On Thursday in Davos, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner unveiled an ambitious plan for postwar Gaza that could be called MGGA, if Gaza had ever been great and if that weren’t so hard to pronounce. After all, Kushner said of his plan that “a lot of the things that President Trump is doing in America, if they’re working, we should all be copying them. If we find what’s working in other countries, we should be copying them, too.” Yet as ambitious and wide-ranging as it is, the success of Kushner’s plan rests entirely upon one core assumption upon which the whole enchilada, or in this case shawarma, is based.
And this is a shawarma with all the trimmings. As Kushner detailed Thursday, it looks as if the idea is to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East, as Trump suggested doing in Feb. 2025. CNN reported that “a ‘coastal tourism’ zone would run along the seafront — long enough for up to 180 skyscrapers, many likely earmarked as hotels.”
Kushner also “highlighted two urban developments, which he referred to as New Rafah and New Gaza. At ‘New Rafah,’ more than 100,000 permanent housing units would be built, along with over 200 schools and more than 75 medical facilities.” Meanwhile, “‘New Gaza’ is to be a center of industry, with the aim of achieving 100% full employment, Kushner said. Computer-generated images suggest a metropolis bearing a strong resemblance to Persian Gulf cities like Doha and Dubai, with gleaming waterside accommodations and office locations.”
It all sounds wonderful, but Kushner inadvertently alluded to what might torpedo the whole plan when he said: “Our goal here is peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. Everyone wants to live peacefully. Everyone wants to live with dignity…. Let’s focus on the positive stories, and let’s just calm down. Turn a new chapter. And if we believe that peace is possible, then peace really can be possible.”
Okay, I’ll calm down, but no matter how fervently I may believe that the moon is made of green cheese, it still won’t be so. And it is also, unfortunately, ain’t necessarily so that everyone wants to live in peace and dignity. Kushner is hardly the first Westerner to assume that all people think basically the same way and desire the same things. President George W. Bush expressed this assumption on Independence Day 2004, when he declared: “Listen, moms and dads in Iraq want to be able to raise their children in a society where their children can have a bright future, just like the moms and dads in America do.” Apparently they were just like the Palestinian moms and dads in Kushner’s mind.
Yet the principal stumbling block on the path to peace is the same in Gaza as it was in Iraq: the Qur’anic phrase “drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191). Palestinians routinely claim (falsely, as The Palestinian Delusion shows) that they were driven from their land by the Jews when Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, and the Arab League—primarily Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia—declared war on the nascent Jewish state, determined to destroy it in its cradle. Accordingly, a Palestinian Muslim is likely to believe that driving out the Israelis from where the Muslims themselves were driven out is a divine command that must be obeyed without question.
Destroying Israel is, in light of this, a religious imperative, even an act of worship. In March 2025, Hamas declared: “Stabbing the soldiers of the occupation is worship that brings us closer to Allah.”
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A Muslim who believes that Allah has commanded him to drive out the Jews from where he was driven out, and that this command is no more negotiable or susceptible to being questioned than the Ten Commandments is by a Jew or Christian, and that killing Jews is an act of worship, is not likely to accept a lasting agreement allowing Israelis and Palestinians live side by side in peace.
Donald Trump is a businessman. He has amassed a fortune making deals that others were sure could not be made. Maybe he and Kushner will find some way to induce a large number of Gazans to set this bloody belief system aside and make a deal that will redound to the benefit of all concerned. Or alternatively, this bloody ideology will relegate Kushner’s ambitious plan to the dustbin of history, where all the other Middle East peace plans reside. Either way, the Palestinians and their beliefs will decide the issue.
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