In his address to the United States Congress on July 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought up his vision of a “new Gaza” to emerge once his country’s brutal aggression against the strip ends. He spoke of a “future of security, prosperity and peace”.
In May, his office released a detailed outline called Gaza 2035, which featured bold plans for “rebuilding from nothing”, “modern designs”, “ports, pipelines, and railways”.
US President Joe Biden has not commented on Netanyahu’s vision but he did allude to a “major reconstruction plan for Gaza” in his speech laying out a three-step ceasefire plan on May 31. This was followed by the June 10 UN Security Council resolution supporting his initiative.
These developments point to a disturbing path for the future of the Palestinian people. The forces behind this genocide will continue to be in charge of their lives when the carnage ends. If not thwarted, they will continue to lay to waste Palestinian lands and to consign to poverty and summarily dehumanise Palestinians.
But they will also draw an inhumane, dystopic future for many other populations in the region and beyond.
Urban dystopia built on mass graves
Netanyahu’s Gaza 2035 plan might be unrealistic, but that should not blind us to the fact that it is symptomatic of a powerful vision of “civilisation” peddled by fintech circles and sold to global audiences as futuristic progress.
Gaza 2035 reimagines the strip into what historian Adam Tooze described as “a wealthy, intensively-managed city state – think Singapore or Abu Dhabi”, “a mega-rich clone of a globalised commercial and industrial city”.
It envisions the desert of the Palestinian ghetto blossoming into the garden of an internationally-governed free trade zone, bringing the fruits of technology and “civilisation” to its residents – and the globe.
It is not the first time that Western civilisation has sought to build and expand on top of killing fields. But Israel’s “civilisational” project in Gaza has been particularly brutal and inhumane – while its Western allies have been adamantly apologetic about it, calling it “the right to self-defence” of “the only democracy in the Middle East”.
By now, official statistics point to a death toll of nearly 40,000 and thousands missing; scientific estimates put the number of dead at 186,000. Continuing carpet bombing of all of Gaza – including “safe zones” – along with widespread starvation and disease will kick up these shocking numbers even higher.
While some have attributed Israeli brutality to a vengeful pathology, there is a clear economic logic behind it. And this makes the ongoing genocide even more terrifying.
The native Palestinian culture and life – the careful tending of the land embodied in the slow growth of the olive tree – have to be exterminated to make way for an ultrafast, high-tech intensive extraction of value that bulldozes over sustainable social and environmental relations to usher in a faceless high-end urban dystopia.
As the genocide unfolds, plans like Gaza 2035 serve to obscure the suffering of Palestinians by the allure of “civilisation”, just as Netanyahu told the US Congress. But this is not just a PR stunt. It is what political elites in Israel and beyond are moving towards.
Over the past nine months, meetings have been held between companies and various business and political entities to discuss reconstruction megaprojects in Gaza, all while 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 hopeful Donald Trump, has publicly praised the “very valuable potential” of “waterfront property” in Gaza.
Elements of Gaza 2035 are apparent even in the way the extreme right part of Netanyahu’s government tries to run Israel. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, for example, is pushing forward a 2025 state budget that would impose austerity on ordinary Israelis and prioritise the high-tech and real-estate sectors.
An open-air lab for AI warfare
A high-tech future requires a high-tech force to first lay down the foundation. Already a major exporter of military technology, Israel has deployed all its latest destructive advances to “battle test” on Palestinians.
The trendiest of them has certainly been artificial intelligence (AI), which now reigns over the battlefield in Gaza. Global and US tech companies have been Israel’s longstanding partners in this sphere.
According to the Israeli +972 Magazine, AI has relegated the creation of “targets” to an automatic “factory”, outsourced human decision-making regarding the “ethics” of battle action, and suggested cost-effective ways of deploying “dumb” 2000-pound bombs to eviscerate entire buildings.
Phone numbers and social media data have been plugged into these AI weapons, which apparently decide whether a Palestinian should live or die based on what WhatsApp group they are in.
Meanwhile, global media have nonchalantly reported that other armies – both learners and potential clients – are watching closely what is happening in Gaza, Israel’s open-air lab for AI urban warfare.
The unfolding genocide cannot but remind us of “technofeudalism”, a notion that Yanis Varoufakis coined 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 is already transmuting into an exterminatory form of oppression that turns powerless “serfs” into an amorphous human mass, available as a resource to be manipulated or eliminated at the whim of the war tech “overlords”.
The genocide in Gaza also brings to mind the observation by Austrian-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders that the end goal of technology is the erasure of the human. This can be observed at the social level, as human experience goes obsolescent in the graywash of unending vacuous media streams. It is also present at the very material level, with the deployment of genocidal technologies, such as the nuclear bomb and the concentration camp, designed to wipe out whole communities.
Anders, as well as other thinkers reflecting on the Holocaust in the decades following World War II, warned not to forget that what happened had its roots in cultural and economic processes that did not cease with the termination of the Shoah.
The fate of humanity
It is now clear that we have not heeded the warnings and are living the horror of an extended extermination of industrial proportions that gets justified as rational and moral – a gruesome failure of the 21st century to abide by the “never again” pledge.
The UN and the international legal regime meant to protect universal human rights and dignity are showing themselves void of the power to actually regulate human affairs.
Even moderate politicians, like EU high representative for international affairs Josep Borrell, have voiced this realisation publicly. In March, Borrell observed: “[Gaza] is a graveyard for tens of thousands of people, and also a graveyard for many of the most important principles of humanitarian law.”
Former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges has bleakly noted that in a world beleaguered by the pursuit of profit amid a grotesque concentration of military and financial power causing a climate catastrophe along the way, genocide will not be an anomaly, but the new norm. “The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in 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 bulldozed over by the profit-churning, AI-powered war machine, and as the resources of our planet and lives are viciously 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, aware, transnational and adamant – is needed to avert a global catastrophe and shape a brighter future for our children.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.