Profiting from Reconstruction: The ‘GREAT Trust’ Plan for Gaza as a Paradigm of Global Urbanism

• In Event: Governing Space

Abstract

We examine the GREAT Trust, a 2025 reconstruction plan for Gaza, as a paradigmatic case of contemporary global urban development. Designed by U.S. and Israeli officials and now being implemented through Trump’s “Board of Peace,” the plan should be a sociopolitical impossibility: it is advanced by the same actors prosecuting genocide, premised on massive destruction and displacement, and unprecedented in its proposed pace and scale. Yet, it already appears feasible and profitable to those with the power to enact it. We argue that this sense of feasibility is produced through a process of moral repackaging that transforms a locally rooted political and historical crisis into a technical problem of global urban and economic development. This repackaging legitimizes globally circulating planning templates, expert networks, and investment logics as necessary instruments of reconstruction, while rendering Palestinian participation irrelevant.

Conducting a close reading of the GREAT Trust and situating our analysis within the global urbanism scholarship, we identify three mechanisms through which moral repackaging produces feasibility. First, the plan enacts a narrative rupture, temporally and spatially severing Gaza’s envisioned future from its political past. Second, it recomposes institutional legitimacy, elevating cosmopolitan experts and transnational investors as moral and technical authorities while displacing Gazans from decision-making. Third, it normalizes securitized governance, casting mass displacement as financially rational, surveillance and policing as investment protection, and rent extraction as common-sense urban administration. Importantly, these mechanisms are neither unique nor innovative; they draw on banal, globally circulating repertoires of large-scale development. Planning in Gaza should therefore be read not as an exception but as a paradigmatic expression of contemporary global urban development.

Authors

• Vineet Xie-Gupta, Northwestern University

• Salma Moustafa-Kamel, Northwestern University

• Mekarem Eljamal, Columbia University