GWU Students for Justice in Palestine called on the University last week to fire an economics professor who authored and sent a plan to President Donald Trump proposing the economic redevelopment of the Gaza Strip.
Joseph Pelzman’s paper — published in July 2024 through the Center of Excellence for Economic Studies of the Middle East and North Africa, a nonprofit think tank co-founded and directed by Pelzman — suggests an economic approach for reconstructing Gaza post war. SJP started a campaign on Feb. 15 urging GW to fire Pelzman for his proposal’s alleged involvement in Trump’s plan to turn over the sovereignty of Gaza to the United States and displace Palestinians to rebuild the territory.
More than 500 people have joined SJP’s email campaign as of Thursday. SJP posted photos Tuesday reportedly submitted by anonymous students of about 20 “notice of eviction” flyers scattered in front of Pelzman’s office in Monroe Hall.
Pelzman’s plan calls for mass excavation of Gaza and the creation of a “sovereign demilitarized green economy” in the territory through the establishment of e-commerce, hotels, an independent energy station and light rail. Pelzman told The Hatchet in an email that a partner at his think tank sent his proposal to the “Trump people” in July 2024.
University spokesperson Julia Garbitt said officials “want to stress” that faculty are entitled to academic freedom in their teaching and research even if it is controversial. She said scholarly work produced by faculty does not reflect a University position.
“These commitments are the hallmark of an academic community that respects differing points of view,” Garbitt said.
Pelzman teaches five economics classes at GW and has taught at universities like Renmin University in Beijing, Ben Gurion University of the Negev and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has done consulting work for U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank and the Department of Labor, according to his resume.
Garbitt said the University condemns any acts that deface GW property or threaten community members. She said the GW Police Department is investigating the flyer incident and has been in contact directly with Pelzman.
She said GW will take “all appropriate steps” under local laws and University policies if those who dispersed flyers are identified.
“These unacceptable activities undermine the meaningful and productive dialogue at GW,” Garbitt said in an email.
An SJP representative who requested to remain anonymous due to concerns of being “targeted” by the University said SJP will not accept a professor at GW who is pursuing the displacement of Palestinians and rejects the University contributing to “imperialist knowledge production.”
They said the University will not be able to “sweep” Pelzman’s involvement “under the rug,” and SJP will continue to protest until officials fire Pelzman.
“We don’t want our University, our campus, this institution that we contribute to and that we pay money to, to be used for the genocide of our people, to be used for the ethnic cleansing and the mass expulsion of our family and friends, from Gaza, from our sovereign, from our homeland,” the representative said.
The representative said Pelzman has not faced any consequences for his economic proposal while GW’s response to students protesting the University’s investment in companies with ties to Israel has been “political repression.”
“They have repressed and brutalized and arrested students for protesting against genocide and yet are continuing to allow a literal architect of genocide to continue to teach at this University,” the representative said.
Pelzman discussed his plan publically on Kobby Barda’s podcast “America, Baby!” in August 2024. In the podcast, Pelzman said he was asked to think of an “out-of-the-box” idea regarding post-war Gaza. He did not say who he was asked by in the episode.
SJP alleged in its email campaign that Pelzman prepared the proposal “at the request of the Trump administration.”
“One of my partners on CEESMENA sent it to the Trump people in July. That’s all I can say. I don’t know the players on the Trump team,” Pelzman told The Hatchet in an email. “I only wanted to be helpful and come up with a solution to the mess in Gaza.”
He sent the paper to Trump’s team because they “initially had an interest in it,” in contrast with former President Joe Biden, Pelzman said in the podcast. Trump said he wants the United States to “take over” Gaza and send Palestinians to neighboring countries like Egypt and Jordan in a White House press conference on Feb. 4 with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump has continued to tease the idea of taking over the Gaza Strip over the following weeks. He posted an artificial-intelligence-generated video to social media Tuesday showcasing what “Trump Gaza” would look like, featuring Gaza as a Riviera-style resort with a golden statue of Trump.
Pelzman said in the August podcast that corporations and Jared Kushner, a businessman and Trump’s son-in-law, expressed interest in his economic proposal. He said investors are “salivating” to get into Gaza.
In 2021, Kushner founded Affinity Partners, an investment firm that focuses on investing through American and Israeli companies and sources funding from the Saudi Arabian government. Kushner praised Gaza’s “waterfront property” in February 2024, calling it “very valuable” and suggested that Israel move out civilians and “clean it up.”
Pelzman said the “detractors” of his plan are not economists and have not read his paper.
“They are all political hacks playing to the pro-Hamas crowd,” Pelzman said in an email. “They make a lot of noise with no credible solution. None have read my paper. Too many equations for them.”
Pelzman said his paper does not address the “mobility” of Palestinians in Gaza other than their right to exit through Egypt. He said the reconstruction process would be dangerous for local residents but declined to comment on how Palestinians would be impacted or compensated for their displacement if the plan were to be implemented.
Pelzman’s paper rejects the “outdated” and “unsuccessful” policy that the United States has carried out so far in Gaza after Hamas took political control in 2007, which includes providing humanitarian assistance to Gaza and advocating for a two-state solution, which proposes creating an independent Palestinian state alongside an Israeli state.
Pelzman wrote in the paper that the U.S. forced Israel to take on a policy of “occasional ping-pong battles” and “appeasing” Hamas with Qatari money, instead of carpet-bombing Gaza and “eliminating the danger” from the territory.
“The Biden-Harris-Blinken people were stuck in the Washington census which has not worked for the past 100 years and will never work in the future,” Pelzman said in an email.
He continued in his paper that Gaza’s economy is struggling and that the destruction in Gaza has been so extensive during the war that it is beyond repair or reconstruction.
He wrote that the first step to rebuilding Gaza requires the elimination of the “underground military infrastructure” in Gaza, referring to a network of underground tunnels created by Hamas, and the creation of a 3.0 to 5.0-kilometer area along the borders of Israel and Egypt, similar to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
Pelzman called for “foreign investors” to develop three sectors in Gaza — tourism, agriculture and technology — to address the region’s economic turmoil, which he said is due to Hamas’ control over Gaza following Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005.
Pelzman wrote in his proposal that these investors would provide funding to help reconstruct Gaza and would receive equity shares in exchange for a limited 50- to 100-year lease. He said investors would establish a “robust civil administration” after completing the lease and would then address the sovereignty of Gaza.
He said the selection of specific investors is outside the scope of his paper and declined to comment on which countries would be foreign investors.
“With respect to an exclusion list of foreign investors, I think it is obvious that it cannot include any parties who have contributed to the current crisis, including the Muslim Brotherhood, its sponsor Qatar or Iran,” Pelzman said in an email.
Pelzman wrote in his paper that Gaza needs a revitalized education system reformed through United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabian curriculums and staffed by international educators based on the Singapore International Baccalaureate model, which is a two-year program for high school students based on a global curriculum.
“The objective function of this education system is to “denazify” the education system in Gaza, similar to how it was done in Germany after World War II,” Pelzman said in an email. “The curriculum will be taken from Muslim countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which remove all forms of antisemitism, anti-Israel bias and anti-Christian bias.”
Junior Ragheb Khalidi, a Palestinian American, said he was shocked and “disgusted” after reading Pelzman’s paper. He said Pelzman’s paper presents a biased view of history and extracts economic potential from Palestinians without any consideration for their well-being.
Pelzman wrote in his paper that based on “local surveys,” Palestinians support Hamas and are calling for the conquest of the historic lands of Israel “from the river to the sea” as a one-state solution on the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea.
“He paints Palestinians and the people as a kind of monolith, calling them violent and genocidal,” Khalidi said.
Khalidi said even before the events of Oct. 7, 2023 — when Hamas crossed across the Israeli border, killing 1,200 Israelis and taking more than 250 hostages — the University has shown a clear bias by “conflating” pro-Palestinian students’ criticism of the Israeli government with hate speech.
Khalidi said SJP’s petition was a “good call” because it quantified the number of people who disagree with Pelzman’s presence at the University because of his paper.
“I, as a student, don’t really believe my background as a Palestinian American is valued by the administration,” Khalidi said.
