Introduction
Israel’s war against Gaza has devastated Palestinian life there and destroyed the territory’s political economy and infrastructure. Palestinians continue to be trapped in a struggle for survival, and in negotiations over access to humanitarian relief. Meanwhile, the outside world is considering the territory’s future through “day after” reconstruction plans, most of which deny Palestinians any agency and threaten to introduce a pernicious form of “disaster capitalism.”
The concept of “disaster capitalism,” coined by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine in 2007, holds that conflicts, natural disasters, and other forms of crises create a propitious environment for political and economic elites to disempower and dispossess communities. Political control without democratic oversight allows these elites to capture and exploit reconstruction funds, and provides them with opportunities to grab land and natural resources and to privatize services. Gaza risks becoming another example of disaster capitalism, following earlier instances in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, among others.
While there are many reconstruction plans for Gaza in circulation, four in particular facilitate such an outcome. Two of the plans have been formulated by the most powerful governments controlling the situation in the territory. “Gaza 2035” has been prepared by the Israeli government, while “An Economic Plan for Rebuilding Gaza: A BOT Approach” is the work of George Washington University professor Joseph Pelzman, who in July 2024 submitted it to Donald Trump’s team, inspiring the president’s vision to turn Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” The third plan is from the “Gaza Futures Taskforce,” a project by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Vandenberg Coalition, both American neoconservative, pro-Israel think tanks. The fourth plan, “Pathways to a Durable Israeli-Palestinian Peace,” is by the RAND Corporation, another U.S. policy think tank, which adopts a framework similar to the one advanced by JINSA-Vandenberg.
All four plans make possible the introduction of three principal mechanisms that enable disaster capitalism: the establishment of a governance structure that denies Palestinians political agency and control over their future; a process of land grabbing, resource extraction, and reconstruction profiteering; and the imposition of security arrangements to enforce the conditions necessary for sustained political and economic control by Israel and its allies.
Moreover, given what has been documented in the scholarship concerning Israel’s brand of settler colonialism, which seeks to displace the Palestinian population and seize their land to expand Israeli-Jewish ownership and control, there are likely to be unique features of disaster capitalism, specifically the potential for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population. Indeed, the Israeli and U.S. plans, which represent the most extreme forms of disaster capitalism strategies for the territory, imply the reconstruction of Gaza without Palestinians. The implications of such external control and potential dispossession make it vital to reassert the best practice principles of post-conflict reconstruction, such as those embedded in the UN’s “triple nexus” framework, which suggests that sustainable recovery must be anchored in Palestinian self-determination, local agency, and sovereignty—values contradicted by all four of the proposed “day after” frameworks.
How the Gaza Reconstruction Plans Enable Disaster Capitalism
Disaster capitalism is made possible by denying local populations political agency during and directly after periods of chaos. This is a first step toward promoting what the geographer David Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession,” through the seizure of land and other natural resources, while implementing policies of privatization and foreign direct investment that deny local communities the funds to invest in their own future or control their political economy.
The examples of Afghanistan after 2001 and Iraq after 2003 illustrate this process. Both countries experienced “regime change” through wars led by the United States and its allies, which then waged counterinsurgency campaigns to expunge both societies of the influence of their previous governing parties—the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Baath Party in Iraq. In Afghanistan, a government of pro-Western elites handpicked by the Americans was put in place, instructed by hundreds of international “experts” and overseen by donors. According to Norwegian political scientist and Afghanistan expert Astri Suhrke, the Afghan authorities had no control over reconstruction funds and two-thirds of all aid was transferred directly by donors to subcontractors of their choice.
In Iraq, the United States set up a Coalition Provisional Authority with L. Paul Bremer as its chief executive. Bremer controlled the purse strings of the huge pot of reconstruction money, most of which went to U.S. companies in no-bid contracts. Bremer also changed Iraq’s laws to open up the country’s economy to foreign companies. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, keeping reconstruction funds out of the hands of the local community facilitated profiteering.
It is partly because of these experiences that we can discern the seeds of disaster capitalism in the four “day after” plans for Gaza. To varying degrees, each of them recommends that governance structures be imposed without local consent and designs security arrangements to enforce external control. Both of these steps permit the imposition of economic frameworks that will facilitate external appropriation and accumulation by dispossession.
When it comes to governance structures, all four plans adopt strategies that deny Palestinians control over their future, at least in the short to medium term. These take the form of an international administration under the supervision of Israel and other states, to oversee the rebuilding of the economy and governance sectors. In Israel’s Gaza 2035 plan, this is referred to as the Gaza Rehabilitation Authority. The United States BOT plan refers to a “civil administration/e-government” under the control of foreign investors, who “buy” shares in Gaza in “a 50-year lease arrangement.” Palestinian sovereignty is denied and can only be addressed after the end of this lease arrangement. As for JINSA-Vandenberg, it proposes an International Trust for Gaza Relief and Reconstruction, while RAND’s preferred moniker is a “multinational coalition authority.” None of these plans puts forward a role for Palestinian institutions, although occasionally there is reference to consultation processes with Palestinians vetted and approved by Israel and the United States. Denying local populations control over the governing and financing of reconstruction is an essential first step toward disaster capitalism.
Thereafter, crisis-driven reconstruction efforts become vehicles for appropriating public resources, seizing land, and transferring wealth from dispossessed populations to private capital. These dynamics are most visible in the United States BOT plan and Israel’s Gaza 2035. The U.S. plan represents accumulation by dispossession in its clearest form, as it transforms Palestinian territory into an investment commodity. Under this framework, Gaza is characterized as lacking any property laws and therefore can be wholly put up for sale to foreign investors. These investors would acquire “equity shares in Gaza” through the lease arrangement, commodifying the territory as a profit-generating asset. Investors would also have comprehensive control over Gaza’s governance, infrastructure, and economy. The plan promotes privatization by emphasizing the “private provision of public services” thereby converting Palestinian public assets into private profit streams for external investors.
Israel’s Gaza 2035 plan operationalizes accumulation by dispossession through direct resource appropriation and territorial restructuring. The plan explicitly targets Gaza’s substantial energy reserves—an estimated 122 trillion cubic feet of gas and 1.7 billion barrels of oil in the Mediterranean Levant Basin—as evidenced by the placement of oil rigs in the plan’s presentation materials. While these resources should be shared because oil and natural gas exist in common pools, Israel has been exploiting these fields for its sole benefit. This resource extraction is coupled with massive land appropriation through the planned construction of a 141-square-mile Gaza-Arish-Sderot Free Trade Zone along with rail corridors, which would bisect Gaza’s main highway and convert Palestinian public assets into sources of private profit for external investors. Moreover, the plan’s integration with Saudi Arabia’s NEOM project and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor would transform Gaza into a transit hub designed to facilitate regional capital flows and trade routes that bypass Palestinian economic needs. This integration reflects the thinking behind the broader Abraham Accords framework, which has enabled regional economic partnerships that marginalize Palestinian demands.
Crucially, both plans imply that the demographic displacement of the Palestinian population is a precondition. The BOT plan explicitly demands that Gaza be “completely excavated” to remove Hamas tunnels, with Pelzman, the author of the plan, highlighting in an interview that it “requires that the place be completely emptied out . . . literally emptied out, dug up from scratch.” While the Gaza 2035 plan does not explicitly mention displacement, its goal of population transfer is implicit in its framework of “rebuilding from nothing,” an idea reinforced by numerous Israeli official statements expressing the intention to ethnically cleanse Gaza’s Palestinians. Therefore, if Israel’s efforts succeed in this regard, versions of the two plans would likely govern Gaza’s future.
As for the two think tank reports, they do not directly discuss economic appropriation. However, they establish governance preconditions that have historically enabled dispossession in other contexts. Their proposals for administrative control by other states and bureaucrats, rather than by locally embedded institutions accountable to the people of Gaza, follow the classic disaster capitalism playbook. Past examples show us that these types of structures facilitate the capture of reconstruction funds and the imposition of new political economy arrangements without local consent.
Another pillar of disaster capitalism evident across all four plans is the use of security arrangements to create and maintain the conditions necessary for external political control and economic restructuring. Indeed, all the plans support Israel’s continuing use of military force to “neutralize” Hamas and other opposition groups and recommend that Israel retain “security control” over Gaza. The Israeli plan is explicit in this regard, whereas the U.S. BOT plan directly links security to capital interests, proposing that the financial interests of investors be protected. Both JINSA-Vandenberg and RAND recommend the creation and stationing of a multinational security force that will work closely with Israel. This force will also retrain, vet, and oversee a new Palestinian Authority security force, the same process instituted by the 2003 Roadmap to end the second Intifada. This security-first approach represents a core feature of disaster capitalism, whereby state violence and militarized control are used to suppress political mobilization and guarantee that stable conditions are in place for private capital.
This pattern reflects a uniform Western approach to Israeli-Palestinian “peace” processes. Every Western plan for peace between Israel and Palestine—from Oslo I (1993) and Oslo II (1994), to the Roadmap to Peace (2003), to today’s plans for post-conflict Gaza—has put Israeli security first and foremost. They have also made Palestinian sovereign statehood dependent on “final status negotiations” that have never materialized. Large aid packages for reconstruction after each Israeli instance of military aggression have represented a form of peacebuilding as counterinsurgency, aimed at buying Palestinian acquiescence. In all the Gaza plans, security becomes a justification for external control and therefore the primary enforcement mechanism of disaster capitalism.
The institutional backgrounds and professional trajectories of the plans’ authors provide additional evidence of how disaster capitalism is embedded within their Gaza reconstruction frameworks. Indeed, the authorship patterns reveal consistent involvement by pro-Israel individuals or organizations or those with experience in implementing similar projects in other post-conflict environments, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This institutional continuity indicates that the planning for Gaza is not an isolated phenomenon but part of a broader pattern of post-conflict, post-disaster economic and political transformation that rarely empowers local populations to prioritize and control their own process of recovery.
In the context of Israel’s settler colonial rule over Palestinians, disaster capitalism would also likely contain two unique features. The first is that, alongside an international administration of mostly Western but also perhaps some co-opted local elites, Israel would continue its harsh counterinsurgency activities. The second is that, together with land-grabbing and dispossession, there would be an imperative for ethnic cleansing. In other instances of disaster capitalism in conflict settings, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, or natural disaster settings, such as Haiti, there was no pressing requirement to kill or expel local populations to gain access to their land and resources. In Israel’s case, however, such actions are at the heart of Israel’s project to replace the Palestinian population with a Jewish-Israeli one, making the combination of Israeli settler colonialism and disaster capitalism potentially even more devastating for Palestinians. This is a feature not seen in other examples of disaster capitalism, creating the most dangerous context for Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe.
Principles for Sustainable and Ethical Reconstruction
The reasoning embedded in the Gaza plans makes it critical to reassert the foundational principles that should guide the territory’s reconstruction and rehabilitation. These are Palestinian self-determination, local agency, and sovereignty. All are grounded in international law and UN frameworks, offering a comprehensive alternative to the extractive models in the plans analyzed here. Specifically, the UN’s “triple nexus” framework, which integrates humanitarian action, development assistance, and peace-building, provides important guidelines for ethical reconstruction because it encourages action addressing root causes, while building sustainable local capacity.
Specifically, there are three core principles that should be emphasized to allow for the ethical and sustainable reconstruction of Gaza and to end the cycle of war-destruction-reconstruction of the past two decades. These principles collectively offer a comprehensive alternative to disaster capitalism reconstruction models.
First, previous reconstruction efforts, particularly in Gaza, have demonstrated that sustainable recovery cannot be achieved without addressing the root causes of conflict and destruction. Any “day after” framework should, therefore, connect reconstruction to broader political processes aimed at ending Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza and its occupation of the Palestinian territories, while recognizing the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, freedom, and justice. Sovereignty over borders, land, trade, and state funds is fundamental for development and ending aid dependency—goals embedded in the UN “triple nexus” approach.
Second, Palestinians must have ownership and inclusive agency in reconstruction. Palestinian institutions anchored in local communities must plan and implement short-, medium-, and long-term reconstruction efforts. This includes Palestinian control over funding allocations, contract distribution, and decisionmaking processes. Genuine ownership demands meaningful participation by all segments of Palestinian society in planning and governance processes, not hand-picked, Israel-vetted individual Palestinian business and political elites. This principle would also ensure that women, youths, different political factions, civil society organizations, and marginalized communities play substantive roles in shaping reconstruction priorities and implementation strategies. External actors should provide support rather than direction, ensuring that reconstruction benefits Palestinians rather than outside contractors, while also building local economic capacity instead of extractive relationships. Such an approach aligns with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which has established that development and governance agendas must be determined by affected populations and their institutions.
Operationalizing this principle requires locally embedded Palestinian institutions to take the lead in designing reconstruction frameworks from the ground up, drawing on the experience and knowledge that Palestinians have accumulated through multiple cycles of destruction and rebuilding. An essential first step would be the formation of a representative Palestinian reconstruction committee that encompasses diverse voices from Gaza’s civil society, including community organizations, academic institutions, business networks, and local and international Palestinian experts. Such a committee would develop a plan and direct reconstruction efforts, while engaging with international partners to ensure that external support serves Palestinian-defined objectives rather than foreign donor agendas. This participatory approach would ensure that diverse Palestinian perspectives, not just those of political or business elites, take the lead in reconstruction from the community level.
Third, international aid must be restructured to prevent donor fragmentation and competition and ensure donor support coordinated with a Palestinian leadership. The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for West Asia underlines that employing the UN’s framework for sustainable reconstruction requires harmonized international action rather than separate agendas that lead to dependency and donor competition. This means that donors must pool their resources and align their assistance with Palestinian-determined priorities that are implemented through local community-controlled mechanisms. Such coordination prevents a situation in which aid becomes a vehicle for external control rather than genuine recovery.
Looking Beyond Gaza
The four reconstruction plans prepared for Gaza reveal a troubling pattern. They engage in the systematic exclusion of Palestinian voices from frameworks that will determine the population’s future. While presented as solutions to Gaza’s devastation, these plans contain strategies that have allowed disaster capitalism to flourish in other post-conflict situations. The convergence of externally imposed governance structures, economic arrangements facilitating appropriation, and a security framework designed to suppress any political opposition to Israel’s control of Gaza create fertile ground for the dispossession and profiteering that characterize disaster capitalism.
Moreover, the implications extend beyond Gaza itself. Gaza has become a testing ground that will determine the trajectory of post-conflict reconstruction globally. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that if his plan for Gaza is successful, it could be “repeated in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.” Therefore, if the international community accepts externally imposed governance, economic appropriation, and the systematic exclusion of local voices in Gaza, this will create dangerous precedents that may be replicated in other places where reconstruction is needed. Conversely, if Gaza’s reconstruction is grounded in the principles of self-determination, inclusive participation, and locally controlled international support, it could embody a model that prioritizes genuine recovery over extraction. Since what happens in Gaza will not stay in Gaza, getting reconstruction right there should not be solely a Palestinian concern, but a global one.
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