The riviera on Gaza's ruins: A global economic experiment disguised as reconstruction - ynet
Imagine Gaza’s shoreline, a few kilometers of shattered coast reborn as luxury resorts, artificial islands in the style of Dubai and a neon casino glittering under the name “Trump Riviera & Islands.” This is not a dystopian fantasy. It is a genuine proposal embedded in the GREAT Trust, a U.S.-led international plan that seeks to rebuild Gaza by turning it into a financial and tourist hub.
Behind the glossy imagery lies a different agenda. Gaza is being recast as a laboratory for a global economic experiment. Land, once a symbol of home, belonging and identity, is now a financial asset, managed by an international trust, translated into digital tokens and traded on global markets. If this experiment succeeds, it will not stop in Gaza. It will be replicated across Africa, Southeast Asia and even Greenland, anywhere that conflict, poverty or political weakness can be reframed as an “investment opportunity.”
History has always been clear on one thing: land is not just real estate; it is the foundation of power. In feudal times, the lord who owned the soil ruled the people who worked it. In the twentieth century, land reforms from Egypt to Mexico to Latin America were never about improving agriculture; they were about dismantling old elites and building new political orders. Control over land has always meant control over people.
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The real novelty, then, lies not in the mechanism but in the scale. Gaza is a global pilot. If ruins can be turned into a profitable tourism and finance zone, all while maintaining “stability” and investor returns, the model can be applied anywhere. The formula is simple: take a weakened territory, rebrand it as a humanitarian problem, convert its land into a managed asset and extract profit under remote political supervision. What is unfolding in Gaza today may become tomorrow’s blueprint for other post-conflict regions, from Iraq to the Congo. Technology, far from liberating communities, is accelerating the financialization of land and pushing ownership ever farther from those who live on it.
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Ultimately, the question is not whether technology will change reality, it already has, by accelerating its pace. The real question is whether we will allow it to replicate an ancient order of power: one in which those who control the land wield authority, communities become footnotes and global markets turn into the true arena of human destiny.
https://www.ynetnews.com/opinions-analysis/article/s1ikwpwkzx
Dr. Bella Barda Bareket is a global trends analyst specializing in the intersection of economics, geopolitics and technology.
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