Albanians Are Against Jared Kushner's Israel-Linked Venture

On Albania's Adriatic coastline, demonstrators clashing with police and private security forces are waving cutout pink flamingos. The bird has become the emblem of protests against the planned tarmacking of a protected nature reserve in the Vjosa-Narta Delta in a multibillion-dollar luxury development project backed by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

The struggle is linked to the Trump administration in more ways than one. On the other side of the Mediterranean, Albanian forces are preparing to enter the Gaza Strip, as one of four states potentially committing boots on the ground via Donald Trump's widely reviled Board of Peace. These developments are deeply connected. The Albanian government under right-populist Edi Rama, whose nominally socialist party has been loyal to Washington ever since 1991, is forging ever-deeper ties with Tel Aviv. In Tirana, Israel has found a loyal, Muslim-state partner willing to provide ideological cover and material support in the aftermath of the Gaza genocide.

The proposed Vjosa-Narta megadevelopment is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Local villagers, bird-watchers, and ecological activists have a common fight to save the unspoiled delta from rapacious investors seemingly linked to the Rama administration through a shady network of shell companies. In so doing, they find themselves in an unexpected confrontation with a global constellation of Trump-aligned financial interests and Israeli-linked power brokers.

When I visited the Vjosa-Narta delta last year, it was easy to see why locals wanted to protect these relatively unspoiled lagoons, home to pelicans, turtle hatcheries, and a beloved population of rare European flamingos. In 2023, it became Europe's first Wild River National Park in a bid to protect it from the fate suffered by Albania's stunning but increasingly overdeveloped coastline. But President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner already had his eye on the region. Shortly after Trump's 2024 reelection, Kushner unveiled plans to create room for tens of thousands of rich tourists in luxury property developments across the protected development and a nearby island, Albania's largest. Rama enthusiastically welcomed the project by granting a Kushner-linked development firm "strategic investor status," meaning the government would underwrite construction and infrastructure costs and exempt Atlantic Incubation Partners from paying tax.

Public opinion had been divided over the project, with some residents welcoming the potential boost to the country's growing tourist industry, even as others worried about the ecological consequences. Xhemal Xherri works for Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania (PPNEA), an environmental NGO that has long sounded the alarm over the potential destruction this project would bring to the delta's fragile ecosystem. "They want to take these protected areas away and give them to the oligarchs," he says. "There's been no concrete plan, no feasibility study, no environmental impact assessment."

Rather, the "strategic investors" appear to be operating above Albanian law, on the basis of personal relationships with the Albanian prime minister (Kushner's wife Ivanka Trump flew in earlier this year to assess the site with a team of architects). The Balkan country has experienced massive corruption issues in the course of its postcommunist transition, and prosecutors this week opened an investigation into the 2024 law changes that opened the door for development on protected environmental areas.

Yet construction has begun in defiance of these legal challenges, with heavy equipment working night and day across the past fortnight to rapidly close off hundreds of hectares on the protected headland. Images of barbed wire and bird fences strung across the delta's golden beaches have sparked particular anger, bringing more locals out to protest the development than ever before. Private security was documented forcibly dragging away protesters, adding fuel to the fire, as protests have spread nationwide to bring thousands to the streets of Tirana and other major cities.

This "Flamingo Revolution" has largely focused on the local issues around the nature reserve, but there are signs of broader discontent with Albania's two-party political establishment. As well as halting the development and reversing laws crafted to facilitate foreign investment, demonstrators have chanted "Ivanka Go Home" and called for the resignation of long-term Premier Rama. "The government has behaved very arrogantly toward the people," Xherri says. "People are tired and angry. I can feel it."

PPNEA stresses the domestic and environmental aspects of the protests, which have brought both left-wing youth and traditional nationalists to the streets together, rather than their broader international significance. Given the limited room for the political opposition to maneuver in Albania, where a nominally two-party system offers little alternative beyond competing networks of capitalist oligarchs and public opinion is staunchly pro-American, this caution is understandable. Authorities have, however, tried to downplay the protests by making out that it's only about Trump. "If it was not Jared [Kushner involved], they would not give a shit," Rama told Politico in a recent interview.

The environmental NGOs that have found themselves at the forefront of the protests are thus cautious in addressing the three-way relationship between Washington, Tirana, and Tel Aviv. Fioralba Duma, who has worked with activist group Palestina e Lirë (Free Palestine) to campaign against Israeli interests in Albania, notes that "people are scared to speak against private companies and states. There is a lot of pressure from Rama, saying that the protesters are against economic development, so people want to protect themselves." Notably, Rama has dismissed the protesters as motivated by misinformation over direct Israeli investment and mere antisemitism, a smear also intended to prevent the activist movement from drawing any links between the controversial megadevelopment and Israeli soft diplomacy in the Balkans.

In truth, the Albanian government's ties to Israel run deep, and are growing deeper, as Albanian investigative journalists and activists have tirelessly documented. Tirana's potential move to put boots on the ground in Gaza caps years in which the Muslim-majority but generally secular country has moved closer to Tel Aviv. Rama most recently visited in Jerusalem in 2026, where he fawned over Benjamin Netanyahu and joked about the omniscience of Israel's Mossad intelligence services. He blames "no one else but Hamas" for the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, where Israel has killed over 70,000 Palestinians since October 2023.

This staunch political support brings material benefits. In the past year, Albania has inked a new multimillion-dollar arms deal for drones, mortars, and artillery systems with Israeli military firms including Elbit Systems; hosted a tech and cybersecurity summit bringing forty Israeli companies to Tirana; and been identified as a key supplier shipping fuel to Israel, with the tiny Balkan country ranking behind only the United States, Russia, and Brazil in its fuel provision to Tel Aviv. The latest Israeli-Albanian deal, an agricultural memorandum of understanding, was signed earlier this week as the protests flared up. It's also worth recalling that Albania houses the controversial, politically marginalized Iranian opposition group Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), which has heavily invested in lobbying Trump's networks and is presented by Mike Pompeo and Rudy Giuliani as the heir apparent in the event of regime change in Iran.

Rather than implying direct Israeli investment in the Kushner-backed development, these ties point to a broader strategic alignment — especially given Kushner's own involvement. Kushner's Affinity Partners investment firm was created to foster investment links between Israel and the Arab world, in line with his father-in-law's Abraham Accords. Kushner is seeking to bring the Albanian development investment from the al-Khayyat brothers, Qatari billionaires originally hailing from Syria. The al-Khayyats are now deeply involved in the reconstruction of their country of origin as its new Islamist government tentatively moves toward normalization with its Israeli neighbors, even as Israeli forces continue to occupy swathes of southern Syria. (This included an unsuccessful bid to use the "Trump" brand in high-end Syrian reconstruction projects.) Funds belonging to the al-Khayyats' own Albanian investment vehicle were temporarily frozen this week, as the Albanian anti-corruption prosecutor continued its investigation into a land-transfer scheme around the coastal development.

These overlapping interests are not confined to Albania. Domestic politics and Trump-linked financial interests intersect across the Western Balkans, where a constellation of nationalist political strongmen have long leveraged their strategic location in a zone of conflicting global interests to variously secure the political support of the European Union, the United States, Russia, and China, often accompanied by personally lucrative investment deals. Affinity Partners recently pulled out of a similar project in neighboring Serbia after its involvement in an equally controversial project in Downtown Belgrade contributed to ongoing anti-government protests there. In nearby Bosnia and Herzegovina, a recent investigation has revealed that a tiny, Trump-linked company stands to win the nation's largest-ever infrastructure contract to build a $1 billion pipeline delivering US gas across the region.

With such major investments and powerful interests at play, it's little wonder that Rama has said there is "absolutely no chance" the coastal development will stop, even if protests continue to grow. Yearslong demonstrations in neighboring Serbia have failed to unseat the country's own strongman leader, Aleksandar Vučić, who like Rama has proven adept at turning his country's potentially vulnerable geopolitical position into a point of strength, maintaining friendly relationships in both East and West. It's telling that though Albania and Serbia are bitter political rivals, both have equally strong relationships with Israel, with Belgrade increasing its own arms deals with Tel Aviv tenfold since 2023.

The "Flamingo revolutionaries" face an uphill struggle if they hope to divert their government's staunch commitment to the Vjosa-Narta development, let alone any broader goals of replacing the Rama administration with a better alternative that prioritizes local well-being over elite interests. Nonetheless, Albania's bird-watchers turned revolutionaries believe change is in the air. "The environmental issue has moved something," activist Duma says. "The rage is so accumulated, so diverse."