Democrats Fall in Line as Trump's Allies Prepare to Profit From Gaza Reconstruction
Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff are leading a U.S.-backed reconstruction scheme funded by Gulf monarchies. Few in Congress are objecting.
“What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience,” Jared Kushner told 60 Minutes last week, defending his role in rebuilding Gaza.
At his side, Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East and fellow real estate developer, assured the interviewer that “the money raising is the easy part” and admitted they had “been working on master plans for the last two years.”
Kushner glanced toward him as he said it, an unspoken acknowledgment of how long the project has been underway.
The two men, each with deep financial ties to Saudi and Emirati investors, are central to Washington’s effort to rebuild Gaza on American terms. After abetting genocide, the United States is moving to install a U.S.-Israel-Gulf-backed government on the Palestinian people. Framed as a path to peace, Trump’s post-war plan for Gaza amounts to a neo-colonial regime imposed on a people emerging from mass death. Palestinians would have no say over their future, and would be forced to relinquish all forms of self-defense and resistance against Israeli occupation.
“Just last year, Kushner was talking about Gaza as a valuable waterfront investment. The future of Gaza should be determined by Palestinians, not by foreign businessmen,” Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., told me.
With remarkable precision, Washington has managed to turn desperation for an end to the slaughter in Gaza into support for its own long-term design for the region. The “peace plan,” which Trump unveiled last month, fuses a ceasefire with a blueprint for Gaza’s future – a blueprint first conceived under earlier administrations, in which reconstruction and control flow through American hands. The U.S. has effectively made the end of hostilities contingent on complete submission to a neocolonial regime.
Trump’s plan offers Israel impunity for its assault on Gaza, promises Gulf monarchies a stake in reconstruction, and positions Trump’s inner circle to profit from one of the deadliest atrocities of the 21st century. Palestinians, meanwhile, are left with no freedom or self-determination.
Under the administration’s 20-point plan, Gaza’s future would be managed by a technocratic administration vetted by the U.S. and its allies, with ultimate authority resting in a new “Board of Peace” chaired by Trump himself. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, remembered across the Arab world for his role as an architect of the Iraq war and for obstructing Palestinian statehood at the UN, would help oversee the Gaza transition and serve as a senior figure.
Reconstruction would be bankrolled by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies, creating vast opportunities for private profiteering and for the enrichment of Trump’s inner circle. Kushner and Witkoff – both with deep financial ties to these regimes – crafted the framework and are shaping its economic program, as they detailed in the 60 Minutes interview.
Kushner’s private equity firm, Affinity Partners, has already received billions from Saudi Arabia and hundreds of millions from the UAE, meaning the very governments expected to bankroll reconstruction are also his financiers. Most recently, his private equity firm teamed up with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund on a $55 billion deal to take the video game giant Electronic Arts private, the largest leveraged buyout in history. Witkoff has longstanding financial ties with the Qatari and UAE governments. The Witkoff family fortune is built primarily in real estate, and his son Alex Witkoff took over as Witkoff Group’s CEO two months before he was announced as Trump’s envoy.
Kushner and Witkoff have brushed off concerns about profiteering as a necessary tradeoff for experience.
“What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships,” Kushner said. “If Steve and I didn’t have these deep relationships, the deal we were able to get done…would not have occurred.”
Witkoff added: “Conflict of interest is a terminology used by some, and we call it experience. We really do. Because we don’t think we crossed any ethical barriers. There becomes this sort of perception…because we can call Sheikh Mohammed in Qatar directly, or because we can call Bibi directly, or…MB Zayed in the Emirates, or MBS.”
Kushner insisted he and Witkoff would not be “involved in awarding contracts or figuring out who does business in Gaza,” even as he described working on “the master plan” and coordinating with financiers across the Gulf.
Kushner, the presidential son-in-law, is expected to play “a very active role” in the next phases of the negotiations, according to CNN. Trump has repeatedly gushed about Kushner and Witkoff’s role in negotiations. “They’ve been so involved in this process,” he said. “I don’t think anybody else could have done it or even come close.”
Plenty of details remain unsettled – including whether Hamas will disarm and what form Gaza’s governance will ultimately take – but mainstream media outlets have already branded it a peace deal, and pundits across the foreign policy establishment are hailing it as a major diplomatic breakthrough.
“The fact that it is on the Arab states to finance this plan, rather than Israel that is responsible for the destruction, is just one of the many signs that this plan is divorced from any sense of justice,” said Josh Paul, who resigned from the State Department in protest over Gaza under the Biden administration. “Because it should be Israel that is funding and financing the reconstruction of Gaza.”
Paul, who served in the U.S. occupation government in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, told me the same logic is now being repackaged for Gaza. “The United States is particularly ill-suited to carrying out what essentially is an occupation, or the governance of a country in the Middle East,” Paul said. “Any such venture that seeks to apply a foreign model to a very clearly and well-defined local political system and cultural system just will not be able to build the legitimacy that makes it sustainable.”
Democrats Fall in Line
In Congress, much of Democratic leadership has already aligned with Trump’s long-term vision for Gaza and the region – a sign of how bipartisan the consensus on U.S. control has become. Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., the top House Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said he’s “encouraged” by news of agreement on the first phase of the plan. “We all hope this moment brings the release of every hostage, the delivery of vital aid, and the first steps toward lasting peace in the region,” Meeks said in a statement.
In Trump’s first term, congressional Democrats vocally condemned the administration’s indulgence of Gulf autocracies and the revolving door between foreign policy and private profit. After the Saudi assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee called for accountability and denounced Jared Kushner’s role in shielding Riyadh from scrutiny. Lawmakers blasted Kushner’s undisclosed financial ties to Gulf regimes and his blurring of diplomacy and personal enrichment.
Those same Democrats are now largely silent as Kushner and Trump’s inner circle prepare to manage Gaza’s future – a staggering reversal for a party that once demanded oversight of Trump-era corruption and foreign profiteering. I reached out to nearly every Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee to ask whether they trust Kushner, Witkoff, and Blair to manage Palestinian affairs and coordinate with the Gulf regimes post-war.
California Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat on the committee who has spoken out against human rights abuses committed by Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., declined to comment. A few offices, like Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., or Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said they were tied up with the looming government shutdown. Most other Democratic lawmakers did not reply at all.
The office of Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American member of Congress, directed me to a statement she made on X: “Trump and War Criminal Netanyahu, perpetrators of the genocide, do not get to decide the future of Gaza,” she wrote. “Palestinians get to determine the future of Palestine.”
In late September, Rep. Khanna led 47 of his colleagues in sending a letter to the Trump administration urging the U.S. to officially recognize a Palestinian state. “We will need to work closely with the Palestinian people, the Palestinian Authority, our Arab allies, and Israel to make this feasible,” the lawmakers wrote. “This includes organizing free and fair presidential and general elections and implementing fundamental security, political, judicial, and democratic reforms.”
Paul expects Democratic criticism of Trump’s broader plan to be limited. “No one wants to be the naysayer on what appears to be, at least for now, the only option for ending the bloodshed and restoring humanitarian access to Gaza,” he said.
“But this plan is designed to play out over many years. Even if it advances, as was the case with Iraq, what looks like success at first will soon reveal itself as failure. You’ll have the same people who supported it early on later explaining in their memoirs how they changed their minds.”
A Seamless Handoff
While Trump has rebranded the project in his own bombastic style, the underlying logic was forged long before his return to office. Under Biden, U.S. officials already blurred humanitarian rhetoric with the architecture of domination, selling the illusion of a policy break with Netanyahu to credulous reporters while materially sustaining Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza. Throughout the genocide, the Biden administration oscillated between feigning helplessness and promoting the idea that the president was growing increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu, who, they claimed, was disregarding even their most tepid humanitarian requests.
The Biden administration’s version of the plan – remove Hamas, demilitarize Gaza, and fold reconstruction into a U.S.-Gulf-Israeli framework – laid the groundwork for exactly what Trump is now aiming to formalize. Biden’s advisers had already envisioned Gulf monarchies rebuilding Gaza’s ruins in exchange for normalization with Israel, a strategy that would secure U.S. dominance, and generate new markets and alliances for the region’s ruling elites.
Top Biden administration officials were explicit from the start. Just a month after the October 7 attacks, amid Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Daniel Mouton – formerly a senior adviser to Biden’s top Middle East hand Brett McGurk – publicly laid out the “post–October 7 U.S. strategy.”
“Long-term security in the Middle East will start with the ability to maintain an enduring regional deterrent order against Iran and its proxies,” he wrote for the Atlantic Council in November 2023. The piece sketched out a sweeping vision of coordinated maneuvering against Iran, China, and Russia, alongside a “two-state solution” that would fold Palestinian governance into a regional security architecture dominated by Washington and its allies.
“This progress will in turn allow for Israel to normalize its relationship with Saudi Arabia and more comprehensively integrate itself into the region,” Mouton wrote, adding that such a breakthrough would “fully unlock U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia.”
Biden’s Middle East strategy was itself a continuation of Trump’s Abraham Accords, a vision of regional “peace” built through Gulf normalization and the permanent deferral of Palestinian sovereignty. Trump’s post-war plan has kept all these same premises intact. His aim is to reframe regime change as peace, permanent occupation as reconstruction, and the subjugation of Palestinians as stability for the region.
Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken has also acknowledged the continuity. “It starts with a clear and comprehensive post-conflict plan for Gaza,” Blinken wrote. “It’s good that President Trump adopted and built on the plan the Biden administration developed after months of discussion with Arab partners, Israel and the Palestinian Authority.”
And when former presidents Biden and Clinton publicly celebrated Trump’s maneuvering, the inheritance was complete, with the imperial architecture passed seamlessly from one administration to the next. “Now, with the backing of the United States and the world, the Middle East is on a path to peace that I hope endures – and a future for Israelis and Palestinians alike with equal measures of peace, dignity, and safety,” Biden said.
Trump’s “peace” plan represents the culmination of a project years in the making. Its iterations have shifted from administration to administration but the goal of preserving U.S. dominance in the Middle East remains constant. That alone ensures Washington will keep trying to impose it, whatever the human cost.