Within 48 hours of the United Nations Security Council approving US President Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan for Gaza on 17th November, Israel launched several airstrikes across Gaza that killed 28 people, mostly women and children, and injured over 70 others. In the same time period, Israel bombed numerous locations in Lebanon, including a Palestinian refugee camp that killed 13 people, and Prime Minister Netanyahu, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, toured parts of Syria illegally occupied by Israel. In this context, the latest overtures towards peace by Western, Arab, and Israeli leaders at the Security Council are resoundingly hollow. This is especially so as Israel has committed over 700 ceasefire violations, killing 360 Palestinians, since the 10 October ceasefire (at time of writing), Hamas abjures disarmament without a Palestinian state, Israel continues to demolish Palestinian homes in Gaza, settlers and the Israeli military ramp up violence in the West Bank, and the Israeli government restricts promised aid. The violence of this Trumpian ‘peace’, which failed to include or dialogue with Palestinian civil society or armed factions, appears, rather, as a tempered continuation of Israel’s aggression in Gaza, named a genocide by the United Nations, leading genocide scholars, and humanitarian organisations. Pessimistically, the most likely outcomes seem to be either the ‘Lebanonisation of Gaza’, where Israel has wantonly breached that ceasefire over 10,000 times and killed more than 300 Lebanese civilians while still occupying Lebanon’s territory, or Israel will resume its full-scale assault.
So far, it has been the immediate, ‘political’ steps that have come under immense pressure in the 20-point Trump Peace Plan. This is not surprising considering that it does not present a realistic path to Palestinian self-determination, ignores Israel’s occupation of Palestine, elides holding perpetrators of violence accountable, and had no Palestinian input. What has yet to be sufficiently analysed are the ‘economic’ components of the Plan, and how they might contribute to, or undermine, peace. Trump’s Plan has distinctly three points that are crafted with Gaza’s economy in mind. In what follows, I argue that these stipulations reflect the new, hegemonic approach to development and peacebuilding – that of de-risking the conflict context to make it safe for private investment – which may foster dynamics that create more inequality, poverty, and violence in Gaza.
Making War Safe for Capitalism
Today’s common-sense method of development, equally applicable in ‘post’-conflict reconstruction, is to de-risk the political, economic, and social context for private investment. This de-risking paradigm emerged in 2015 as the Sustainable Development Goals were negotiated. At this time, major international financial institutions, namely the influential World Bank and International Monetary Fund, called for the mobilisation of ‘billions to trillions’ of dollars for development through private capital (such as that held by investment firms, pension funds, etc.). The argument went that eviscerated states could not afford to fund development, and so the immense sums held by private companies had to be mobilised instead. To encourage private investment in development, green initiatives, and peacebuilding, so the argument continued, it was necessary to completely ‘de-risk’ these contexts for investment – to promise substantial returns for investors whatever the risk, indemnified and guaranteed by the state itself or international institutions – with development repackaged as investible assets marketable to international investors. Daniela Gabor argues that this de-risking impetus reflects a broader evolution in neoliberalism to the Wall Street Consensus (cf. the prior Washington and Post-Washington Consensuses).
In my new book, Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine, I trace the emergence of this de-risking Wall Street Consensus through the influence of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. I also investigate how this de-risking model is applied not only in development contexts, but during active war. I study economic reforms in conflict contexts such as El Salvador, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and finally, my major case study, Ukraine, to track the emergence of this de-risking paradigm that aims to make war safe for private investors. This paradigm is now the new ‘common sense’ for development and peacebuilding that buttresses the economic points of Trump’s Peace Plan in Gaza.
The Economic Peaces
The major ‘economic’ points in Trump’s Plan are below and addressed in turn (my emphasis):
9. Gaza will be governed under the temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee… with oversight and supervision by a new international transitional body, the “Board of Peace”… This body will set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza until such time as the Palestinian Authority has completed its reform program, as outlined in various proposals, including President Trump’s peace plan in 2020 … This body will call on best international standards to create modern and efficient governance that serves the people of Gaza and is conducive to attracting investment;
10. A Trump economic development plan… to attract and facilitate these investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope for future Gaza; and,
11. A special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.
In point nine, the focus is the institution of an ‘apolitical’, technocratic and international body that sets Gaza’s ‘governance’ to attract investment. This echoes the New Constitutionalism of the Post-Washington Consensus, which sought to ensure economic decision-making was sectioned off from democratic accountability, preferably through internationalised agreements or bodies – seen in previous conflict settings such as Bosnia’s EU High Representative (ongoing and, again, in the midst of crisis) and the disastrous Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. This partition of economic decision-making also reappears in the new Wall Street Consensus, to guarantee the stability of economic policies for international finance and ensure a war-affected landscape is ‘conducive to attracting investment’. This body has been slated to include pro-Trump tech billionaires who have profited from Israel’s destruction in Gaza, led by Trump himself who may hold viceroy-like powers over Gaza and usher in the Wall Street Consensus on his sceptre.
The reform requirements placed on the Palestinian Authority (PA) are crucial here too. Trump’s 2020 ‘Peace to Prosperity’ plan, referenced in the Gaza deal, demanded that the extremely unpopular and ineffective PA strengthen the rule of law and private property rights for business, promote private sector growth through parcelling off projects for Public-Private Partnerships, a key de-risking tool, and implement austerity via fiscal stabilisation. Most points within this 2020 Plan are fantastical, as Israel controls all borders and the PA does not have an independent economic policy. Simultaneously, a fund, administered by an international institution (likely the World Bank), would implement ‘grants, concessional loans, and other support’ for private projects in the Occupied Territories. Revealingly, this fund may end up being the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) Trust, shared privately with Trump officials and created by those who established the illegitimate Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose ‘aid sites’ turned into massacres for Palestinian aid-seekers. Overall, these measures evidently look to de-risk the Occupation for private capital.
Point ten is the real crux of the Gaza deal, containing a ‘Trump Economic Development Plan’. However, as of yet, there is no detail on what this entails, but we can gleam insight based on movements by US allies and the current situation in Gaza. On the 12th of October, the UK hosted a conference at Wilton Park on financing Gaza’s reconstruction, inviting not only allies but international investors and institutions such as the World Bank. The resulting Communiqué mandated financing from the private sector to fund Gaza’s reconstruction, with the International Chamber of Commerce noting that ‘de-risking’ such private investment was the key topic of conversation.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel is digging in for an extended occupation of ~55% of the Strip it depopulated, outside of small armed gangs it protects and arms, as it expands the boundaries of the ceasefire ‘yellow line’ to further asphyxiate the entrapped Palestinian population in the west. The Israeli-controlled ‘East Gaza’ is a desolate wasteland, previously the breadbasket of the enclave, where the Occupation Forces and civil contractors continue to demolish remaining buildings. On 22 October, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, reappearing on the political scene, announced that reconstruction would only proceed in this Israeli-held territory. This ‘reconstruction’ reportedly entails building ghettoised detention camps of prefabricated container homes, euphemistically called ‘Alternative Safe Communities’, planned by a cabal of officials from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Israeli ‘magnates’, and the CEO of the Abraham Accords Aryeh Lightstone – reporting directly to Kushner. This ‘new Gaza’ is purposely quarantined from the Palestinian body politic, reminiscent of Trump’s ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ plan, to create a de-risked environment ‘that would be safe for the billions of dollars in investment’ into the Strip. Kushner, himself a real-estate developer, is engineering a de-risked and militarily occupied eastern Gaza, which he may exploit through his Saudi-backed investment fund, Affinity Partners, that prioritises Israeli investments. Indeed, it appears that Israeli firms, who have profited from Gaza’s destruction, will be first to profit from its reconstruction, as has been the case in previous rounds of reconstruction in Gaza (though most work went via tunnels). International private capital, Trumpian acolytes, and Israeli firms all stand to gain momentously from the US$70 billion needed to reconstruct Gaza, as the Israeli military implements what Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer, described as the ‘two-state solution’ within Gaza – or, more accurately, apartheid within apartheid.
Finally, point eleven calls for the establishment of special economic zones. As Quinn Slobodian writes in Crack Up Capitalism, these are democracy-free zones that set ‘preferable’ (i.e., low/non-existent) tariffs, taxes, and regulations on business. Elsewhere, special economic zones have driven down wages, compromised working rights/conditions, disintegrated state sovereignty, eroded ecological health, and helped corporates avoid tax and facilitate illicit trade. The vision is that these special zones would proliferate throughout Gaza, creating fantastical ‘charter cities’ controlled by capital that elide Palestinian sovereignty; or, even more astonishingly, the entirety of Gaza would be ‘one large industrial estate’, as suggested by a former World Bank Vice President. These reveries ignore that Gaza had such zones previously, which were constantly flattened by Israeli air strikes, and similar zones in the West Bank are notorious for supporting illegal Israeli settlements, extracting Palestinian resources, and furthering Palestinian de-development. Their establishment reflects the ongoing, naïve belief in a neoliberal ‘economic peace’ that is, rather, a central plank of Israeli settler colonialism, which has abjectly failed to catalyse peace in Palestine. The reanimation of the shuffling, zombified corpse of this economic peace through intensified de-risking efforts under the Wall Street Consensus is unlikely to produce a different result.
Conclusion: De-Risking the Occupation
In Making War Safe for Capitalism, I investigate how the application of de-risking reforms during conflict in Ukraine, in agriculture, gas, and pension, furthered immiseration, inequality, poverty, and potential conflict. Even on its own terms, the failures of the Wall Street Consensus are obvious. The ability for de-risking to ‘crowd in’ private capital for development is underwhelming, with Gabor noting that every dollar of public money mobilised a fraction of private capital (30 cents). Instead, foreign private investors have extracted over US$200bn in interest and repayments from developing countries since 2020, indebting and impoverishing these states, so that rather than ‘billions to trillions’, we have seen ‘millions in, billions out’.
It appears that the de-risking impetus of the Wall Street Consensus will inform the economic reconstruction at the heart of Trump’s Gaza Plan, which will mean profit for international investors, Israeli firms, and perhaps Palestinian elites. However, as my research has suggested, these de-risking measures for private business in warzones rarely benefit conflict-affected people and may even set the stage for further violence. Any peace in Gaza that does not address Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and Palestinian self-determination is bound to fail.
Elliot has an upcoming book launch in Brisbane for Making War Safe for Capitalism at Avid Reader, at 6PM on 6 February 2026. Attendance is free but registration is essential.
Comments