It's not just destruction that is profitable here, but the reconstruction plan is the real bounty that we see in Gaza like in many other places.
The key is previously the economic peace was about stabilizing the two-state solution. Now essentially the economic peace is about voiding the two-state solution. So you no longer have to take it seriously. And so this Gaza plan is the material realization of that. You obliterate Gaza, which is one of the great wounds of Palestinian history, you literally just pave it over and build a mall and build a hotel complex and an EV manufacturing zone and a big solar field. So the underlying logic here is that we move from economics as a stabilizer of the two-state solution to economics played at an even bigger level. Now, mega high-tech Israel with mega wealthy Gulf. They explicitly say this is going to be run by tech. It's not — they're going to be run by technocrats. It's not common for technocrats to literally write 'I am technocrat' on my forehead. People label you technocrat once you're doing technocratic things. But in this case, they literally say there will be a technocratic government and it will be overseen by a board and the whole thing will be a Trump program. It's like that AI, that ghastly AI fantasy actually come to life. It's quite astonishing in how blatant it is really.
Right. And it's about this plunder being disguised as some form of expertise, something that we also see in other contexts such as Ukraine.
Professor Adam Tooze is the Katherine and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University and the director of the European Institute. He is author of many prize-winning books including The Deluge, Crashed, and his famous Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Adam, your scholarship is vital in this historic moment because it shows how deep historical work and a global perspective can help us emancipate from propaganda and untruths that are covering up one of the worst historic crimes in history. My great aunt Teresa Mattei actually was expelled from all the schools in the Kingdom of Italy in 1939 when she denounced the racial laws against the Jewish people in Italy. And we know that it takes a lot of courage today to speak up persistently about the conditions of genocide in Gaza. Your work really is important because it helps answer one question that I would like to start with, which is the question I get a lot, which is: why do you focus so much on Palestine? Why is it all this fuss? How is it that we don't also look at other contexts of suffering around the world? So before we get into what I would like to do with you today, which is explore the connection between militarism, the economy of reconstruction, and fundamental austerity, I would like for us to focus on this question. Why Gaza? Why is Gaza so important historically for us to focus on? And why is it not like what we've seen before?
Well, first of all, you do me too much honor in putting me in the same category or mentioning in the same breath as a famous anti-fascist resistor of the 1930s. But this question I think is urgent. I mean, it's also one that's of course highly politicized. The politics of comparison is part of the politics of the denunciation of anti-semitism. You know, the claim that critics of Israel apply double standards and apply to Israel standards they don't apply to other places is part of the apparatus through which allegations of anti-semitism are made. And my response to that has been just a calm willingness to roll with the punch and say right, okay, let's do the comparison. And this isn't difficult to do. UN agencies the world over do comparisons of situations of famine and there's a huge amount of scholarship on issues of scholasticide in many of the places to which Gaza is commonly compared and where people make the objection that by focusing on Gaza we're ignoring for instance the absolutely dramatic crisis in Sudan or the situation in Myanmar or in the DRC. And so what I've done in two pieces on my newsletter, Chartbook, is to simply say, well, okay, fine. Let's take this pushback and go with it and pose the question: in what ways does Gaza seem singular?
And as soon as you do that, it's perfectly obvious that it stands out above all simply for the deliberateness with which an enormously overpowerful Israeli state which has all of the resources of a highly sophisticated economy at its disposal, from a position of absolute safety, with the massive support of major powers all over the world, including of course the United States, which is paying for a very significant fraction of the damage that Israel is inflicting and the violence it's inflicting — the deliberateness with which this overpowerful state is embarking on the destruction of Gaza and the infrastructure of life in Gaza. There are destructions of universities in Sudan. Right now there is famine, hunger across large parts of the DRC for instance. But the deliberateness with which this is being inflicted, the siege conditions, the asymmetry of power, the openly articulated project of ethnic cleansing, making space for an eventual incorporation of Gazan territory in the view of the right-wing of Israeli politics, makes this an absolutely singular case. So the effect of the pushback which says, oh, you're ignoring all these other global crises and you really ought in fairness to compare and apply the same standards — the weird element of that argument is that the more you actually do that the more you see the singularity of what is going on here. And I don't think therefore that anyone who is serious about thinking about the Gaza situation or with the Gaza situation about the world that we're in should ever flinch from this comparative question. And it's an invitation also to inform ourselves about what is going on in Sudan for instance and the damage that's being done there. And it's quite clear that a very large part of that country's important university infrastructure has been disrupted. And there are many many scholars in exile who are documenting this. And what their painstaking inquiries show is it really doesn't bear comparison with the application of massive amounts of aerial bombardment and heavy artillery to the destruction of Gaza's educational infrastructure. So that's what this comparison shows us and it poses a whole series of questions about how on earth this could be possible, right? What makes Gaza a potential target for this kind of destruction which is unique in the world in its intensity and its deliberateness and its asymmetry in the current moment.
Thank you Adam. So important. The two Chartbooks that you're referring to are the one on scholasticide, 349, and the 400 on 'Murder Not Crisis: Why Israel's Starvation of Gaza Is Exceptional in a Global Context.' And you end with very strong words that I would like just to read: 'Anyone deflecting from the clear responsibility of the Israeli state for this mass starvation of two million people, anyone resorting to euphemisms about crisis, make themselves complicit in this historic crime.' So I would like to follow up what you just said. How is it — this is a question you asked actually in another Chartbook called 'Gaza: Beyond Development to Disposability and Destruction' — what does make these 2 million people so easily to be disposed of and this whole Gaza so absolutely objectified? What is the history behind this? And I know it's very complex, but can we at least give a sense of how we got here?
I mean the central thing to understand about Gaza is that its current position is absolutely anomalous in a history which stretches back literally thousands of years. William Dalrymple has been doing an amazing job on Twitter of reconstructing Gaza's history in a series of podcasts and extraordinary Twitter posts about this region, this area, this series of settlements that for large parts of the ancient history of the Mediterranean were absolutely organic and central and considered some of the more sophisticated flesh pots of the Eastern Mediterranean. The modern history of Gaza begins with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Gaza becoming, in the context of the Nakba, a major site for Palestinian refugee congregation at a time when its access to Egypt was still vital and open. And it's really the 1967 war and the massive Israeli territorial gains at that moment that constitute the modern Palestinian problem as we know it. Nakba is the beginning, but in the early phases of Israel's history, the Palestinian question occupied second place really to the history of Arab nationalist opposition. The 56 war is really about that story. And from '67 onwards, however, we see the modern configuration of the occupied West Territories of the West Bank and Gaza as an enclave.
But through the 1980s, Gaza was really like the West Bank today. One could think of them as following a relatively parallel evolution, which is as dependent labor reserve enclaves for the Israeli economy. And it's in that context that Roy, the great political economist of Palestine, spoke about a context of development. So a context in which Palestinian incomes in fact tended to go up and measured GDP in these regions went up because so many migrant workers were finding work in the Israeli economy. But on the other hand there was no actual development taking place because essentially the Palestinian territories were being reduced to the status of commuter labor suburbs and Palestinians were being inserted in very subordinate positions into the Israeli labor market. And this model breaks with the intifadas — with the first intifada in the late '80s and then the second intifada in the early 2000s — which are themselves, especially the first intifada, a kind of classic economic crisis-driven social protest movement originally by migrant workers. The intifada is triggered by a car accident, a truck accident, in which a group of Palestinian migrant workers are killed by an Israeli truck which then triggers what initially is a labor protest. It's a general strike essentially by the Palestinians against the Israeli economy which the Israelis recognize their vulnerability to.
And then from the 1990s onwards, as Israel goes through its own crisis-driven neoliberal reconstruction with Netanyahu emerging as one of the great spokesmen of this new neoliberal high-tech vision of Israel, one of the things that Israel does is not just to begin to anchor itself in the promise of the two-state solution and the deal with the Americans and the Europeans but also to render itself increasingly independent of Palestinian labor supply by importing more and more migrant laborers from around the world. Israel becomes the cosmopolitan place that people know it as today. Meanwhile in Gaza, the extreme conditions there are producing the radicalization which sees the emergence of Hamas and Hamas then becomes the key protagonist of the second intifada and then ultimately the seizure of power between 2006 and 2007 which produces a massive divergence within the Palestinian territories between the West Bank which remains in that position of a kind of dependent subordinate labor reserve location and continues to see some GDP per capita growth though not really development, and Gaza which from 2007 is essentially placed under siege. And in that siege economy you have a tight-knit political economy in which local initiative within Gazan society sees the emergence of various types of social groups which mobilize to build this extraordinary tunnel economy and Hamas then sits as a kind of controlling agent on top of that.
We think there are about 1,500 tunnels, essentially commercial operations in large part, where people basically dig a tunnel for a couple of hundred thousand and then charge fees on it. And an extraordinary siege economy emerges, which is then repeatedly hammered and throttled by the Israelis on the one side and the Egyptians on the other. And it's that which really creates this incredible divergence. So that even before the current shocking train of events, Gaza had become a totally precarious, fragile, aid-dependent, improvised siege economy, which is why people talk about it as essentially like an open-air prison camp. It's this story of divergence which intensifies with the military operations of the 2010s and the military takeover in Egypt from 2013 which is very opposed to Hamas because Hamas is organically descended from the Muslim Brotherhood which are the people that the Egyptian military coup against in 2013. And so Gaza finds itself trapped between those two locations. So rather than there being a long history of Gaza as some sort of appendix that can just be willfully cut off, it's really only in the last 20 years, 15 years really since the onset of the siege in 2007 that it's been reduced to this status of just a battlefield. I mean that piece I wrote it in the aftermath of those utterly cynical Israeli orders to like one million people to evacuate a space which they were just going to make into a battle space. And yeah, that's really the backdrop of this dissociation of 2 million people from the rest of the world.
Emblematic of the siege is of course the bombing of the airport and the complete destruction also of the fishing industry in Gaza. And of course you're right that by 2015 half of the population was dependent on aid. Now we know the numbers are even higher. So it's interesting because this tunnel economy as a way to evade what was ultimately a closure of economic possibilities stands in stark contrast with the Trump plan and Netanyahu plan for the Gaza after the genocide. Because the Gaza after the genocide you describe as a glossy hallucination but made of a globalized space in which the global trade becomes central. I'd like to read a passage from a Chartbook that you wrote earlier on actually in May 2024 when the plans that we're seeing currently being discussed as we speak for a Gaza peace, so-called peace plan, were already in the books. And you write the following: 'Netanyahu's Gaza 2035 is a plan to complete the erasure of Gaza. In its place, the Israeli government envisions a mega-rich clone of a globalized commercial and industrial city somewhere between Chicago — what historian William Cronon described as nature's metropolis — and Dubai. As Netanyahu himself observes, Gaza 2035 entails rebuilding from nothing. A tabula rasa, literally translated as a scrapped tablet. After the scrapping being done by the Israeli military will come the building of energy systems, oil and gas rings and solar panels and infrastructure, ports, airports and railways that will move Gaza from crisis to prosperity. In other words, there will be a thriving commercial center but no longer a Palestinian political entity.' Could we perhaps describe what you saw as being part of the Netanyahu government plans already in December 2023 and the current developments of the peace deal? Because in the peace deal, it's really interesting, point 9101 points exactly to this type of solution. I'm going to read the point: 'A Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East. And again, a special economic zone will be established with preferred tariffs and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.' So what is this all about? Why is it that it's not only destruction that is profitable in a capitalist economy? And just today there is a new report released that says that Biden and Trump together gave at least 21.7 billion dollars in aid to Israel which we know ultimately means aid to international companies in the arms business. It's not just destruction that is profitable here, but the reconstruction plan is the real bounty that we see in Gaza like in many other places.
Yeah, I mean if you're thinking about the political economy of capitalism, this issue, this question of tension between different capital groups is at the core of everything, right? And so clearly there is a group of businesses that are materially interested in continuing the war and the destruction. But as you say, the really big profits, the really big business is to be made in some sort of reconstruction peace. And this has a history going back to the 1990s. I mean the two-state solution of the 1990s, the Shimon Peres version of that, heavily backed by Clinton and the Europeans, was also an economic peace variant, but it basically was an economic peace that was supposed to underpin a two-state solution. So there was supposed to be a parallel evolution, at least to some degree, of a Palestinian and Israeli economy. And this didn't seem quite as crazy as it sounds now because the Israeli economy then was not what it's become. It was itself recovering from deep economic crisis in the 1980s. I mean the Israeli economy in the '80s was a debt-ridden, would have been dependent on the IMF if it hadn't had the absolute massive backing of the United States. So the idea was to stabilize both. This isn't an era of absolute massive oil affluence. And the idea is to have a kind of European-style due commerce development, co-development that will constitute peace.
And what's happened over the course of the 2000s after the second intifada and the preeminence increasingly of Netanyahu's group and the shifting of America's perspective is we're still with the economic peace vision but it's now the Abraham Accords and the deal is basically to try and marry a ultra high-tech, super affluent Israel which has a GDP per capita at the level of Germany and a debt level of like 60% of GDP. It's like in way better fiscal shape than America. It doesn't need any money from America, right? It has huge foreign exchange reserves, all deliberately built as part, I would see it, as a grand strategy of sovereign independence so as to be able to do this mega Sparta that Netanyahu talks about in extremists. On the one hand, marry that Israel to the mega affluence of the Gulf. You know, the Saudis are the really big play, but if the worst comes to the worst, you settle for the Qataris and the Emiratis who now are in a radically different level of economic development affluence than they were in the early 1990s. And the key is — and if you can do that, you can just completely ignore the Palestinians. So whereas previously the economic peace was about stabilizing the two-state solution, now essentially the economic peace is about voiding the two-state solution. So you no longer have to take it seriously.
And so this Gaza plan is the material realization of that. You obliterate Gaza, which is one of the great wounds of Palestinian history. You literally just pave it over and build a mall and build a hotel complex and an EV manufacturing zone and a big solar field. And in due course, of course, the same fate befalls the West Bank as well. So that's the kind of underlying logic here is that we move from economics as a stabilizer of the two-state solution to economics played at an even bigger level now — mega high-tech Israel with mega wealthy Gulf over the heads, and really as a way of erasing the Palestinian question. And that's I think what we're seeing again in these so-called peace plans — a depoliticized... I mean it's bizarre, you and I have a lot of interest in technocrats but they explicitly say this is going to be run by tech, it's not — they're going to be run by technocrats. It's not common for technocrats to literally write 'I am technocrat' on my forehead. Like people label you technocrat once you're doing technocratic things. But in this case they literally say there will be a technocratic government and it will be overseen by a board and the whole thing will be a Trump program. It's like that AI, that ghastly AI fantasy actually come to life. It's quite astonishing in how blatant it is really.
Right. And it's about this plunder being disguised as some form of expertise, something that we also see in other contexts such as Ukraine. I would just like to quote a passage because I think it's so fascinating. You write: 'This is the new geoeconomics of our era. Vast visions of transport, infrastructure, and logistics energized and inspired by a mixture of commercial interest, technological fascination, and geopolitical ribaldry. These power moves are both massively political, defining who is in and who is out, and aggressively anti-political at one and the same time. Once there is a train and a train that runs on time, the hope is that other questions will seem like irrelevancies.' So first of all, yeah. The trains running on time — I was thinking of you when I wrote that. And this all is part of an infrastructure plan. Everything's about infrastructure these days. Daniel Lager has a great line on this. Believe it or not, at the same time in 2024 they were doing these whopping great deals with India, of course, which once upon a time in the Biden era was part of this American grand strategy of encircling China. India as we know has maintained solidly good relations with Israel through all of this, unsurprisingly given the Hindu nationalist politics and the Muslim minority in India. And the idea is to build some — they kind of draw these lines on the map — but there's one set of lines anyway that go from India through to the Gulf and then across the desert to Israel and it's going to be solar powered, high-speed railway, all the usual gizmos. And that was very much part of this vision. And it's been going on — this started in the 2010s, right? So this is not something that was suddenly cooked up as this annihilatory violence was unleashed after October 7th. This was in the works already in the 2010s. And one does have to credit Netanyahu with strategic vision in this respect. I mean the guy's — he does, he's not just a political survivor and a total cynic. He actually does have a kind of grand strategic vision and these infrastructure projects are definitely part of that. And it is absolutely this combination of a total rewriting of the politics of the space but in the name of just high-speed logistics, just-in-time logistics, punctual trains, great container ports, you know, all that good stuff.
So this peace deal — we no one knows what's going to happen yet — but clearly is a form of what Marx economists would call primitive accumulation. It's part of making the land accessible even further to foreign power and speculation and in doing so pretending that there is some form of objective economic advancements in which all interests are united. What do you think about that?
