I don’t think anybody quite understands what President Donald Trump is proposing in Gaza. At its most idealized form, anyway. Think of the territory reframed as a kind of Dubai. A sparkling, sprawling, high-rise fusion-mix of resort, conference center, Ferrari dealership, off-shore banking haven, yacht marina, and hotel spa. Gazans get rehoused while the futuristic commercial leviathan gets built. Many of them work there, along with other groups. Then they return and live there, along with other groups. (“Palestinians can also live there.”) They even get some ownership, lots of it, maybe most of it like the Gulfies. 

But that’s hardly the point because, there and elsewhere, we are entering a new reality where ownership no longer attaches to place in the old way, or identity to indigeneity or custom to landscape. Not just in Gaza but in the present and future, everywhere. Because everybody will have shares in real estate corporations all around the world. We will all own bits of Gaza, along with Gazans. 

In return, Trump is offering alleviation from poverty. Perhaps a good deal more; ultimately he’s offering them shares in the new high-flying consumer-shareholder global order. He’s not inventing this idea. He’s articulating a reality in the process of unfolding ubiquitously, not just for Gazans but for you and me too. This is what’s meant by globalization or globalism. Nor should we think of the Gaza proposal as a new iteration of Western imperialism. Or as ethnic cleansing a la Native Americans. Such notions are outdated, and I say this with no sense of irony. You cannot have Western imperialism when the West itself is owned by worldwide shareholders and the society itself is multiethnic or immigrant-based — including its identity myths, its stories of selfhood and becoming, its advertising to itself. In this scenario, there can be no such thing as ethnic cleansing because the notion of ethnically owned or inherited geography becomes racist. 

Trump is, in effect, offering Gazans (and the rest of us) a new kind of identity and a liberation from the old kind. Let go and you can come back as a transformed person, not as an inhabitant in the traditional sense but as a shareholder, along with “outsiders,” in the wealth your transformation has generated. (Welcome to the new “trans”citizen.) You are maximizing the value of your inherited holdings. Naysayers might denigrate such proceedings as just another form of gentrification or commercialization. To which there’s a ready response: It’s the homeowner’s decision. If, as Iago says in Othello, you “put but money in your purse” and can now live anywhere, wouldn’t you take it? Instead of a crumbling, mildewy place in a ghetto, you get the chance to live in, say, a clean Miami Beach high-rise world’s away? Or something similar in your own neighborhood? Sure, you’ll be living next to strangers from around the world, but only a racist complains about that. 

Again, do not think you detect a note of sarcasm — because it really isn’t that morally simple or the proposed vision so easily dismissed. We are talking about a challenge bigger than ethnic cleansing, more momentous, if that’s possible. We are being challenged by an ethos that eradicates the very moral basis of such judgments. Your home, the terrain of “your people,” your nation is not a homeland, tied unnegotiably to memory and identity. 

Rather, it’s real estate. Your identity is tied to it as a percentage shareholder and global consumer. The beauty of this idea, fully realized, is that it liberates the citizen from centuries of regional, inherited rivalries and hatreds. It substitutes freedom of choice for atavistic roots of the kind replete with such baggage. Sure, you bring your traditions with you wherever you move, and these days there’s no pressure to dilute them in your new chosen location because the internet and the shrinking globe obviate the need to assimilate. But, the truth is, your place of origin is no eternal seat of immutable identity either. Where you came from will ultimately be subject to the same changes. Those countries that exported emigrants are not guaranteed to remain uni-ethnic. These days, Turkey is inundated with Syrians and India is having trouble with African migrants. We will all be transient global citizens among others of that stripe even if we stay put. You may regard this as a living nightmare vision, but that will pass. Do you see the citizens of Singapore or Dubai complaining?

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It’s interesting that nobody on the Left has reconsidered national liberation movements of the past in the light of present-day mores. Why were they not racist and exclusionary, or at the very least, ethno-statist? 

Think of the masses who were killed by their own side for wanting to join the free-market side in, say, Vietnam. Decades later, after so much bloodshed, they are doing so anyway. The same goes for Hamas today. Such allegiances are a thing of the past, or so the argument goes. What Trump is offering, or channeling, is a not-so-modest invitation to total personal and historical transformation. Was it Marx who said the point is not just to change the structure of society but the very nature of man? 

Melik Kaylan writes about culture for the Wall Street Journal and a column on foreign affairs in Forbes.