Trump and Kushner are building a military base in Gaza and calling it reconstruction.
The Board of Peace, set up by the president in January to oversee rebuilding the strip, has issued its first construction award, though a board official says several awards remain in their final stages and none has been finalized. The work is being handled by Arkel International, a Louisiana firm that has previously carried out jobs for the United States government in Iraq.
The project is not a home. It is not a school, a hospital, or a water line. It is a rudimentary military outpost for 150 Moroccan troops, one hundred metres by one hundred and twenty, about a mile from the Israeli border, inside the 60 percent of Gaza the Israeli army directly controls.
The reconstruction of Gaza is beginning with a barracks.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but I was raised to believe that when a board takes the name of peace and sets out to rebuild a place, its first building ought to be a house.
Read the contract language slowly, because the fine print is where this kind of operation confesses. The first phase calls for “tents and cots for forces to sleep, as well as chemical toilets and handwashing stations. At this phase, this is what we would consider habitable.”
Habitable.
I know what habitable means, and it is not a cot and a chemical toilet on somebody else’s land. That is the standard written for foreign troops on Palestinian soil while the people of Gaza sleep in rubble and makeshift camps.
Earlier plans called for a 5,000-person base with vehicle fighting positions and a raised perimeter berm, a defensive bank of earth that says the men drawing it expect to be shot at. The current project also includes a “quick extraction route” in case the small force comes under attack.
That route is the honest part of the design.
The men who drew up this outpost assume it will be attacked. The troops get a way out. The population they are there to stabilize does not get so much as a paved street.
A reconstruction whose first structure comes with an escape hatch is not reconstruction. It is a garrison with a name attached.
The United Nations resolution approved an “international stabilization force,” so the outpost is called a stabilization base. The contract is described as one of several projects “essential for the future of Gaza.” Morocco has promised a small contingent. The legal framework for the deployment is not finalized. Documents show the board planning to shield the force with sweeping legal immunity.
The geography says more than the paperwork. The base sits inside the security line the Israeli army has drawn through the strip, beside the buffer zone Israel has created. Whatever word the documents use, this is foreign military infrastructure being built on ground controlled by an occupying army.
Days after President Trump announced that Hamas had agreed to disarm, Israel increased its airstrikes in Gaza. The new outpost is being prepared for the force that is supposed to stabilize the territory while the territory remains under military control and its people remain exposed to violence.
This is not stabilization. It is a garrison with better public relations.
The grand promise has shrunk in plain sight. At the Board of Peace’s first meeting in February, Jared Kushner unveiled “New Gaza,” a waterfront city of gleaming mixed-use towers. “It could be a hope, it could be a destination. A lot of industry,” he said. Five billion dollars in pledges were floated for rebuilding the whole strip.
By July, the plan had become a small pilot project in the south. Now the pilot has a first construction award, and the first deliverable is a military base for 150 soldiers.
At least 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings were damaged or destroyed in the war. Ten months after the ceasefire, most of the territory’s two million people still live in makeshift, unsanitary camps. The board promised hope, destination, and industry. It has produced tents and cots for foreign troops.
The name is doing the work.
Peace board. Stabilization force. Essential project. Reconstruction.
The nouns are clean. The ground is not.
Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, warned the country to guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, “whether sought or unsought,” by the military-industrial complex. He also warned that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite and insisted that only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry could compel the proper meshing of the machinery of defense with peaceful purposes.
Here is that mechanism, running on schedule. A body named for peace becomes the procurement vehicle. A firm seasoned on the Iraq war takes the tender. The product is garrison infrastructure. The budget line is reconstruction.
The military machine no longer needs a war to get paid. It has learned to wear a peace board’s hat.
No conspiracy is required. A war machine invited to plan the peace is enough. The president’s name is on the invitation. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is on the board. His friend Steve Witkoff is on the team. The contracts go out of Louisiana. The troops are Moroccan. The escape route is for them.
The people of Gaza get the camps.
That is the old arrangement. The men who profit from the construction are not the people who will live with the fortification. The soldiers sent to hold the outpost are not the people who decide what happens to the land beneath it. And the two million people promised a future are treated as inventory in a plan written elsewhere.
The constitutional posture here is not complicated. The president does not get to take over and own a territory the United States does not possess, then place a family-connected political board in charge of building a foreign garrison without Congress and public debate. Whatever the merits of an international force in Gaza, the people who must consent were never asked, and the people who will live under it had even less say.
A constitutional order treats those two million people as parties to their own future, not as inventory. A board that calls itself a board of peace earns the name the only way such names are ever earned: by building the people homes first.
The Board of Peace has built nothing yet but paper. On that paper, the first thing it bought is tents and cots for soldiers, chemical toilets, a raised earthen berm, and a quick extraction route.
The people it was created to serve sleep where the buildings used to be.
When the contract calls that habitable, it is not describing Gaza. It is describing who the peace was for.