Jared Kushner showed up at Davos this week with a masterplan for rebuilding Gaza, full of renderings of gleaming skyscrapers along the Mediterranean coast. He also happens to run a $4.8 billion investment firm backed by the Gulf states who would be financing said gleaming skyscrapers. Nobody in the room appeared to find this strange.
The 'Board of Peace' Is a Board of Real Estate Guys
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Kushner unveiled what the Trump administration is calling a 'board of peace' for Gaza. Trump, speaking alongside him, said the board will ensure Gaza is 'demilitarized.' Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it a 'board of action.' What neither of them mentioned is that the board's grand vision looks almost identical to an AI-generated video released last year showing Gaza transformed into a luxury Riviera, featuring Trump and Elon Musk, which the internet briefly treated as a joke before everyone realized it was actually the policy.
Kushner has no official role in Trump's second administration. He is not a diplomat. He is not a government official. He is a private citizen who founded an investment firm in 2021 and who happens to be married to the president's daughter. And yet, according to The Independent, he has been working closely with Steve Witkoff, Trump's actual special envoy to the Middle East, on the multi-billion-dollar plan to rebuild post-conflict Gaza. Trump even highlighted Kushner's contributions in a speech to the Knesset in Jerusalem last October, calling Witkoff a 'great negotiator' who was 'really good at real estate.' These are the people designing the future of a territory where over a million people have been displaced.
About That Investment Firm
Here is where the story stops being merely absurd and starts being something else. Kushner's firm, Affinity Partners, had approximately $4.8 billion in assets under management by the end of 2024, according to The Independent. The firm's backers reportedly include sovereign wealth funds from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, two of the Gulf states who would be most directly involved in financing Gaza's reconstruction under Trump's plan.
Let's be precise about what that means. Jared Kushner is simultaneously advising on the peace deal that would greenlight reconstruction, presenting the reconstruction masterplan at Davos, and running a private investment firm funded by the governments who would be cutting the checks for that reconstruction. In a 60 Minutes interview, Witkoff confirmed: 'We're already talking to contractors from all of the Middle Eastern countries.' Kushner, in the same interview, said the project's goal is to create 'transparent, good government' in Gaza. He actually said that. On television.
Affinity Partners has a track record here worth examining. The Independent reports that last year the firm unveiled investment plans across the Balkans, including a proposed $1.4 billion luxury resort on Albania's Sazan Island, a tourism project in southern Albania, and a redevelopment at a former military complex in Belgrade. The pattern is consistent: move into a region emerging from conflict or political transition, leverage prior government connections, and turn instability into a real estate play.
What Kushner Has Said Out Loud
To be fair to Kushner, he has been quite candid about his thinking over the years. In February 2024, speaking at Harvard's Middle East Initiative, he said Gaza's 'waterfront property could be very valuable' and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it 'cleans up' the strip. Earlier than that, he described the entire Arab-Israeli conflict as 'nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.' These are real quotes from a real person who is now presenting a real reconstruction plan at the World Economic Forum.
Trump has called the rebuilt Gaza the 'Riviera of the Middle East.' He gave that speech back in February 2025, invoking visions of luxury seafront redevelopment. He hailed the UN Security Council's approval of his 20-point Gaza plan last November as 'one of the biggest approvals in the History of the United Nations,' a post on Truth Social that, as The Independent pointed out, made no reference to Israel or the Palestinian people. Two populations whose conflict necessitated the plan. Not mentioned.
The People Who Would Actually Live There
Sara Roy, a Harvard professor who specializes in the Palestinian economy, told The Independent what she thinks of all this: 'Jared Kushner can talk about building resorts or casinos or whatever he has in mind, but he's building them literally and figuratively on the graves of Palestinians.'
Roy's analysis goes beyond the obvious conflict-of-interest problem. She argues the entire redevelopment framework has reached what she calls its 'logical and final conclusion,' which is the total destruction of Gaza's productive economic capacity and the elimination of any meaningful Palestinian agency over their own future. The best Palestinians can realistically hope for, she told The Independent, is to 'exchange self-determination for construction projects.' She does not think that will work. The Center for American Progress has called Trump's vision a 'troubling call for ethnic cleansing.' These are not fringe voices. These are the people who study this for a living.
The Dingo Take
Let's just slow down and look at what is being normalized here. A private citizen with a multi-billion-dollar investment fund backed by Gulf sovereign wealth is presenting luxury real estate renderings at Davos for a territory still covered in rubble, while operating as an informal but clearly influential adviser to the administration designing the political deal that would make those renderings financially viable. If you wrote this as fiction, an editor would send it back and tell you to make the corruption a little less on-the-nose.
The 'board of peace' framing is doing an enormous amount of lifting. Peace boards don't present skyscraper renderings. Peace boards don't have their architects simultaneously running investment firms positioned to profit from the outcome. What Trump and Kushner are describing is a development deal with a diplomatic veneer, being sold to the American public and the international community as a humanitarian vision. Harvard professors are calling it the liquidation of Palestinian self-determination. The Trump team's response is to add more skyline graphics.
And the thing about this that should make everyone's stomach drop is how smoothly it is all proceeding. The UN Security Council approved the resolution. Witkoff is talking to contractors. Kushner is doing Davos panels. The machinery is moving. Whatever you think the end state of Gaza should look like, 'Jared Kushner's investment portfolio' is probably not the answer most people would give. But here we are, and the board of peace is open for business.
