Paradise and Possession

I have been to West Palm Beach only once, for a wedding nearly twenty years ago. What I remember most was not the ocean or the architecture, but the geography of wealth itself. I had never before seen extreme poverty and extreme luxury sitting almost side by side — not separated, merely adjacent.

That memory came back to me recently while hearing talk of “revitalizing” Gaza — language that imagines, in effect, a Mediterranean resort. We were no longer speaking first about a people, a history, or a political settlement. We were speaking about a redevelopment opportunity.

We were discussing someone else’s homeland as though it were a project.

Israel’s public language has centered on security and retaliation. But the Administration’s rhetoric does something different. It reframes a conflict about sovereignty into a conversation about development, investment, and future tourism. The shift matters, because language reveals assumptions. Political language assumes inhabitants. Economic language assumes assets.

Great powers have long acted beyond their borders, but they traditionally justified their actions. They spoke of protection, stability, liberation, or security. Even when those claims were disputed, the need to make them acknowledged a limit: power still required explanation in human terms. It had to say something about the people who lived there.

Here the explanation is different. The justification is not moral or ideological, but managerial. The land is described less as a society than as a project.

From my home outside Washington, that sounds jarring. I cannot imagine how it sounds to those who actually live there.

What is equally striking is what is absent. Multilateral diplomacy, negotiated settlement, and even the language of coexistence barely appear. Territory is discussed as a transaction. The conversation begins to resemble a development proposal rather than a political future.

The world has known empires before. Empires usually spoke the language of destiny, civilization, or order. What feels new is the ease with which modern societies — which otherwise speak constantly of self-determination — can slip into speaking of inhabited land as though it were vacant land.

If nations begin to treat territory primarily as an asset rather than a society, politics changes in a subtle but profound way. The question ceases to be how people govern themselves and becomes who can best organize the property.

That shift does not remain confined to one region. Once sovereignty becomes negotiable in principle, security becomes negotiable in practice. The rules that protect small states begin to depend less on law and more on whether powerful countries find them useful.

This is why the language matters. It is not only describing policy; it is reshaping expectation. A world in which land is primarily valued for its development potential is a world in which the people living on it slowly disappear from the argument.

And when people disappear from the argument, peace rarely lasts — not because conflict is inevitable, but because belonging is no longer being discussed at all.