In his speech to the US Congress on July 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of his vision of a “new Gaza” that would emerge once his country’s brutal aggression against the Gaza Strip ends. He spoke of a “future of security, prosperity and peace.”
In May, his office released a detailed plan called Gaza 2035, which included bold plans to “rebuild from scratch,” “modern designs,” “ports, pipelines and railways.”
US President Joe Biden has not commented on Netanyahu’s vision, but he hinted at a “major reconstruction plan for Gaza” in his May 31 speech outlining a three-stage ceasefire plan. That speech was followed by the June 10 UN Security Council resolution supporting his initiative.
These events point to a worrying path for the future of the Palestinian people. The forces behind this genocide will continue to control their existence after the carnage is over. If left unchecked, they will continue to ravage Palestinian lands, condemn them to poverty, and mercilessly dehumanize them.
But they will also paint an inhumane and dystopian future for many other populations in the region and beyond.
Urban Dystopia Built on Mass Graves
Netanyahu’s Gaza 2035 plan may be unrealistic, but that should not blind us to the fact that it is symptomatic of a powerful vision of “civilization” peddled by fintech circles and sold to the global public as futuristic progress.
Gaza 2035 reimagines the Gaza Strip as what historian Adam Tooze describes as “a wealthy, intensely managed city-state – think Singapore or Abu Dhabi,” “a mega-rich clone of a globalized commercial and industrial city.”
He imagines the desert of the Palestinian ghetto blossoming into the garden of an internationally governed free trade zone, bringing the fruits of technology and “civilization” to its inhabitants – and to the world.
This is not the first time that Western civilization has sought to build and expand on battlefields. But Israel’s “civilizational” project in Gaza has proven particularly brutal and inhumane – while its Western allies have staunchly apologized for it, calling it “the right to self-defense” of “the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Official statistics put the death toll at nearly 40,000 and thousands missing. Scientists estimate the death toll at 186,000. The relentless bombardment of the entire Gaza Strip – including the “safe zones” – as well as widespread famine and disease will further aggravate these shocking figures.
While some have attributed Israeli brutality to a logic of revenge, there is in reality a clear economic logic. And that makes the ongoing genocide even more terrifying.
The indigenous Palestinian culture and way of life – the careful tending of the land embodied in the slow-growing olive tree – must be exterminated to make way for ultra-fast, high-tech, intensive value extraction that would bulldoze sustainable social and environmental relations to usher in a faceless, high-end urban dystopia.
As the genocide unfolds, projects like Gaza 2035 serve to obscure Palestinian suffering under the guise of “civilization,” as Netanyahu told the US Congress. But this is not just a publicity stunt. It is what political elites in Israel and beyond are striving for.
Over the past nine months, meetings have been held between companies and various business and political entities to discuss mega-projects for reconstruction in Gaza, as its population is being exterminated. Participants include a company that “designs large-scale urban development projects” and a major international consulting firm.
Meanwhile, Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of US presidential candidate Donald Trump, has publicly hailed the “very valuable potential” of “beachfront properties” in Gaza.
Elements of Gaza 2035 are visible even in the way the far-right part of Netanyahu’s government is trying to run Israel. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, for example, is pushing a 2025 state budget that would impose austerity measures on ordinary Israelis and prioritize the high-tech and real estate sectors.
An open-air laboratory for AI warfare
A high-tech future requires a high-tech force to lay the foundations. Already a major exporter of military technology, Israel has deployed all its latest destructive advances to “battle-test” the Palestinians.
Artificial intelligence (AI), which is now ruling the Gaza battlefield, is undoubtedly the hottest. International and American technology companies have been Israel’s long-standing partners in this field.
According to Israeli magazine +972, AI has relegated the creation of “targets” to an automated “factory,” outsourced human decision-making regarding the “ethics” of combat actions, and suggested cost-effective ways to deploy “dumb” 2,000-pound bombs to eviscerate entire buildings.
Phone numbers and social media data have been integrated into these AI weapons, which apparently decide whether a Palestinian lives or dies based on the WhatsApp group they belong to.
Meanwhile, international media casually report that other militaries – both learners and potential customers – are closely monitoring what is happening in Gaza, Israel’s open-air laboratory for AI-based urban warfare.
The ongoing genocide cannot help but remind us of “technofeudalism,” a term coined by Yanis Varoufakis to describe the mutation of the global capitalist system into one that concentrates power through digital technologies controlled by a small elite. It seems that in Gaza, this phenomenon is already transforming into a form of exterminating oppression that transforms powerless “serfs” into an amorphous human mass, available as a resource to be manipulated or eliminated at the whim of the “lords” of war technology.
The Gaza genocide also recalls the observation of the Austrian Jewish philosopher Günther Anders that the ultimate goal of technology is the erasure of the human being. This observation is seen at the social level, as human experience becomes obsolete in the fog of endless media flows. It is also present at the material level, with the deployment of genocidal technologies, such as the nuclear bomb and concentration camps, designed to wipe out entire communities.
Anders, like other thinkers who have pondered the Holocaust in the decades since World War II, has warned that what happened had its roots in cultural and economic processes that did not cease with the end of the Shoah.
The fate of humanity
It is now clear that we have failed to heed the warnings and are living through the horror of a prolonged extermination of industrial proportions that is justified as rational and moral – a macabre failure of the 21st century to live up to the pledge of “never again.”
The UN and the international legal regime that are supposed to protect universal human rights and human dignity are proving to be devoid of the power to truly regulate human affairs.
Even moderate politicians, such as the European Union’s High Representative for International Affairs, Josep Borrell, have expressed this publicly. In March, Borrell said: “(Gaza) is a cemetery for tens of thousands of people, and also a cemetery for many of the most important principles of humanitarian law.”
Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges has ruefully observed that in a world besieged by the pursuit of profit and a grotesque concentration of military and financial power causing climate catastrophe, genocide will not be an anomaly, but the new normal. “The world outside the industrialized fortresses of the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate,” he wrote in a recent article.
As human dignity is trampled by a war machine fueled by artificial intelligence and profit, and as the resources of our planet and our lives are savagely extracted to accumulate wealth for the fintech elite, it is up to us to decide whether we want Gaza 2035 to be our collective future. Action – disciplined, conscious, transnational and resolute – is needed to avert global catastrophe and shape a better future for our children.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
