Gaza is a gold mine
The headline's words are not mine, but rather those of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who, during a real estate conference in Tel Aviv, did not hesitate to openly state the true motives for the invasion of Gaza City and the entire Strip: "The Gaza Strip. We have invested a lot of money in this war and we have already completed the first phase, which is the demolition. Now it's time for reconstruction." He predicted a time of "real estate boom" and stressed the fact that this was "a great market opportunity." Smotrich is 45 years old, openly declares himself a supremacist, a member of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, and trained at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ono Academic College, an elitist private university in Kiryat Ono, where he was perhaps taught to express himself with that bluntness. Smotrich, in any case, personifies the profile of the triumphant young lion postulated by the global right: arrogant, cold, implacable, without moral scruples of any kind because he knows how to justify them all. For him, the idea that the Palestinians must be massacred in the name of democracy and Israel's right to defend itself is implicit and, as such, goes without saying. The rest is simply a matter of money. Lots of money.
What Smotrich has said, in fact, has already been pointed out on several occasions by the Israeli and US governments. When Netanyahu and Trump talk about the displacement of the Palestinian population to Jordan or Egypt (and, in passing, point to these third countries as part of the problem, due to their refusal to accept this population disarray), when Trump insists that they will give the Palestinians "very nice" places to live, with that repulsive paternalism. It is, quite simply, about expelling the Palestinians from their country, willingly (in quotation marks) or by force. Allowing themselves to be deported from their homes or being massacred. Clearly, the famous video made with AI by Elon Musk when he was still friends with Trump, in which Netanyahu and Netanyahu appeared partying in a Palestine transformed into a large tourist complex, was something more than a fantasy or a joke in bad taste: it was a real estate project. A huge brick-and-mortar operation (and tourism, of course). To achieve this, the Israeli and American governments need only one thing: a Palestine without Palestinians.
The hostages are the tragic excuse that Hamas fanatics give to Netanyahu and his accomplices. But we already know their real motivation. Bombing refugee camps or starving children to death are merely means to make good business. The question of what has happened to bring Israel to this point is a pertinent one: the evolution of its governments—from kibbutz to turbo-capitalism, to put it mildly—is surely one of the factors to take into account. Meanwhile, many would already be booking a grand hotel on the Gaza seafront.