The Financial Times reports today that the Tony Blair Institute “participated in a project to develop a postwar Gaza plan that envisaged kick-starting the enclave’s economy with a ‘Trump Riviera’ and an ‘Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone.’” The plan, which would “reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub,” was “led by Israeli businessmen and used financial models developed inside Boston Consulting Group.” It “proposed paying half a million Palestinians to leave the area and attracting private investors to develop Gaza.”
One lengthy document on postwar Gaza, written by a TBI staff member, was shared within the group for consideration. This included the idea of a “Gaza Riviera” with artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives, a deep water port to tie Gaza into the India-Middle East-Europe economic corridor, and low-tax “special economic zones” The TBI document said the devastating war in Gaza had “created a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild Gaza from first principles... as a secure, modern prosperous society.”
Genocide as an opportunity for “blockchain initiatives” may be the bleakest thing I’ve ever heard. The plan imagined Gaza’s land being put into a trust “whose assets could be sold to investors via digital tokens traded on a blockchain,” with Gazans “offered the chance to contribute their privately owned land to the trust in return for a token that gave them the right to a permanent housing unit.” They even made a demented map of the future depopulated Gaza.
We shouldn’t be surprised that human vultures are planning ways to profit off of the destruction and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Trump and his allies have been salivating for months over Gaza’s beachfront real estate, envisaging a waterfront development free of its inconvenient Palestinian population.
The Tony Blair Institute initially denied the story, telling the Financial Times that their story was “categorically wrong,” before backpedaling, saying that they “never said TBI knew nothing about what this group was working on or that they weren’t on calls in which the group discussed their plans,” but that they were in “listening mode.”
Tony Blair has long been a scumbag. He was, of course, complicit in the worst crime of the 21st century, the invasion of Iraq. He’s used his status as an ex-Prime Minister to make huge amounts of money advising some of the world’s worst people. Branko Marcetic documented his shameful post-political career in a profile for Jacobin back in 2017. Marcetic concluded:
Blair’s whole post-prime ministerial career has been one big advertisement for the failure of his particular brand of globalization. He is precisely one of those “few” for whom the new hyperconnected, globalized world has paid handsome dividends, thanks to grotesque corruption and obscene private wealth. And far from advancing a vision of “liberal democracy,” he’s used his privileged position to bolster countless authoritarian regimes, all for a price.
That profiteering actually led us to produce a spoof ad in Vol. 1, Issue 1 of Current Affairs back in 2016:
“His legacy is death and despair / It’s time to see the trial of Tony Blair”