The emergence of Tony Blair as a potential Gaza interim consul and member of Donald Trump’s “board of peace” marks his latest reinvention as a would-be power broker in the Middle East.
As a key architect of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, a promoter of a simplistic interpretation of Islamist extremism as the world’s main security challenge and a figure who has been accused of intertwining his own business interests with his political advocacy, he is in some ways a perfect fit for the new Trump era.
What is less clear is what the former UK prime minister can meaningfully bring to one of the world’s most intractable problems, outside overarching self-belief.
Blair’s role as an architect of the Good Friday agreement ending the Troubles in Northern Ireland is much mentioned, but his track record in the Middle East is far more controversial.
His years in Jerusalem working for the Quartet on the Middle East – representing the UN, EU, US and Russia – were viewed at best as a moderate success by diplomats while Palestinians saw him as an impediment to their efforts to advance statehood.
He was appointed with the backing of the then US president, George Bush, and the former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, but the EU and Russia were less enthusiastic. Blair’s role from the beginning was somewhat toothless, focused largely on economic development, and Palestinian officials complained he was more sympathetic to Israel.
Even in the year before he became Quartet envoy, Blair’s actions were seen by some as contributing to what would become two decades of crisis in Gaza that followed elections in 2006.
That vote was won by Hamas, at a time when the group seemed more open to political engagement, but Blair sided with Bush and Israel in rejecting the results. He supported a boycott of Hamas, allowing Fatah to continue in power in the Palestinian Authority, although he would later meet Hamas leaders.
That boycott contributed to the frictions that culminated in Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in 2008. Blair belatedly conceded in 2017 that the international community should have tried to “pull Hamas into a dialogue” but his subsequent actions raised further scepticism.
Xavier Abu Eid, a former official in the PLO’s diplomatic negotiations team, said: “When he became the Quartet envoy, some people believed because he had come from [being British prime minister] he would take the job seriously and progress would be made.
“His attitude became clear when Palestinians requested his help with issues like Israeli home demolitions. He would say I have a political mandate. But then in 2011 when Palestine went to the UN to ask for recognition and membership, it became clear he was lobbying against it.”
Blair remains beyond the pale for many in the Labour party because of Iraq and it is not clear how much support his angling for a role in Gaza enjoys with Keir Starmer’s government.
The best that David Lammy, the deputy prime minister, could offer when asked about Blair’s draft plan for postwar Gaza at a Labour conference fringe event was that he didn’t have “a clue” about it.
Blair’s worldview, say critics, is dominated by his belief that Islamist extremism is the world’s top security threat. The flip side of that, they say, has been to gloss over the human rights abuses of regimes in the Gulf he sees as allies.
Over the years, Blair has rubbed shoulders with autocrats including Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Egypt’s Abdul Fatah al-Sisi, saying Egypt’s army had “no choice” but to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohamed Morsi.
Blair told the Jewish Chronicle in 2020: “There is a new and emerging leadership in the Middle East that really wants to modernise their countries to make sure that religion isn’t abused and turned into a political ideology. That is the single biggest gamechanger for the Middle East.”
But even if Blair and his institute remain supporters of a two-state solution, the direction of his advocacy appears to have been overtaken by the brutal reality of a war in which Israel has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza.
Josh Paul, a co-founder of A New Policy, a US thinktank, said before the leaking of Blair’s draft proposal: “Having worked with Tony Blair when he was Quartet special envoy for Middle East peace, I can warn immediately of the two fatal flaws any plan he proposes will have.
“First, anything proposed will prioritise economic development over political progress and Palestinian self-determination. As multiple failed efforts along these lines in the West Bank have demonstrated, economic success depends on Palestinian self-rule and basic freedoms of movement and enterprise, not the other way around.
“And second, whatever their merits, they will be endorsed by the government of Israel which will then prevent their implementation through a strategy of death by a thousand cuts – making even simple objectives unobtainable.
“Blair’s effort is a distraction that is founded on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Israeli-Palestinian dynamic and the political economy of occupied Palestine.”
