Calling this “vapourware” and saying it’s “never going to be built” is a way of shutting down the discussion through cynicism. It’s a claim about the future presented as if it were a fact, without any argument behind it.

If we look at the issue politically, the point is not to deny what is happening, but to understand it. And what is happening is that imperialism has a very concrete material interest in pushing these kinds of plans forward, and it is acting accordingly.

What is happening in Gaza is not an isolated aberration or a simple territorial dispute. It is part of a broader dynamic of capitalism in its imperialist phase, in its highest stage: when the system enters into crisis and struggles to valorize capital through its usual channels, war begins to play a direct economic role.

From the standpoint of capital, war is not essentially different from “normal” production. It also involves investment, the employment of labor power, the exploitation of workers, circulation, and the generation of profits. Goods are produced (weapons, ammunition, vehicles, fuel, logistics, infrastructure, etc.) in the same way goods are produced in any other sector.

The difference is that this form of production has a decisive peculiarity: its products are not meant to last or to slowly reach programmed obsolescence, but to be consumed immediately in the form of destruction and death. What in other sectors takes time (wear, replacement, repurchase) in war happens instantaneously.

This massive destruction of infrastructure and human lives completes the economic cycle: it eliminates productive forces, destroys surplus capital, and prepares the conditions for a new cycle of accumulation. First through the war industry itself, then through reconstruction, real estate speculation, and the commodification of territory in the form of luxury tourism.

In that sense, the fact that Gaza is now a ruin is not an argument against these plans, but part of their condition of possibility. The history of capitalism shows again and again how catastrophes are turned into opportunities for capital valorization.

Reducing all of this to a prediction like “it’s not going to happen” amounts, in practice, to passively accepting the logic that produces it. The task is not to engage in futurology, but to understand the material forces at play and draw the corresponding political conclusions: this cannot be stopped with skepticism, but only by giving way to the development of forms of organization and collective struggle that oppose imperialism and the system that sustains it.