It requires a special, almost crystalline purity of delusion to stand amidst the frozen, champagne-soaked peaks of Davos—a place where the global elite gather annually to pretend they aren't the architects of the world's demise—and propose that the solution to a blood-soaked, rubbled war zone is a nice set of luxury condominiums. Yet, this is precisely the theater of the absurd provided by Jared Kushner, the former First Son-in-Law and current prince regent of the geopolitical grift. In a display of tone-deafness so profound it borders on performance art, Kushner unveiled a “glittering plan” for Gaza, complete with computer-generated renderings of skyscrapers and waterfront promenades, effectively pitching the gentrification of a graveyard.

To the average observer, still capable of feeling the rudimentary pangs of shame, the juxtaposition is nauseating. Gaza is currently a landscape of pulverized concrete, starving children, and utter infrastructural collapse. But to the American real estate mind—a psyche so warped by transactional nihilism that it views history only as a series of zoning disputes—Gaza is simply a distressed asset. It is a beachfront property with a PR problem. The disconnect is not merely accidental; it is structural. Kushner, inaugurating President Trump’s Orwellian-sounding “Board of Peace,” views the Levant not as a cradle of civilization or a cauldron of ancient strife, but as a potential portfolio diversifier. The logic is impeccably, horrifically capitalist: once you clear away the debris (and the people living in it), the view of the Mediterranean is actually quite spectacular.

The “Board of Peace.” Roll the phrase around on your tongue. It tastes of aluminum and corporate letterhead. It sounds less like a diplomatic body and more like a shell company registered in the Cayman Islands to launder reputation credits. The very nomenclature betrays the Trumpian worldview: Peace is not a moral imperative or a cessation of violence; it is a board meeting. It is a deal to be struck, likely over well-done steak, where human rights are traded for air rights. The inauguration of such a board at Davos is the final punchline. Here are the masters of the universe, huddled in their North Face jackets, nodding sagely at renderings that look like a cancelled Dubai project from 2008, pretending that verticality is the antidote to radicalization.

Let us not pretend, however, that this is solely a failure of the Right. The Right brings the greed, certainly—the rapacious desire to turn the Holy Land into a high-end strip mall. But the international community, the feckless UN, and the performative Left have created the vacuum in which this stupidity can fester. Decades of failed diplomacy, empty resolutions, and the fetishization of a status quo that was never sustainable have led us to this moment. When the so-called "adults in the room" spend fifty years failing to provide basic dignity or a political horizon, eventually the slumlords will show up with a PowerPoint presentation and a bulldozer. The outrage from the liberal establishment is palpable, yet entirely impotent. They offer moral scolding; Kushner offers glass towers. Neither solves the hunger or the hatred, but at least the towers reflect the sun nicely.

The specific inclusion of skyscrapers in this plan is the chef’s kiss of dystopia. In a region where electricity is sporadic and sewage treatment is a distant memory, the construction of high-density, energy-dependent glass monoliths is not just impractical; it is an insult to the laws of physics. But reality has never been a constraint for this particular brand of American exceptionalism. The plan assumes that if you simply build the aesthetics of prosperity—the shimmering facades, the manicured lawns, the duty-free shops—the messy, bloody reality of ethnonationalist conflict will simply evaporate. It is the belief that you can gentrify your way out of a genocide. It posits that there is no grievance so deep that it cannot be smoothed over with a concierge service and a gym membership.

Ultimately, this proposal is a mirror held up to the emptiness of modern geopolitics. We have ceased to try to solve problems; we now simply try to redevelop them. The “Board of Peace” will likely accomplish nothing other than generating billing hours for consultants and architects who specialize in building fortresses for the rich. The skyscrapers will remain pixelated ghosts on a screen, a glittering hallucination hovering over the rubble. But the audacity of the attempt tells us everything we need to know about who runs the world. They do not see human beings. They see square footage. And in their eyes, the only thing preventing peace in the Middle East is a lack of luxury amenities.