Have the Palestinians not suffered enough?
For two years, the unfortunate people of Gaza have faced a horrific military assault. Yes, people can debate the rights and wrongs of Israel’s actions, but the fact remains that hundreds of thousands of people have faced death, injury, bereavement, fear and malnutrition.
Now these people are going to endure—Tony Blair?
“Blair would help oversee Gaza transition under Trump plan,” the BBC reports. Trump’s “plan” involves a campaign of demilitarization and redevelopment. Happily, the president has dropped what seemed to be a plan of ethnic cleansing and hotel construction, but inflicting Blair on the luckless Gazans seems cruel nonetheless.
Blair, whose government held Britain in its cold and clammy hands between 1997 and 2007, is best known in the Middle East for cocreating the invasion of Iraq. This nightmarishly stupid endeavor, based on overheated claims about Saddam Hussein’s military capacities and childish delusions about liberal democracy flourishing amid sectarianism and clannishness, left hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of coalition soldiers dead, as well as providing fertile grounds for the development of ISIS. Such were the horrors of the war that it made Bush and Blair’s doomed adventure in Afghanistan seem comparatively sane—and that war ended with the Taliban simply retaking control after 20 blood-soaked years.
This is the man tasked with sorting out Gaza? How about bringing in Sam Bankman-Fried to reshape its economy, or Ghislaine Maxwell to campaign for women’s rights?
Blair’s failings don’t end here. It might seem churlish to bring up his lamentable role in expanding mass migration or the higher education system. Gaza is hardly liable to suffer from an excess of migrants or universities. But the point is that Blair is self-important and delusional—launching secular crusades without a sense of realism. He is a great marketer inexplicably elevated to leadership—holding forth on the world stage as if he can conjure up a brighter future with the sheer power of clichés. The tragedy is that people have tried to put his “narratives” into practice.
Since 2016, Blair—now Sir Tony Blair—has been the frontman of the modestly titled Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. With 800 employees working on projects in 40 different countries, some have speculated that Blair is more powerful than he was in 10 Downing Street. On the back of multi-million dollar donations from the likes of Larry Ellison of Oracle, the TBI—it sounds like a gastrointestinal disorder—have been involved in AI boosterism and advising leaders on governance and geopolitics (“I’m Tony Blair and here’s what not to do …” et cetera). Their links with power were seemingly demonstrated by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s recent announcement that Britain would adopt a system of digital ID cards coming days after a TBI report on digital ID.
It would be dishonest to suggest that the Tony Blair Institute can offer no valuable insight into the Israel/Palestine conflict. One suspects that a lot of people could have done with reading Beth Oppenheim’s June 2023 article for the TBI, which warned: “Without a political process, the next Gaza-Israel escalation is only a matter of time.” Well, yes.
Still, ending wars takes a lot more risk and insight than anticipating them. Blair’s sweeping plan for Palestinian development, while admittedly humane compared to some that we have heard, brims with vain technocratic optimism, appearing to think that economic development can be manifested in a political vacuum. Blair is a big believer in the power of AI, and his techno-optimism seems to have made him even blinder to the sheer messiness of human beings.
All this smells of the worst sort of imperial arrogance, without even the entertaining pomp and circumstance. Bluntly, if Blair could make such a hash of “modernizing” the peaceful and prosperous Britain of the late ’90s, how can we expect that he will “modernize” Gaza?
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I suppose that Blair could point to his role in the Good Friday Agreement, which—largely—ended violence in Northern Ireland. But Northern Ireland was not Gaza, and Israel is not Great Britain. If nothing else, peace in Northern Ireland would have been a different proposition if Belfast had been left in smoking ruins, or if the IRA had carried out an attack on the scale of October 7.
Establishing a durable peace in Palestine will absolutely take ambition. It will absolutely take international involvement (unless people think Hamas can lead the Gazans to a glorious future). But Tony Blair is not just ambitious—he is deeply and devastatingly hubristic. A series of avoidable catastrophes in government did nothing to diminish his self-belief. Like an evangelical veering towards the status of a cult leader, he remains blissfully convinced that he can reshape the world.
I agree with him. He can. But not—I suspect—for the better.
