A Luxury Resort Became A Sovereignty Fight
It started with a coastline that many Albanians believed was protected.
Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, is building a luxury resort on two sites in Albania: Sazan Island, a former Cold War military base riddled with derelict bunkers and landmines, and the Vjosa-Narta coastal wetlands near Zvërnec, a protected nature reserve home to flamingos, Mediterranean monk seals and sea turtle nesting sites. The project is worth an estimated €1.4 billion. Hotels, private villas, a superyacht marina, 6,000 rooms. Managed by Aman, the ultra-luxury hospitality brand whose clients include Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Then Ivanka Trump explained how they found the island.
“We were on a friend’s boat and we stopped for a swim,” she said in a podcast interview published 1 June 2026. “Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated.”
For many Albanians, those words said everything. A national island, a protected coastline, a public wetland, described like something a wealthy tourist stumbled upon and decided to keep.
Who Is Actually Paying For This
Affinity Partners is not American money in any meaningful sense.
Kushner’s firm raised roughly $3 billion, nearly all of it from overseas sovereign wealth funds. $2 billion came from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, personally pushed through by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after the fund’s own advisory panel initially refused, citing Kushner’s inexperience. The panel was overruled. The rest came from Qatar’s sovereign fund, Abu Dhabi’s Lunate and the UAE. A fifth investor has never been named.
Affinity has collected over $157 million in management fees on these funds. Saudi Arabia alone has paid $87 million in fees, whether or not a single project is ever built.
This is the fact that changes the story. A chunk of Albania’s protected Adriatic coastline is being capitalised by Gulf monarchies, routed through the US president’s son-in-law, who takes a management fee regardless of outcome. The Albanian government gave Kushner’s LLC “strategic investor” status, with no business plan on file and no feasibility study submitted, weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The Beach Was Fenced. The Country Reacted.
In late May 2026, developers erected barbed wire fences near the Zvërnec site, cutting off local families and tourists from public beach access. When activists arrived to remove the fencing, a private security guard was filmed dragging a protester toward a cliff edge. The footage circulated across Albanian social media within hours. It was the moment a local environmental dispute became a national revolt.
Protests spread from the coast to Tirana, where thousands gathered outside the office of Prime Minister Edi Rama. Protesters carried inflatable flamingos. They held signs reading “Albania is not for sale,” “I don’t want Albania like Dubai” and “Ivanka, go home.” Artists, intellectuals and environmental scientists joined the marches. Mainstream Albanian television ignored the protests. People organised through social media instead.
Rama invited protesters to send a delegation for talks. They refused.
Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutors, known as SPAK, opened a formal investigation into how coastal land titles were processed and transferred to private investors, and specifically into 2024 legislative changes that reclassified protected areas to clear the way for the development. Two private security employees are under criminal investigation. The licences of the two firms that employed them were revoked. Fifteen protesters have been charged with crimes.
Flamingos, Wetlands And The Isr*el Question
The Vjosa-Narta area is not empty land. Forty environmental organisations from 28 countries wrote to Rama in January 2026 demanding the immediate suspension of the project. They cited endangered migratory birds, flamingo colonies, monk seal habitats and sea turtle nesting grounds that would be destroyed by construction.
Rama called the development transformational. He said Albania must remain welcoming to investors.
But there is a second layer to Albanians’ anger at Rama, and it runs deeper than one beach.
In January 2026, while more than 72,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza, Rama flew to Jerusalem to address the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. He praised the Isr*el-Albania relationship, received the Presidential Medal of Honor from President Isaac Herzog, and told lawmakers that Hamas was responsible for Gaza being what he called an “open-air free prison.” He did not criticise Isr*el’s conduct. He did not mention the scale of civilian deaths.
Albanian civil society answered immediately. On 30 January, protesters gathered outside parliament in Tirana under the slogan “Not in My Name.” They carried Palestinian flags and said Rama did not represent them.
He has not stopped. In late 2025, Albania signed a multimillion-euro arms deal with Isr*eli defence companies including Elbit Systems, covering artillery, mortars and tactical drones. In May 2026, Elbit registered its Albanian branch. An Albania-Isr*el technology and cybersecurity summit brought 40 Isr*eli companies to Tirana. In August 2025, nearly 300 Albanian Muslim religious leaders signed a public statement condemning the genocide in Gaza and calling on their government to break its silence. One Albanian historian told Middle East Eye: “Albania’s government has deepened ties with Isr*el without any concern about the Muslim community reaction.”
Albania is a Muslim-majority country. Its government is arming a state the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants against for crimes against humanity. Its prime minister is accepting medals from a leader facing genocide charges. And its protected coastline is being handed to a fund bankrolled by the same Gulf monarchies that Kushner describes as the financial engine of his Middle East peace vision.
Albanians see all of this at once. The resort protests and the Gaza protests are not the same movement. But they point to the same wound: a government that has decided who it serves, and it is not the people in the streets.
This Is Not The First Time
Albania is not the only country where Kushner has tried this.
In Belgrade, Serbia, he proposed a luxury hotel on the site of Yugoslav army buildings destroyed by NATO bombing in 1999. That project triggered public protests and ended in a criminal indictment. It was halted.
Albania is now following the same pattern. The Senate Finance Committee found that Affinity’s deals in the Balkans contain provisions that make the host governments business partners in the development. The Albanian state, through the Albanian Investment Corporation, is co-invested in this project. Rama is not just approving Kushner’s resort. His government owns a piece of it.
The Real Story Is Power
The government calls it investment. It will bring tourism, jobs and transformation, it says. Albania’s path to EU membership runs through modernity, and modernity costs money.
But what Albanians in the streets see is this: a protected island handed to a firm run by the US president’s son-in-law, funded by the same Saudi crown prince who ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, approved without a business plan, enabled by laws quietly changed in 2024, defended by a prime minister who praises Isr*el in front of the Knesset while his own citizens carry Palestinian flags outside parliament.
The bulldozers may be local. The money may be foreign. But the anger now belongs to Albania.
By Shizza Farooqui
SOURCES: Al Jazeera, NPR, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Balkan Insight, Reuters, Euronews, Truthout, ABC News, PBS News, Middle East Eye, Anadolu Agency, Untold Magazine, Tirana Examiner, New York Times, Senate Finance Committee (via reporting)
