The New Mandate for Palestine: ‘Safe Zones’ to Greater Israel
The official story sells Gaza as a problem to be managed: hostages to be freed, terrorists to be defeated, civilians to be protected through “safe zones” and “humanitarian corridors.” Strip away the slogans and a different picture emerges. The United States and Israel are not reluctant custodians of a tragedy. They are the architects and financiers of a project that aims to remove Palestinians from Gaza, cement permanent military control, and repurpose the coastline for profit. The key phrases of this project come straight from their own lexicon: “redevelopment,” “trusteeship,” “voluntary migration,” “humanitarian transit areas,” and “security buffers.” This is not the improvisation of war. It is policy by design, executed with bulldozers, consultants, and press releases.
From the outset, Washington’s role has been decisive, not peripheral. The U.S. frames, funds, shields, and in several instances openly claims ownership over the outcome. Israel, for its part, calls the shots on the ground. Together they have fused military doctrine with development finance to produce a modern colonial operation: displacement marketed as “reconstruction,” occupation baptized as “protection,” and annexation by any name but annexation.
The real estate vision behind the war
It is no accident that Gaza is repeatedly described in the language of property. When senior figures in the U.S. policy ecosystem call Gaza “very valuable waterfront property,” the mask slips. The words are not a gaffe. They are a statement of intent. If people are the problem, the land becomes the solution. The immediate corollary is to move the people and “clean up” the land.
That worldview was translated into spreadsheets by a blue-chip consultancy. The Boston Consulting Group’s internal “Aurora” work did not debate whether Palestinians should be removed. It modeled how to do it. Buses and cargo flows. Payment schedules and host-country options. The banal vocabulary of management hid a grotesque premise: depopulate Gaza efficiently and then unlock the development upside.
At the same time, a 38-page prospectus circulated in Washington under the banner of the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust. The acronym was GREAT. The pitch was simple. Place Gaza under U.S. or international “trusteeship” for a decade. Offer “voluntary migration” incentives to thin out the Palestinian presence. Tokenize land rights digitally for investors. Build the “Gaza Riviera” with smart districts and luxury hotels. The proposed sovereigns of the strip were not its people, but a rotation of U.S. administrators, Gulf funds, and Israeli partners. Palestinian sovereignty was an afterthought. Palestinian return was a problem to be managed, not a right to be honored.
The U.S. presidency then put the quiet part on loudspeaker. Talk of “we’ll own it” was not a slip. It was an admission that the goal of the trusteeship model is ownership in everything but name. When the most powerful office on earth speaks of owning a territory already inhabited by millions, the moral hierarchy could not be clearer. Palestinians are to be relocated, contained, or erased. The land is to be branded, leased, and sold.
Israel’s paper trail and public normalization
Israel provided the bureaucratic scaffolding. Six days after October 7, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence distributed an options paper on Gaza’s civilians. It listed three scenarios and favored the transfer of Gaza’s population into Egypt’s Sinai. Tent cities now, permanent housing later, and messaging to call it voluntary. That was not a fringe tract. It was a government document.
Within months, the language moved from leak to lectern. In Jerusalem, cabinet ministers and settler leaders hosted conferences on “Resettlement and Voluntary Migration.” Maps of the dismantled settlements of Gush Katif were dusted off, annotated, and presented as blueprints for return. Finance and security officials took the stage to normalize the idea that Palestinians could be “encouraged” to leave and that Jewish settlements could and should be rebuilt. Washington and European capitals issued their ritual condemnations. Nothing changed. Israel had openly mainstreamed the vocabulary of expulsion.
This is the division of labor that has defined the project to date. Israel writes the playbook, chooses the targets, and destroys the neighborhoods. The United States rebrands the outcome as “trusteeship,” lures funders with talk of “redevelopment,” and deploys humanitarian language to manage the optics.
The “humanitarian” machinery of expulsion
The coup de théâtre is the humanitarian façade. The same authorities who flatten districts and push civilians from one death zone to the next also offer “Humanitarian Transit Areas,” “humanitarian cities” in Rafah, and “safe zones.” These phrases function like air fresheners in a burned building. They do not change the substance. They mask the smell.
Humanitarian Transit Areas are not neutral. They are designed corridors to concentrate civilian flows, process them, and redirect them. Label the transfer “voluntary” and the law is sidestepped. Package it with cash cards, rations, and temporary housing and the moral clarity blurs. A “humanitarian city” sounds benign until one remembers that every refugee camp in Palestine was also “temporary,” and that many are still there after three quarters of a century. Safe zones are announced, then struck, then announced again somewhere else. The pattern is not an accident. It is a technique. The point is to keep people moving until the original neighborhoods are uninhabitable and the frontier has shifted for good.
None of this is possible without U.S. complicity. Washington bankrolls the weapons. Washington offers diplomatic cover at the Security Council. Washington speaks the language of “humanitarian deconfliction” while funding the very offensive that makes humanitarianism necessary. The choreography is seamless. Israel advances. The U.S. narrates. Palestinians are left to navigate a maze designed to deliver them out.
Earthworks that cannot be argued away
Words can be spun. Maps cannot. The Netzarim Corridor is a physical statement. It slices Gaza from coast to border, a militarized highway built on the ruins of homes. No one constructs that kind of infrastructure for a temporary police action. It exists to enforce a new geography where Gaza is no longer a single living territory but a series of fenced fragments that can be switched on and off like valves.
Around the perimeter, “security buffers” have been widened into lethal belts in which life is impossible. These are not “margins.” They are amputations. In place after place, the eastern and northern edges have been bulldozed inward by kilometers. Entire neighborhoods and farmlands are now sterile ground. The stated goal is security. The practical effect is the theft of a third of the strip by other means.
Rafah, once the last refuge, has been prepared for the same treatment. It is not enough to cut Gaza in half. The gateway to Egypt must be closed, encircled, and pulled into the controlled grid. That is the anatomy of permanent control: bisect the strip, widen the belts, choke the exits, and declare the result an unavoidable price of security. Once poured, concrete makes arguments obsolete.
Exporting the doctrine: when borders are “meaningless”
The Gaza template is already being exported north. In Lebanon, Israel reoccupied forward positions and linked any drawdown to the permanent disarming of Hezbollah. U.S. envoys describe Sykes–Picot borders as “meaningless” from Israel’s perspective. The meaning is plain. If a neighbor cannot satisfy Israel’s security demands, then Israel reserves the right to carve out an operational zone inside that neighbor and keep it indefinitely. Development talk follows quickly. Gulf-backed “industrial zones” in southern Lebanon appear as economic carrots to secure a military arrangement. The border remains on paper. In practice it shifts to wherever Israel plants posts.
In southern Syria the same logic holds. The Golan Heights were annexed long ago. Now, under the banner of preventing Iranian entrenchment, patrols and positions expand functional control further east. There is no formal annexation because it is not required. Security zones do the same job with fewer legal costs. It is Greater Israel without the ceremony, a federation of controlled spaces harvested from neighbors who cannot prevent it.
Again, the U.S. function is to bless and bankroll. Israeli demands become condition sheets for Washington’s diplomacy, and “regional stability” becomes the euphemism for carving out permanent exceptions to Arab sovereignty.
A very old script with a new sales deck
All of this has a precedent. The British Mandate dressed colonial control in the garments of international legitimacy. The League of Nations declared Britain a custodian tasked with preparing Palestine for self-rule while it facilitated a project that deliberately changed the country’s demography. Balfour gave the promise. White Papers and policing supplied the force. The “civilizing mission” supplied the story.
Today’s script is the same operation performed with cleaner graphics. Where London spoke of trusteeship, Washington speaks of “trusteeship.” Where the Mandate promised “development,” the U.S. offers “redevelopment.” Where British officials insisted they were balancing communities, American officials insist on “humanitarian protection.” The difference is candor. The Mandate seldom declared that it intended permanent Arab removal. The U.S.–Israeli project speaks, with striking frankness, of “voluntary migration,” “ownership,” and “rebranding” a coastline.
This is why the language matters. “Voluntary migration” in a pulverized war zone is not choice. “Humanitarian city” for a population whose homes have been flattened is not protection. “Trusteeship” asserted by a power that funds and arms the occupier is not stewardship. These are incantations designed to immobilize critics while the facts are changed on the ground.
Smokescreens in sequence
The sequencing is too consistent to ignore. The hostage narrative provides urgency, moral fury, and daily headlines. While the world watches the clock on negotiations, the engineering proceeds in the background. Hostage return never required permanent corridors, multi-kilometer kill belts, or digital land token schemes. But those things advanced under the cover of the hostage story.
The terrorism narrative supplies the umbrella. If the premise is that Gaza must never again be a launch pad, then any demand can be made to fit under security. Corridors that cannot be justified as counterinsurgency can be justified as defensive architecture. Once labeled security, a bulldozer becomes a prophylactic.
The humanitarian narrative supplies absolution. Announce “safe zones,” declare “humanitarian transit areas,” and you have created a flowchart in which each displacement is rebranded as a rescue. Open a crossing just enough for aid convoys and you can claim to be saving the same civilians you are driving from one unsafe zone to the next.
In every phase the U.S. stands in the center of the frame. It bankrolls the weapons that clear the land. It fends off international censure. It supplies the consultants and the prospectuses that translate expulsion into “reconstruction.” It offers the legal and financial shell called “trusteeship.” Without Washington, this project would be politically costly and financially risky. With Washington, it is packaged as inevitable and even lucrative.
The endgame, stated plainly
The endgame is visible in the promotional materials. A depopulated or thinned Gaza linked to Israel by militarized corridors and cut off by sterilized belts. A coastline parceled into development zones pitched to sovereign funds and private equity. A decade of U.S. administration that metastasizes into permanent control because the geography now makes any reversal unworkable. The people displaced into enclaves called “cities,” or exported under “voluntary” schemes that pair cash with coercion. A statehood horizon erased through facts on the ground, then declared dead for lack of realism.
Call it what it is. This is a land grab. The operational details are modern but the logic is ancient. Conquest marketed as guardianship. Removal marketed as choice. Profit marketed as peace.
What Gaza reveals
Gaza reveals the whole architecture because the operation there had to be conducted at scale and in public. Bulldozers, satellites, and cell phone cameras made secrecy impossible. So the story had to be updated. Not annexation, but “security zones.” Not cleansing, but “voluntary migration.” Not occupation, but “trusteeship.” Not looting, but “redevelopment.” Once the vocabulary was in place, the work could proceed in daylight. The result is now hard to deny. A strip amputated. A people scattered. A plan advanced.
The U.S. and Israel are not bystanders to that outcome. They are the authors. Israel engineers the terrain. The United States writes the cover story and corrals the investors. Together they wield law and language to turn a war into a real estate transaction. The price is paid in lives and in the erasure of a people’s future on their own coast.
History will supply the comparison. The British Mandate promised stewardship and delivered a catastrophe. A century later, the U.S.–Israeli mandate makes the same promise with fewer euphemisms. The international community pretends the vocabulary is the policy. It is not. The bulldozer is the policy.
When officials talk of “safe zones,” understand they mean corridors to nowhere. When they praise “humanitarian cities,” understand they mean camps with PR firms. When they tout “voluntary migration,” understand they mean removal under duress. When they speak of “trusteeship,” understand they mean takeover. When they dangle a “Gaza Riviera,” understand they mean the profits that follow erasure.
Gaza is not a detour in the history of the conflict. It is the proof of concept. If this model is allowed to stand, borders become optional, sovereignty becomes conditional, and humanitarianism becomes the purchaser’s premium added to the price of a stolen home. The antagonists do not hide in this story. They speak the script into microphones and etch it into earthworks. The U.S. supplies the blessing; Israel drives the blade. The result is not security. It is theft, with a sales deck.
