Kushner's island land grab: Albanians are revolting against a system, not a resort
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Soumaya Ghannoushi
on
Tue, 06/09/2026 - 12:30
The protests are against an American political operative with deep ties to Israel, funded by Gulf sovereign wealth who moves across borders acquiring land, and ignoring the will of populations
Protesters shoot slogans during a protest against a luxury resort linked to Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner in Tirana, Albania on 7 June, 2026 (Reuters)
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Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump's son-in-law and special envoy, and his wife Ivanka Trump would like you to believe that they discovered an island.
They tell the story with all the breathless wonder of Christopher Columbus stumbling upon the Americas: a mysterious Mediterranean island floating patiently in the sea, waiting for Ivanka Trump to find it.
One almost expects her to continue: "We planted a flag, claimed it for the House of Trump, and introduced civilisation to the natives."
The problem, of course, is that Sazan is not some uncharted paradise floating anonymously in the sea. It is part of Albania. It belongs to a country. It belongs to a people. It has a history. These are facts that appear not to have registered.
Yet, listening to Ivanka Trump describe the experience, one gets the distinct impression that Albania itself is little more than scenery: a tasteful backdrop in the ongoing film of a billionaire’s self-discovery.
There is something revealing about the language. Not merely the naivety, the entitlement and the assumption that the world exists as a collection of assets waiting to be admired, acquired, developed, monetised and transformed into luxury experiences for the ultra-rich.
"We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. That’s how we found it. We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way."
Barefoot. How charming. How innocent. How wonderfully down to earth.
A choreographed spectacle
There is something almost Marie Antoinette-like about the performance. While millions of Americans struggle with the cost of living and live pay cheque to pay cheque, Ivanka invites the public into her personal journey of self-discovery aboard a billionaire’s yacht.
The daughter of a president who claims to speak for ordinary Americans recounts the magical tale of discovering a Mediterranean island while out for a swim.
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»
One can almost hear the echoes of Versailles.
Not because she literally said: "Let them eat cake", but because the same detachment lingers beneath the story: a world so insulated by wealth and privilege that it mistakes extravagance for authenticity, acquisition for adventure, and a billion-dollar land deal for a spiritual awakening.
The act is an old one. The same colonial habit that once spoke of "virgin land": empty, untouched, waiting to be claimed.
But this modern conquistador does not arrive carrying a sword. She arrives carrying investment capital, a lifestyle brand and a carefully curated sense of wonder. She does not speak of conquest. She speaks of development.
And before Sazan island, there was Gaza.
Long before luxury villas were being imagined on an Albanian island, Kushner was publicly discussing Gaza’s waterfront potential. As Palestinians were being slaughtered and tonnes of bombs were flattening entire neighbourhoods, he publicly salivated over Gaza’s "very valuable" waterfront real estate.
The language is strikingly familiar: potential, opportunity, prime coastal property. The same vocabulary that transforms human communities into investment prospects, or inconvenient obstacles to be "cleaned up", a term Kushner used openly while the bodies in Gaza continued to accumulate.
Of course, Sazan itself is not merely a picturesque island. It is a former military zone filled with tunnels, fortifications and infrastructure built because of its strategic location between the Adriatic and Mediterranean seas. Situated between the Balkans and Italy and close to major regional routes, it possesses a significance extending far beyond tourism brochures and luxury villas.
Strategic questions, however, are conveniently absent from the glossy presentations. Instead, a blonde heiress is placed in front of the cameras to smother such questions beneath an avalanche of lifestyle jargon: wellness, sustainability, reflection, personal journeys and mindfulness.
The result is a carefully choreographed spectacle in which geopolitical realities dissolve behind mood boards, barefoot hikes and a great deal of expensive nonsense.
The objective: Control
Kushner is often presented as simply a businessman pursuing profitable opportunities. That description is incomplete.
His family has long been among the major financial supporters of Israeli settlement organisations. Family foundations donated to projects in settlements built on occupied Palestinian land, as well as to the Israeli military.
Kushner cultivated exceptionally close ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli far right, and became one of the principal architects of policies that overwhelmingly favoured Israeli territorial ambitions.
These are not peripheral biographical details. They are the context without which nothing that follows makes sense. They reveal a consistent worldview: one in which land is something to be rearranged by those with sufficient power.
If money fails, there are political deals.
If political deals fail, there is pressure.
If pressure fails, there is military force.
The mechanism changes.
The objective remains.
Control.
The parallels become even more striking when one considers how Kushner says he first encountered Sazan.
In 2021, he visited the island while aboard a yacht owned by Nat Rothschild, where he met with the Albanian prime minister on board the same vessel and began exploring the development project.
A billionaire, a baron and a prime minister on a boat, deciding what would become of someone else’s land.
The informality is the point. These conversations are not meant to happen in parliaments.
Nat Rothschild is not merely a wealthy financier who happens to share a famous surname. He is Nathaniel Philip Victor James Rothschild, 5th Baron Rothschild, the current hereditary peer, executive chairman of a global manufacturing company and the only son of Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, who died in 2024.
The family's connection to the Balfour Declaration requires care to state precisely, but is no less striking for it.
The letter was addressed in 1917 by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild, the 2nd Baron, who died in 1937 without legitimate children; his titles eventually passing down through the family line to the present holder. The 2nd Baron and the 5th Baron are not the same man. But they are the same title, the same dynasty and the same unbroken thread.
Over a century separates the two moments. One was a letter that helped promise away Palestine. The other was a yacht on which the fate of a protected Albanian island began to be discussed.
The mechanism, as ever, is elite men in private spaces arranging the world beyond the reach of those who live in it.
From Palestine to Albania
Palestinians have long viewed the Balfour Declaration as the quintessential colonial act: powerful men deciding the fate of another people’s homeland without their knowledge or consent. Then, as now, influential figures discussed land through the language of strategic opportunity, development and grand visions conceived far from the people most affected by them.
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»
Palestine was treated as something that could be promised away. Many Albanians fear Sazan is being treated in much the same fashion.
Not through military conquest, but through money, influence and elite relationships operating beyond democratic scrutiny.
That fear is not without foundation. Anti-corruption prosecutors in Albania are currently investigating changes the government made in 2024 to laws that make it easier for tourism development to take place on environmentally protected land. It is unclear how long the probe will take or what consequences it may have for Kushner’s development.
What is clear is that the law was changed, and then the deal was signed. The sequencing is, at minimum, worth noting.
Under the terms of that strategic investor status agreement, Kushner’s company will pay no taxes for ten years during construction. Albania’s treasury will not see a single lekë of it for the better part of a generation.
A sovereign nation, in other words, changed its environmental laws, waived a decade of tax revenue and handed a strategically significant island to a foreign billionaire.
In exchange for what, precisely, remains a question the government has shown little enthusiasm for answering.
Nor is this the first time Kushner has attempted this model.
He previously planned to develop a Trump-branded property in Belgrade, Serbia. In December 2025, he withdrew from the project after four high-ranking Serbian government officials were charged with abuse of power and forgery in connection with it. Kushner's company, Affinity Partners, announced it was ending its involvement because “meaningful projects should unite rather than divide”.
A touching sentiment. It arrived, notably, only after the indictments.
Sazan is not an anomly
The irony is that Kushner is not some self-made entrepreneur risking his own hard-earned capital. Affinity Partners was launched with roughly $2bn from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, with further investment from the UAE and Qatar.
The firm moving across borders acquiring land and influence is itself financed largely by governments from the very region Kushner helped shape as a senior American official.
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»
The conflicts of interest are not incidental. They are the architecture.
Since the Trump family’s return to power, the broader Trump linked investment network has expanded with remarkable speed. According to the Financial Times, 1789 Capital, a venture firm whose partners include Donald Trump Jr., saw its assets under management surge from approximately $200m to $3.5bn in little more than a year.
Political power and private capital do not merely coexist in this world. They are the same thing, wearing different clothes.
Sazan, then, is not an anomaly.
It is a case study.
Politically connected capital, backed by sovereign wealth, facilitated by compliant governments, cloaked in the language of development and opportunity, moving across borders with the confidence of those who have never been told no and have no expectation of hearing it now.
To understand how such confidence is sustained, one need only look at the man who handed them the island.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama is not merely a willing host. He is an ideological participant. On a visit to the Israeli Knesset in January, he told Netanyahu that his legs were shaking in the presence of “one of the world’s greatest orators” and pledged, with apparent sincerity, to survive Bibi’s "judgment".
It was less a diplomatic exchange than a performance of devotion, a head of government prostrating himself before a man overseeing a military campaign that much of the world has called a genocide.
When protests erupted recently, Rama did not answer the questions being asked. He reframed them.
The demonstrations were, he declared, "a hybrid war against Albania, armed by the enemies of Albania and Israel". Apparently, Albanian citizens asking questions about their own coastline now qualify as enemies of both.
On Tirana’s main boulevard, thousands have gathered for successive nights of protest in what demonstrators have taken to calling the Flamingo Revolution, after the pink wading birds whose breeding ground the resort would encroach upon.
They carried Albanian flags, placards and large flamingo-shaped cut-outs.
The signs were simple and direct:
"Albania is not for sale", “Where will they live now?"
What Albanians are revolting against is not simply a resort.
It is a system.
One in which an American political operative with deep ties to Israel, funded by Gulf sovereign wealth, facilitated by a prime minister who openly prostrates himself before Netanyahu, moves across borders acquiring land, extracting value and leaving populations with no recourse and no say.
Gaza. Serbia. Albania.
The geography shifts.
The logic is identical.
But so, increasingly, is the resistance.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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