Tony Blair visited the White House on Wednesday (27 August) to brief Donald Trump on a plan for postwar Gaza, along with the US president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The “day-after” plan reportedly includes a strategy to rebuild the devastated enclave after the conflict and ideas for how it could be governed without the involvement of Hamas, according to Axios, which first revealed details of the meeting.
Blair and Kushner are said to have been working for months on plans for the future of the Palestinian territory, which Trump has previously suggested could be transformed into the “riviera of the Middle East”. In February, the US president publicly weighed the possibility of taking a “long-term ownership position” over Gaza, with the US moving to “take it over and develop it”. He proposed relocating the civilian population, which totalled more than two million people before the current war, to a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” or “numerous pieces of land”. (International legal scholars quickly pointed out that deporting an entire population could constitute a war crime or crime against humanity.) Trump also shared an AI-generated video depicting the Gaza Strip as a luxury beach resort, named “Trump Gaza” of course, complete with skyscrapers, palatial hotels and a towering golden statue of himself.
Kushner, who like Trump has a background in property development and is credited with playing a pivotal role in negotiating the Abraham Accords during the US president’s first term, has previously described the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property” and the possibility of developing the territory after the conflict. The Financial Times reported in July that staff at Blair’s foundation, the Tony Blair Institute, had also taken part in a project led by the Boston Consulting Group that envisaged plans to remake Gaza into a regional trading hub after the war. The Tony Blair Institute has insisted that its staff have never authored, developed or endorsed any proposal that would involve relocating residents of Gaza.
Ahead of what he called a “large meeting” on Gaza at the White House on Wednesday, which included Blair and Kushner, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News that he believed the conflict would be over within months, “certainly before the end of this year”. Witkoff, who has episodically tried to negotiate an end to Russia’s assault on Ukraine without success, said the administration was developing a “very comprehensive plan” for Gaza after the war. “I think many people are going to be – they’re going to see how robust it is and how it’s – how well meaning it is,” he said, “and it reflects President Trump’s humanitarian motives here.” At a televised cabinet meeting that day, where Trump’s officials competed to outdo each other in their fawning praise of the president, Witkoff told Trump he hoped the Nobel Peace Prize committee would finally recognise that he was the “single finest candidate” in the history of the award. “Your success is game-changing out in the world today,” he said. “And I hope everybody wakes up and realises that.”
Here in the real world, Witkoff’s comments would be laughable if the situation in Gaza was not so serious. Now officially in a state of famine, which the head of the United Nations has described as a “man-made disaster” and a “failure of humanity”, scores of civilians have been killed in Gaza in recent days, many while searching for food, as the Israeli military steps up its attacks. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appears to be moving ahead with his plan to seize Gaza City and ultimately occupy the entire Gaza Strip. When Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Saar was asked after his meeting with the US secretary of state Marco Rubio in Washington, also on Wednesday, what the plan was for a Palestinian state after the war, he replied that there would not be one.
At a time when many other leaders are finally, if belatedly, calling out Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, Blair risks further tarnishing his already dubious legacy on the Middle East – which is still indelibly linked in the minds of many voters with the decision to join the disastrous US-led invasion of Iraq – by sitting down with a US president who has given Netanyahu a free hand in the destruction of Gaza. That effect will only be compounded by the presence of Kushner and his past form in appraising the territory’s value as a potential waterfront development.
The former UK prime minister, who served as a Middle East envoy for the Quartet (a group comprising the UN, EU, US and Russia) after leaving office, from 2007 to 2015, could also find himself at odds with the current Labour Party leadership. Keir Starmer has vowed that the UK, along with France, Canada and Australia will formally recognise a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in September unless Israel agrees to end the war, which currently appears vanishingly unlikely.
Of course, it is possible Blair used the meeting to impress on Trump the urgent need to get vast quantities of aid into Gaza and the importance of ensuring the dignity and security of the Palestinian population in any future settlement. Neither the White House, Blair nor Kushner have released any details as to what was discussed. But any discussion of a “day-after” plan for Gaza must begin with the recognition of the catastrophic conditions in the territory right now, and the fact that Trump is the only leader in a position to exert serious pressure on Netanyahu to change course.
Instead, Trump appears to be standing aside as Netanyahu presses ahead with his war and Gazans die from starvation, disease and relentless Israeli strikes. Instead of preparing for an end to the war, Israel appears to be readying a major new ground assault on Gaza City.
[See also: Letter from Gaza: “What I feel isn’t just hunger. It’s slow, internal erosion”]
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