. If Trump’s board succeeds in imposing external control over Gaza’s reconstruction, it demonstrates a new imperialism model: neocolonial management of devastated territories, transformation of reconstruction into deepened subordination, substitution of political independence with technocratic administration.

Gaza would become a laboratory, not for Palestinian development, but for a new form of imperial control. This model would inevitably extend elsewhere — to territories deemed inconvenient, regions where resistance has exhausted local reconstruction capacity without external aid. Neocolonialism thrives on exactly this: creation of dependency conditions, followed by imposition of external management as the only solution.

How the legitimate inhabitants of Gaza would be treated by Trump-run mobsters can be seen, right now, on the streets of Minneapolis where even peaceful resistance is met with arbitrary murder. Like the people of India in the early 20th century, the people of Palestine know all too well what it’s like to be murdered and maimed for non-violent resistance.

But the people of India still had a country left to win when their resistance defeated the British. Under the Trump plan, the people of Palestine will have no recognisable land to return to. It will be buried under concrete, hotels and “data centres,” with every vestige of authentic Palestine erased by a “Las Vegas on the Med” with added slave camps.

Where old colonialism relied on direct political rule, neocolonialism achieves domination through financial dependency, the imposition of external structural conditions and the strategic silencing of local voices. It is imperialism with a development agenda. Palestinian labour will not simply be exploited — as in the West Bank, it will be controlled, managed and rendered surplus according to settler-colonial logic.

Everyone who cares about Palestinians must resist this board of mobsters. Every politician who aids and abets it must ultimately face charges for crimes against humanity.

The Palestinian people did not ask for this board. They asked for sovereignty. They asked for the end of occupation. They asked for self-determination — not granted by external powers but seized by their own organising and resistance. The future of Gaza does not belong to Trump, Blair or Netanyahu. It belongs to the Palestinian people.

International law affirms this. Fifty years of UN resolutions affirm this. And the Palestinian people, in their resilience and their struggle, affirm this through their very existence and resistance.

The reconstruction of Gaza must be led by Palestinians, controlled by Palestinians, and owned by Palestinians. Anything less is occupation by another name.

Claudia Webbe was previously the member of Parliament for Leicester East (2019-24). You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and x.com/claudiawebbe.