Another dystopian BCG model for Gaza's future
What value are people if they don’t trade derivatives, drown their sorrows in booze and games, and manufacture fake culture?
Other than making financial models for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza which would turn their properties into blockchain-based tradable assets for anyone with money, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) was involved in another stomach-churning dystopian plan for Gaza.
The Financial Times last week revealed BCG’s involvement in a plan envisaged by unnamed Israeli businessmen and the Tony Blair Institute “to reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub.” The proposal would have seen the besieged enclave turned into “‘Gaza Riviera’ with artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives, a deep water port to tie Gaza into the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor, and low-tax ‘special economic zones.’”
In short, the proposal — developed by a company run by a war criminal — a man who played a leading role in the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan — alongside nameless, faceless Israelis eager to throw EDM parties in debauched venues built atop the silent screams of Palestinian children who never had a chance to live, and a consulting group eager to profit off of a genocide that has killed upwards of half a million people already — has no place in it for the natives.
Titled the Great Trust — where Great stands for Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation — the plan reads less like a reconstruction effort and more like a high‑gloss urban‑planning‑cum‑real‑estate brochure for colonial ambition. Behind the polished renderings and talk of smart manufacturing zones lies a chillingly casual acceptance of mass displacement, dispossession, and profit-driven dehumanisation.
According to the report, the plan sought to pay half a million Palestinians — roughly a quarter of Gaza’s population — to leave their homeland, offering them a mere $9,000 per person to vanish quietly, never to return, while their land was transformed into beachfront property and blockchain assets for foreign investors in New York, London, and Riyadh.
The entire proposal is soaked in the language of techno-utopianism — “tokenisation,” “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing zone,” “MBZ Central Highway,” “MBS Ring,” “Gaza Trump Riviera” — as though tossing in Silicon Valley buzzwords and Gulf monarchs’ initials might somehow launder the flesh, blood, and rubble beneath. It is a neoliberal fever-dream dressed up as “postwar recovery,” but it cannot mask the stench of death, the silent screams, the hanging limbs, and forced removal of the natives.
At the heart of it all is the premise that Gaza — after enduring months of total siege, the levelling of entire neighbourhoods, famine, mass displacement, and a staggering death toll — is now ripe for investment. “A once-in-a-century opportunity,” as the Tony Blair Institute put it in its internal document. An opportunity for whom, exactly? Certainly not for the traumatised, starving, homeless population barely clinging to survival beneath thin plastic sheets and debris, while the sun beats down and the next bomb is never far away.
Indeed, while the Institute insists it did not “author or endorse” the final slide deck, it has been caught in a net of its own contradictions. Two of its staff members actively participated in group chats and calls where the plan was developed. One of them even authored a detailed proposal that outlined some of the very ideas later included in the businessmen’s deck: artificial islands off Gaza’s coast, special economic zones, and more. The denials, like Blair’s legacy in the Middle East, do not withstand scrutiny.
As for BCG, its fingerprints are all over the economic modelling used to legitimise this grotesque plan. The company now claims it disavows the work and has sacked the two partners responsible, but this too rings hollow. BCG created a glittering vision of value creation in Gaza — estimating an increase in the “value of Gaza to $324B from $0 today.” BCG, the soulless American corporation, placed the value of the faithful, gentle, noble people of Gaza at $0. Worthless. Useless. What good are people who can’t crunch numbers to estimate the profit from another people’s genocide? Can their value be anything but zero if they don’t trade derivatives, fill their empty lives with booze and games, and manufacture fake culture?
This is the future of Gaza that Trump once shared on his social media, now embodied in a slide deck.
This reconstruction plan is a blueprint for erasure. A vision of a Gaza emptied of Palestinians and filled with investment opportunities. An enclave stripped of its people and its soul, rebranded for the ultra-rich and sold with a blockchain bow.
The cruelty is matched only by the callousness. As Gaza bleeds, its ruins are measured for their economic potential. Its trauma is commodified. Its survivors are not invited to the table — they are the cost of doing business.
This is the apex of a long history of western indifference to Palestinian life. From the Balfour Declaration to the Oslo Accords, to today’s grotesque reimagining of Gaza as a luxury strip for foreign investors, Palestinians have been treated not as a people with inalienable rights, but as a problem to be managed, relocated, or erased. Their grief, their resilience, their unbreakable spirit, their human rights — none of it factors into the spreadsheets.
To dress this up as “humanitarian planning” is an insult to every life lost since Jewish supremacists first pitched their tents in Palestine over a century ago. This is the latest incarnation of their brutality now envisaged through pitch decks — digitised, de-politicised, and branded for a global market.
Gaza does not need artificial islands or blockchain tokens — leave those to the glittering void of Dubai. It does not need Musk, Trump, Blair, or BCG. It needs an end to the siege, justice for the dead, dignity for the living, and liberation for Palestine.
No amount of investor-friendly jargon can bury the truth: you cannot rebuild Gaza by erasing Palestinians.
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One thinks the killing, torture, in humanity involved in genocide is as low as a human can stoop. And them along comes Tony Blair, his institute, and BCG. If there is any one person on this planet who is more vile than Netanyahu, it's got to be Tony Blair. Such a disgusting excuse for a human being. If only they could be held accountable.
The point, of course, is to provide an unfeasible alternative and thus a pretext for ethnic cleansing or outright mass murder. Blair and BCG know full well what they are doing.