First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner had a mixed record in New York managing the Kushner family’s real estate portfolio. His purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue (yes, that was the address), the family’s biggest investment and at $1.8 billion the most expensive deal in U.S. history for a single office tower, proved epically ill-timed.

Mr. Kushner bought that unlucky address in 2007 just months before the Great Recession threw the N.Y. market into a historic tail spin. It took a billion-dollar bailout in 2018 from an asset management firm, its primary owner the Qatari government, to interrupt what had been the Kushner family’s near ruin.

Now as the Middle East point man for the Trump administration, Mr. Kushner has great expectations for another unprecedented real estate deal. This one in Gaza. All of Gaza.

What had been perceived by many as a cosmic diplomatic joke has somehow become official U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East. The Trump administration’s Board of Peace, which convened its first meeting in Washington on Feb. 19, is sponsoring an ambitious plan for rebuilding the demolished Gaza Strip. No longer will it be a dismal slum for the dispossessed; it will be reborn as a casino playground on the Mediterranean for the super rich.

President Donald Trump announced a U.S. commitment of $10 billion to Gaza’s reconstruction during the board’s inaugural meeting, though he did not say where that money would come from. According to U.N. estimates, restoring Gaza could cost as much as $70 billion, but that estimate reflected a modest ambition of rebuilding Gaza close to something like it was before Hamas’s devastating war with Israel.

The New Gaza plan proposed by Mr. Kushner calls for something completely different and no doubt much more expensive—vast green spaces, luxury hotels, seaside promenades. It even includes an international airport.

Where will the Palestinians live? That detail is left obscured, but prior to the ruinous conflict provoked by Hamas in October 2023, Gaza’s 2.2 million lived in one of the most densely populated places on earth; almost 90 percent of the strip had been fully urbanized, according to a U.N. study in 2024.

Folks in Gaza watching the Board of Peace’s first sit-down in Washington, assuming they can find electricity and an internet connection, may be wondering if its deliberations will get them any closer to the comprehensive humanitarian relief they have been waiting for. The winter has been cruel to Gaza and sporadic violence continues. More than 600 Palestinians have been killed since a cease fire was signed last October. U.N. officials report the cease fire remains fragile and the hunger and need in Gaza remains great. Half-rations are being distributed among the hungry.

The Vatican declines

Trump’s Board of Peace, which he has suggested could one day rival the United Nations, has attracted more than two dozen member-states from around the world. Each presumably on the hook for the $1 billion entrance fee to join the club. It has raised $7 billion so far.

Traditional U.S. allies from Europe have all passed on Mr. Trump’s invitation to join the board. One notable international party invited to join the founders’ circle by Mr. Trump has likewise declined the honor, the Holy See. Vatican officials were skeptical of accepting a role in Mr. Trump’s geopolitical social club from the get go, noting that there was no way the Holy See was going to be able to overcome that $1 billion obstacle.

But Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, officially put the kibosh on the idea on Feb. 17, citing “points that leave us somewhat perplexed.”

“One concern,” he said, “is that at the international level it should above all be the U.N. that manages these crisis situations.” Cardinal Parolin apparently shares the concern of many in the diplomatic community that the U.S. president’s board represents an expensive and destabilizing intrusion on the U.N.’s global peace-making role.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Feb. 18 called the Vatican’s decision “deeply unfortunate.”

“I don’t think that peace should be partisan or political or controversial,” she said.

Most Vatican officials would probably agree, but they might also point out that true peace can only be achieved through justice and reconciliation, avoiding the peace of the graveyard. And how else to describe Gaza these days—with more than 72,000 dead and perhaps 10,000 more corpses scattered in the cinder block and concrete piles that are all that remain of some 81 percent of Gaza’s buildings and infrastructure.

An assessment from the United Nations and World Bank from April 2024 reports near total destruction of Gaza’s roads and water and sanitation infrastructure. Removing 60 million tons of debris that has piled up after thousands of Israeli missile, tank and artillery strikes could take as long as seven years, according to the report.

The Vatican might also suggest to Ms. Leavitt that true peace is not often reached when the gang going over the details for it is composed of some of the globe’s most consistent human rights abusers.

“It is hard to imagine this body giving priority to ending suffering, hatred and bloodshed, as Trump declared at the launch event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum,” writes Louis Charbonneau, the United Nations director for Human Rights Watch, in his review of the cast of characters invited to or already signed up for the Board of Peace.

“Among those Trump has invited to join are two who are subject to International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for war crimes and crimes against humanity—Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump has invited leaders of other countries with appalling human rights records to join his board: From China and Belarus to Kazakhstan.”

No doubt another significant concern for the Vatican is the absence of a role among actual Gazans on a committee which is purportedly to decide their fate. The composition of the Board of Peace, bereft of Palestinian voices, obliterates the minimum level of participation demanded by human dignity and makes a mockery of a quaint notion like subsidiarity.

At an event in Rome on Feb. 6, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, called the Board of Peace a “colonialist operation,” criticizing it as “others deciding for the Palestinians.”

Gaza’s future will be left to political outsiders and business leaders to decide. Of course their interest in placating the Trump administration may take precedence over the plight of the Palestinians themselves.

Mr. Trump seems mostly just enthralled by the possibility of opening a Trump casino in Gaza, and according to the board’s charter, as board chairman he has substantial authority to set the agenda, determine membership and “to adopt resolutions or other directives” pretty much exactly as he sees fit.

The charter suggests far broader ambitions than the reconstruction of Gaza. That task has been assigned to a subcommittee headed by Mr. Kushner and the Trump administration’s utility infielder Steve Witcoff, the U.S. Mideast envoy. Turkish, Qatari and Egyptian officials will also serve on the “Gaza Executive Board,” along with an Israeli business executive.

The Palestinian problem

A major, initial hurdle for the Gaza group will be persuading Hamas and other Islamic militants still operating in Gaza to turn over their weapons, including small arms, a comprehensive demilitarization that Hamas leaders have already dismissed as a kind of surrender they won’t cooperate with.

And a substantial humanitarian and logistical obstacle to the Kushner vision for New Gaza are the 2 million people who remain in the obliterated terrain. How does one care, feed and house a population of that size in the middle of a construction zone?

To many, including the president and cheerleaders in the Netanyahu government who still can’t seem to believe their good fortune in all this, the answer is obvious: the Palestinians have to be transferred somewhere else—temporarily? That last bit is still unclear.

The president has promised Gazans a “beautiful new land” elsewhere and threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Jordan and Egypt if these U.S. allies decline to accept this latest wave of Palestinian refugees. Middle East analysts who have seen this before wonder if the Gaza reconstruction project is nothing more than a thinly disguised plan for ethnic cleansing.

And what of the Palestinians themselves? Many say they will refuse to leave, their attachment to Gaza too great despite its ruin. Others long to escape Gaza’s deplorable conditions, hoping to restart their children’s educations or to seek medical treatment for wounds received during the war. Months ago during the conflict’s most destructive days, almost half of Gaza’s Palestinians said they were prepared to leave if offered a credible exit.

Many hesitate to leave Gaza, worried about how temporary this latest displacement might prove were they to accept a transfer while Gaza’s golden future is built. Mr. Trump has already said that Palestinians who leave the strip will not be guaranteed the right of return.

It does not help assuage skepticism about the Board of Peace’s intentions that among Israeli’s contemporary far-right leadership, including several senior members of the Netanyahu government, politicians are openly crowing about the prospect of moving out the Palestinians and reclaiming Gaza for Israeli settlers.

The plan for Gaza was reviewed by the Board of Peace in Washington just days after the Israeli government announced the opening of a contentious land regulation process in a large part of the occupied West Bank. That plan could result in Israel gaining control over wide tracts of the area for future development. The region had once been outlined as the future second state for Palestinians. That was a faraway, more hopeful time.

The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now said the process likely amounts to a “mega land grab” from Palestinians. The decision to begin the registration process is only the latest step toward deeper Israeli control over the West Bank. Maybe the Board of Peace will soon begin drawing up plans for a New West Bank.