Tony Blair’s Name Is Being Whispered in Gaza’s Ruins - Here's Why

Right, so if neoliberalism had a face, it might look like a PowerPoint slide titled "Reimagining Gaza," designed in a London boardroom, sent via WhatsApp, and implemented with lethal results on the ground as we’re seeing all too much of. And if empire had a LinkedIn profile to go with all of that, it would surely belong to Tony Blair. Two decades after he helped set Iraq on fire in the name of democracy and destiny, Blair is back yet again it seems, another of his all too common rare interventions—not with missiles this time, but with metrics, mission statements, and monetised misery. The language has changed, but the logic hasn't. This is still shock and awe, just delivered by consultants instead of commandos this time.
Tony Blair once told the British people that invading Iraq was a matter of global responsibility, a moral duty wrapped in the language of liberation. Twenty years later, we full well know what a pack of lies that was, but the same vocabulary is being deployed again with Gaza, but with a slicker façade: it’s all about humanitarian aid, redevelopment and digital transformation this time. Yet behind these words lies the same chilling continuity that has become synonymous with Blair’s name. The same ideological machinery that drove the Iraq War is now repackaged in the suits of consultancy firms, the slide decks of think tanks, and the sterilised plotting of post-conflict redevelopment plans. At the centre of this new iteration stands the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the TBI, now found to have been involved in controversial plans to reimagine Gaza, whilst also having been found to have links to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, GHF which distributes aid in a manner that has killed hundreds. Blair’s legacy—far from receding into the past—is living and breathing in the here and now as his cell at The Hague remains empty and once again is perhaps proving lethal.
Right, so back in May, as we know, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the GHF, which we now also know is backed and bankrolled by Israel, and the United States, rolled out a new model for aid distribution in the Gaza Strip. Aid hubs sprang up, secure zones where displaced Palestinians were expected to queue for food, water, and medical supplies. But being Israel backed, these centres, quickly became sites of chaos, violence, and mass death instead. In the first month alone, over 600 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,000 injured in or near these centres, both under Israeli military oversight and at Israeli military hands, along with those of the Israel backed ISIS affiliated food thieves being led by Yasser Abu Shabab.
Now the model for this mockery of an aid distribution plan, the consulting framework was provided by the Boston Consulting Group, which had helped design the hub system and reportedly offered logistical advice on how to manage aid flows under militarised conditions, that kind of thing. But a whistleblower has revealed, as shown in Quds News Network and the Financial Times that BCG had also worked on a separate plan to forcibly relocate over 500,000 Palestinians from Gaza, offering them $9,000 as an incentive to leave, a total cost of $5 billion. The firm later disavowed these plans, calling them "unauthorised pro-bono work," and terminated two of the employees involved. Yet the damage had already been done: the infrastructure and logic of displacement had been baked into the humanitarian response itself. A quote from Quds on this reading:
‘BCG said the senior figures were repeatedly misled on the scope of the work by the partners running the project.
Referring to the work on postwar Gaza, BCG said: “The lead partner was categorically told no, and he violated this directive. We disavow this work.”
BCG told the Financial Times that the work carried out was “in direct violation of our policies and processes”. “We stopped the work, exited the two partners who led it, took no fees and launched an independent investigation. We are taking steps to ensure this never happens again.”’
As Amnesty International have noted, covered in a recent report by AP News, the GHF’s aid distribution system, in practice, amounted to the use of starvation and desperation as tools of population control, something we’ve all become more and more aware of as each passing day brings news of further attacks on Palestinians seeking aid, to the point the head of UNRWA has referred to the aid hubs as human abattoirs. By concentrating desperate civilians in limited, exposed, and militarised zones, the hubs created choke points where the Israeli military could manage, surveil, and all too massacre Palestinian civilians with impunity. So far from facilitating relief, the GHF turned humanitarianism into a tool of warfare.
While the Tony Blair Institute was not directly involved in the GHF aid hub design, it played a more significant role in a parallel scheme dubbed "Project Aurora." This plan, having also been exposed by the Financial Times in a separate article to the one already referenced, was marketed as a bold vision for post-war Gaza: a privatised economic zone branded as a hub of innovation, investment, and peace. Internally, the project was also referred to as "The Great Trust" and carried the more vulgar nickname "Trump Riviera" due to the involvement of Trump-affiliated figures and Gulf developers.
Two senior staff members from the Tony Blair Institute participated in early WhatsApp groups and planning meetings concerning Project Aurora. These discussions apparently included representatives from BCG and Israeli developers, so it all ties together, this vision of Trump Riviera, the aid hubs which have become scenes of atrocity and Tony Blair’s name brought into the mix as well. The plan proposed the construction of smart manufacturing zones, the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians outside of Gaza, and the development of beachfront properties for foreign investors.
The Tony Blair Institute has since denied authoring or endorsing the final plans, claiming their staff were merely "listening participants." However, Middle East Eye have reported that TBI’s involvement helped legitimise what very much appears to have been a blueprint for ethnic cleansing. By participating in the planning stages, even informally, TBI lent its institutional credibility, lent Tony Blair’s name to a vision that amounts to the forced displacement of an indigenous population.
So the optics are damning. Gaza, under siege and rubble, is being carved up on spreadsheets and WhatsApp threads by the same class of global elite that once justified Iraq's destruction with the promise of reconstruction, because of course the parallels to the here and now in Gaza and 20 years ago in Iraq and Tony Blair’s name being associated with both is never going to be seen as an accident is it?
To understand why Blair’s involvement in Gaza is so incendiary, we only need look at his legacy in Iraq. In 2003, Blair stood shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush to launch a war justified by lies: non-existent weapons of mass destruction, manipulated intelligence, and fantastical visions of democracy blooming in the desert. The Chilcot Inquiry, released in 2016, condemned Blair for presenting the case for war with unwarranted certainty, ignoring peaceful alternatives, and failing to plan for the aftermath.
That aftermath was catastrophic: over a million dead by some counts, the rise of ISIS, the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure, and a generation of trauma. Yet Blair was never held to account. Instead, he went on to launch the Tony Blair Institute, selling governance advice to Gulf monarchies and African autocrats under the banner of "global change."
His presence in Gaza today therefore evokes this same cycle: violent disruption, followed by elite-managed reconstruction designed not to empower the local population but to pacify it, privatise it, and extract from it.
In the Arab and Muslim worlds, Blair is not viewed as a peacemaker any more than many of us in the West do these days, many of us were heartily sickened after Iraq that he went on to become a Middle East Peace Envoy of course, but out there too, he is seen as a war criminal. His role as that peace envoy between 2007-2015 did little to rehabilitate his image, especially as Gaza remained under siege throughout his tenure. His deep ties to Israeli leadership and his uncritical embrace of Gulf State autocracies only added fuel to that fire.
To now see his Institute involved—even loosely—in plans to reimagine Gaza without Palestinian input, without Palestinians even is surely the ultimate insult now. It is empire by other means, colonisation disguised as consultancy. The mistakes which have caused such disorder in the Middle East being repeated. The Israeli right, the American think tank class, and Gulf investors may see Blair as a stabilising figure, but for Palestinians, his re-emergence, even if it is only his name – but that, all things considered is surely enough? Signals a new phase of occupation—data control rather than destruction, but actually no less violent, no less a war crime as forced displacement is.
Blair remains deeply unpopular to this day, not only in the Middle East but especially here in the UK, yet he never seems to be aware of it given how often his name still crops up in the papers, how often journalists seek his opinion on things, how often interviewers still have him on news programs as a guest. Many believe – myself included - that he should face trial for war crimes over Iraq, that he has evaded justice and become rich off the back of it at the same time. His name cropping up yet again, now linked to a Gaza redevelopment scandal that amounts to a war crime has just reignited calls for legal accountability and public outrage.
But this Gaza episode is not even an outlier in the Tony Blair Institute’s history. Across the globe, TBI has partnered with repressive regimes under the guise of governance modernisation. In Rwanda, it has praised Paul Kagame’s authoritarian government for its "efficiency." In Saudi Arabia, it has supported Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030—even after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In Kazakhstan, it has worked with the post-Nazarbayev regime, ignoring its crackdowns on protest.
In each of these cases, the formula is the same: TBI offers technocratic advice in exchange for access, influence, and contracts. The result is a softer form of authoritarianism, where digital tools and economic reforms are used to entrench elite power rather than democratise it. Gaza fits neatly into this model. Instead of challenging the root causes of Palestinian suffering—occupation, blockade, apartheid—TBI and its allies offer a vision of smart cities and beachfront tech hubs.
As Reuters reported last week, Swiss authorities have moved to dissolve the Geneva branch of the GHF, the place where the GHF was established, as a Swiss based NGO despite being US backed and as it later turned out, Israeli backed too, over mounting legal and ethical concerns. Yet no equivalent scrutiny has been applied to the think tanks and consulting firms who gave GHF its ideological architecture.
Gaza does not need to be reimagined by those who cheered or enabled its destruction. It does not need the Tony Blair Institute, Boston Consulting Group, or any other arm of the Western consulting-industrial complex to plan its future. What Gaza needs is liberation—from occupation, from siege, and from the endless cycle of foreign-imposed fantasies that treat its people as obstacles to be managed or assets to be monetised.
Tony Blair’s return to postwar statecraft is not an act of redemption, it’s a sick joke. It is a grotesque resurrection of the very mindset that plunged the region into chaos two decades ago, it is a reminder that this man still walks free and has never been held accountable for his actions. The continuity from Baghdad to Gaza is literal, operational, and deadly. And until figures like Blair are held accountable—not honoured, not platformed, but prosecuted—the machinery of empire will keep turning, repackaged, rebranded, and no less brutal. He is literally the poster boy for Western interventionism when it isn’t wanted and too many people from the UK to the Middle East are heartily sick of hearing his name and seeing his face.
Gaza deserves justice, not reinvention by the architects of its ongoing ruin.
Whilst we’ve brought up the subject of The Hague though, but aside from the ongoing case by South Africa against Israel at the ICJ and those arrest warrants that have been issued by the ICC, Israel is being put on trial over its genocide of Gaza elsewhere too, somewhere more than familiar with colonialism and white supremacy in its own history at that. Get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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