Settler colonial planning: Alberto Toscano, ‘Planning Against Palestine’,Protean Magazine, 13/10/25 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial planning: Alberto Toscano, ‘Planning Against Palestine’,Protean Magazine, 13/10/25

20Nov25

Excerpt: The GREAT plan (subtitled “From a Demolished Iranian Proxy to a Prosperous Abrahamic Ally”), like its kin proposals, is also a recapitulation, recombination and acceleration of multiple forms and devices of domination emerging from the history of colonial racial capitalism. As a node in what it calls “the Abrahamic fabric” of this imperial region, the political form to be taken by Gaza is that of a “U.S.-led multilateral custodianship.” The Trust, we are told, will govern Gaza “for a transition period until a reformed and deradicalized Palestinian Polity is ready to step in its shoes.” To implement this structure of antipolitical governance—an echo of the UN Mandate system which regarded certain populations as unready (or in the case of Palestinians, unfit) for self-governance without European tutelage—this machine to void Palestinian sovereignty, premised on the subaltern’s willingness to mature into a willing and pacific client, GREAT includes its own productions of neocolonial space, namely what it terms “Hamas-free humanitarian transition zones.” Presented with operational maps, these “humanitarian transitions areas,” to be managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and then a “hybrid security framework,” are the not-very-distant descendants of the British practice of resettlement into “new villages” in Kenya and Malaya, the French policy of regroupement in Algeria, and United States’s own strategy of “hamletization” in Vietnam. Demonstrating the sheer continuity in the ruling imaginary of counterinsurgency, the very design of the “New Gaza,” with its golf courses and green areas, draws on the history of social war in the imperial metropolis itself. As we can read in one of the slides: “Like Haussman’s strategy in 19th century Paris, this plan aims to address one of Gaza’s ongoing insurgency’s root causes: its urban design.” Felicitously, spatial discipline can now be complemented by cybernetic control, once “all services and economy in these cities will be done through ID-based AI-powered digital system.” But GREAT has a much wider horizon than the mere management of pacification in the wake of genocide. In the breathlessly vapid language of venture-capitalist visionaries, it sings of raising billions in public private investment, employing an “innovative funding model” that would combine some kind of “tokenized” “land trust” whose returns would be invested in a “Wealth Fund for Gaza.” Gaza’s value, now estimated at 0 dollars, would rise in ten years to over $300 billion (accompanied by “1 million jobs”). Critical to GREAT’s vision is the idea of Gaza as a “hub” in a vast logistical-extractive-productive regional complex to compete with China. The establishment of the “New Gaza” would serve to accelerate the profitable integration of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and transform the Strip into the “center of pro-American regional architecture,” securing economic, political, and military power over the circulation of energy, capital, and commodities (special attention is given to “rare-earth minerals”). As Ziadah argues, what “is being imagined is not recovery for [Gaza’s] residents, but the conversion of Gaza into a logistics centre serving IMEC,” “a corporatized trusteeship for global capital”. In GREAT, she concludes, “Gaza is described less as a society than as a distressed asset to be flipped. This is disaster capitalism at its sharpest. It is devastation reframed as the precondition for speculative profit.”

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