There’s a very short list of important questions, these days, to which the right answer is ‘Tony Blair’. I mean, a really short list. In a round of the US gameshow Jeopardy, when the host says ‘Tony Blair’, nobody is going to win a doublewide trailer by piping up: ‘Who would be the best person to be king of the Gaza Strip once all the bodies have been cleared away?’
The scheme circulating for Blair the Viceroy involve GITA entering Gaza as its ‘supreme political and legal authority’
And yet. Our former prime minister – now, though the way he carries on it’s easy to forget, a private citizen – is reported to be putting himself forward as the king, or interim leader, or chairman of the board, of whatever is supposed to pick up the pieces after the bombing and smiting stops. Blair has yet to confirm or deny the reports, but I can’t say I’m surprised. I wrote here last year about the peculiarly post-democratic character of Sir Tony’s engagement in the great affairs of the world, and here’s its terminus: our man as the seemingly unelected British sovereign of a post-conflict middle-eastern territory.
We can all see, if we squint a bit, why this sounds on the face of it a good idea; or at least a less bad idea than the next one. But that’s only because the next one is turning Gaza into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Donald Trump’s business interests – an ethnically-cleansed ‘Gaza Riviera’ complete with golf-courses, tacky international hotels, hi-tech tax havens and golden statues of Trump left, right and centre, while such Palestinians that remain are forced into ghettos. In those circumstances pretty much anything looks like a reprieve.
The Trump administration version of a post-conflict plan (remember that grotesque AI-generated video?) was to be called GREAT – Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust – a lunkheaded Maga pun of shocking callousness and frivolousness. The Blair plan is to be called GITA (Gaza International Transitional Authority), which at least has a certain functional sobriety to it, even if it might contain an inconvenient echo of the great genocide historian Gitta Sereny’s name. I suspect that the most important three words in every report of this scheme are ‘White House-backed’. That’s the main selling point. Here’s an idea that, it’s hoped, might get a nod from the Donald for long enough to take his attention from his own, much worse ideas.
The scheme circulating for Blair the (interim) Viceroy involve GITA entering Gaza as its ‘supreme political and legal authority’ (after an initial billet in Egypt) ‘accompanied by a UN-endorsed, largely Arab multinational force’ – though it proposes to rule for half a decade rather than the UN’s own plan of a transition to Palestinian power within a year. Its endgame is, supposedly, a unifying of all Palestinian territories under the Palestinian Authority – though no initial involvement or consultation with the PA is envisioned. And it does promise that its plans don’t involve the forcible expulsion of Arabs in – though that is, or should be, a low bar to clear in terms of moral standing.
So its selling points are that it’s not the White House’s favourite, but it’s one that maybe the White House will wear; and that it’s not the UN’s favourite, but it’s one that maybe the UN will wear. (What the Palestinians will wear is, apparently, neither here nor there.) A Third Way, you could almost say.
But Tony Blair as its figurehead? Whatever his good intentions in helping prosecute the catastrophic war in Iraq – ‘I did it because I thought it was right,’ he told the Chilcot Inquiry, tears welling in his eyes – it remains the case that in wide swathes of the Arab world he is rightly or wrongly regarded as an imperialist, a crusader, and a lapdog of the hated United States. It is also, as stated, the case that he remains a private citizen and that no amount of sucking up to Mohammed bin Salman or pressing the flesh with Qatari billionaires makes him anything other.
And is it not also, and more importantly, the case that giving posh Brits a Palestinian mandate with the stroke of a pen was what led to a century or more of this blood-soaked bullshit in the first place?
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