Nearly 18 years have passed since Tony Blair, then Middle East envoy, presented a 34-page document that outlined a “corridor for peace and prosperity”, stretching from the Red Sea to the occupied Golan Heights.
The Blair plan envisaged an agro-industrial park near Jericho in the occupied West Bank to facilitate the transportation of goods to the Gulf via Jordan. Another industrial park, or “quick impact project”, would have been created in Tarqumiya in Hebron, and a third in Jalameh, north of Jenin.
Little of this was new. The Oslo Accords, signed in 1993 and 1995, envisaged the creation of up to nine industrial estates along the Green Line from Jenin in the north to Rafah in Gaza.
But filled with optimism and the backing of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the United Nations, the European Union, USAID and Japan, Blair announced, like the true visionary he always knew himself to be: “If the above package works, then it will be followed by further such packages. In this way, over time and progressively, the weight of occupation can be lifted, but in a way that does not put Israel’s security at risk.”
He added: “It is my firm belief that these steps shall also facilitate the ongoing negotiations between the parties, aimed to achieve a viable and lasting peace agreement between two countries, living side by side in peace and prosperity.”
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Today, little remains of Blair’s industrial park at the Jalameh crossing with Israel. For years, the fenced-off site remained empty, until the PA – with the backing of Turkish investors – attempted to establish an “industrial city” in Jenin. Now, a few roads and a smattering of warehouses are all that exist of those dreams.
In 2008, Blair claimed credit for reducing the number of roadblocks in the occupied West Bank, which then numbered around 600. Today, there are 898 military checkpoints, including dozens of gates sealing off Palestinian towns and villages for most of the day. All economic life is throttled.
Settler militias roam the land, terrorising Palestinian towns and driving Palestinians from vast tracts of land, which are claimed by illegal “shepherd’s farms” in coordination with Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has assumed control of the Civil Administration in the occupied West Bank.
Precursor to annexation
All of this is seen as a precursor to the widely anticipated announcement of Israel’s annexation of Area C, comprising about two-thirds of the West Bank.
More than 40,000 Palestinians have been made homeless by the demolition of refugee camps in Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams, in an Israeli army operation called “Iron Wall”, now into its eighth month.
Back in 2009, Blair received an award for his stillborn plan: a $1m prize for “leadership”, most of which went to his own foundation “for religious understanding”.
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Today, after 23 months of genocide and demolition in Gaza, Blair is back in business, repackaging himself nearly two decades later as a seasoned hand of the Middle East.
He has reportedly been advising the White House and talking with Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, about the US president’s latest plan for Gaza.
The strategy, or at least one version of it, is contained in a 38-page slide deck laying out a vision for postwar Gaza.
The first thing to note about this slide deck is its brutality. It is devoid of any acknowledgement of Gaza as a Palestinian homeland
Since October 2023, Gaza has been a 21st-century laboratory of death – a horrifying lesson in how to rewrite the rules of war; how to use drones and robots to maximise collateral damage; how to leverage artificial intelligence to locate targets; how to use starvation and aid distribution points to break the will of a people to resist; how to dismantle health and education systems; and how to render an entire nation homeless.
Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician who performed deadly experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz, would have recognised many of these performance criteria as achievements.
Now, a further human experiment is about to be conducted on the Palestinians of Gaza, focusing on how to build $324bn of Dubai-style “mega-projects” on their graves.
The emperors of Gaza
The first thing to note about this slide deck is its brutality. It is devoid of any acknowledgement of Gaza as a Palestinian homeland. In this, its authors have regressed to the moral standards of tsarist Russia, and to what happened in a field outside Moscow just four days after the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II.
Up to half a million Russians gathered at Khodynka for free food and gifts from the emperor, which reportedly included bread rolls, sausages, pretzels, gingerbread and commemorative cups. When rumours flew that there was not enough beer and pretzels for everybody, and that the enamel cups contained gold coins, there was a stampede, with more than 1,200 people killed and up to 20,000 more injured.
No matter. The emperor and empress went ahead with their plans. They appeared in front of the crowds on the balcony of the tsar’s pavilion in the middle of the field, by which time the corpses had been cleared away.
This is equivalent to how today’s emperors are behaving towards the famished and dying population of Gaza – only today, the scale of the tragedy makes Nicholas II’s insouciance towards the fate of his people look restrained.
Trump intends to build a Dubai-style wonderland on the fresh graves of 63,000 dead (and counting). This psychopathic lack of empathy extends to the living as well as the dead: for the paradise that is going to transform Gaza from a “demolished Iranian proxy” into a “prosperous Abrahamic ally’’ will not only be “Hamas-free”, but free of most Palestinians as well.
In fact, the more Palestinians who leave, the cheaper the project becomes. For every Palestinian who leaves, the plan calculates that $23,000 will be saved; for every one percent of the population that relocates, that’s $500m in savings. To induce the Palestinians of Gaza to leave their land, the plan proposes to give each person $5,000 and to subsidise their rent in another country for four years, as well as their food for one year.
The plan’s authors are thought to be Israeli. The proposal was reportedly led by Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli American venture capitalist, and Liran Tancman, an Israeli tech entrepreneur and former military intelligence officer. Their initials, “ME” and “LT”, appear to be listed on the deck’s first page, alongside a mysterious third set of initials, “TF”.
Eisenberg and Tancman were part of a group of Israeli officials and businesspeople that first conceived of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in late 2023, weeks after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel, according to the New York Times.
A first draft of the Gaza redevelopment plan is believed to have been finished this past April and presented to the Trump administration. It is not known whether this proposal was discussed during the recent meeting between Kushner and Blair, both of whom have been hammering out similar ideas.
But the direction of travel is clear.
Doomed to failure
Blair, for one, should realise that any plan built on making Gaza “Hamas-free” is doomed to failure. He should think back to his own days as prime minister, and his government’s own efforts to negotiate with the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Just imagine if someone had come to him with an idea to de-republicanise the Short Strand, the home of the Irish National Liberation Army, or the whole of West Belfast as a precondition for peace.
Happily, the direction that three British prime ministers – Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair – took in the peace process was the exact opposite. The acknowledgement that Dublin had a role in the North was Thatcher’s achievement, followed by direct talks with the IRA under Major, who did most of the work.
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This included a series of meetings that took place in Derry between Michael Ancram, then a serving British minister in Major’s government, and IRA leader Martin McGuinness. Many years later, Ancram told me about those meetings in great detail, and with much mirth. But their existence totally defied the government line at the time: that Britain does not talk to those it qualifies as terrorists.
The IRA began the decommissioning process after Britain promised to release Republican prisoners from the Maze prison, and when political guarantees were given to share power in Stormont as part of the Good Friday Agreement.
McGuinness and his onetime arch foe, Ian Paisley, then head of the Democratic Unionist Party, became allies. Such was their mutual sense of ease with each other, that they became known as the “Chuckle Brothers”.
Now apply the formula that brought peace to Northern Ireland to Gaza and Hamas, which is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK, and what do you get? Direct talks with Hamas on a hostage and mass prisoner release, followed by talks with all resistance groups on a technocratic government, alongside the restoration of all UN aid agencies, the end of the siege, and a huge international flow of money and concrete to rebuild. In the long term, Hamas could offer a “hudna”, or indefinite pause, to armed conflict.
That is the Irish formula applied to Gaza. But the exact opposite course is now being taken with regards to Gaza, because all thinking on Palestine is seen through the prism of the need to defend and arm Israel’s ever-expanding state.
Excluding Hamas
Peace in Northern Ireland could not have been achieved without the active involvement of Dublin and Washington. The US today – as represented by a succession of presidents, both Democrat and Republican – is the chief sustainer of Greater Israel, and the chief obstacle to a sustainable peace.
Hamas has been excluded from the broader political process ever since the party won the last freely held elections in Palestine in 2006. Blair’s task in this regard was made much easier by the behaviour of the PA and the leaders of every Arab government. He is far from alone in attempting to apply a solution over the heads and against the will of the Palestinian people.
Ten years ago, I revealed how Blair met Khaled Meshaal, then the political director of Hamas. Two of those meetings took place in Doha when Blair was still envoy. But the meetings continued for some time after he was no longer in the post.
Blair, accompanied by MI6, attempted to gain credit for a revised Hamas foundational document that recognised the 1967 borders of Israel, offering to take the document to Washington, Palestinian sources told me. Hamas naturally refused Blair’s attempt to insert himself into an internal matter.
But the meetings were seen at the time as an acknowledgment that the attempt to exclude Hamas from government, and from talks about a future for Palestine, had failed.
Over the last 23 months, Israel has been attempting to achieve by force what 17 years of an increasingly brutal siege failed to achieve through deprivation and bouts of bombing.
Today, Blair has become yet another extremely wealthy, tanned man, fully at ease in the company of other multimillionaires like Kushner.
Today, $1m would mean little to him. Serial failures in the Middle East have been a lucrative business for Blair, putting former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plan for self-enrichment after office to shame.
What place would there be in Trump’s Gaza Riviera for a monument to the more than 63,000 Palestinians who have been killed?
But have no doubt: this plan for Gaza, or any other scheme hatched over the heads of the Palestinian people, will meet the same fate as all the other stillborn projects.
Gaza cannot be cleansed of Hamas, any more than England can be cleansed of the English or France of the French.
No peace process would exist in Northern Ireland without the IRA’s consent, and even with it, there are still active splinter groups today.
No Palestinian postwar government will work in Gaza without Hamas’s consent, stated or implied. That is the one fact on the ground that has been established by 23 months of resistance.
Besides, in all the trite acronyms – in all the dizzying plans for ports, airports, cities with vertiginous skyscrapers, a road system filled with Mohammed bin Salman Ring Freeways – one small detail is missing.
What place would there be in Trump’s Gaza Riviera for a monument to the more than 63,000 Palestinians who have been killed and 160,000 wounded in Israel’s genocide?
And what would Trump call this? A memorial for the Palestinian Holocaust created by the Netanyahu regime?
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
