Could Tony Blair run Gaza?

Could Tony Blair run Gaza?

THE ECONOMIST

By rights no one should want it. Gaza is a hellscape. Israel’s tanks have ploughed its cities to dust and devastated its infrastructure. Even in the past week its soldiers have pushed half a million from Gaza city. And yet as Israel fights what it says is its final campaign in Gaza, a battle is brewing over who will run the wasteland.

While Western powers line up to recognise the state of Palestine at the un, behind the scenes they are grappling over who should take over Gaza. Since the war began in October 2023, over a dozen governments and government-sponsored think-tanks have offered plans for Gaza’s “day after”. They range from the seven-page New York declaration unveiled by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Faisal al-Saud, the Saudi foreign minister, at the un in July, to a 200-page “green paper” published in January by Hamas, the Islamist militants who retain some control of the strip. The governments of Britain, Denmark, Egypt, Israel, Palestine and America have drafted documents, as has a government-backed think-tank in the United Arab Emirates and businessmen in regional and Western capitals.

Perhaps most keen is Tony Blair, an ex-British prime minister. Within weeks of the outbreak of war in Gaza, he had made repeated visits to Jerusalem and got his London-based foundation drafting a plan for a post-war mandate. According to multiple sources involved with the plan, Mr Blair could head a body called the Gaza International Transitional Authority (gita). 

It would seek a un mandate to be Gaza’s “supreme political and legal authority” for five years. If approved Mr Blair would have a secretariat of up to 25 people and chair a seven-person board to oversee an executive body running the territory. Gulf states would pay. “He’s willing to sacrifice his time. He genuinely wants to end the war,” says a source who knows Mr Blair.

Mr Blair’s plan has powerful backers, from Gulf leaders to Jared Kushner, the American president’s son-in-law. Perhaps most important, unlike other plans, it seems to have Donald Trump’s blessing. Mr Blair, Mr Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the president’s Middle East envoy, all argued the case at a meeting with the president on August 27th. (Ron Dermer, the Israeli prime minister’s confidant and minister for strategic affairs, joined in by phone.) And on September 23rd Mr Trump was said to have presented the idea to the leaders of Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia and five Arab countries. “Maybe we can end it [the Gaza war] right now,” Mr Trump told them.

According to surveys Mr Blair’s team published in May, over a quarter of Gazans favoured some form of international rule, against a third for the Palestinian Authority (pa), President Mahmoud Abbas’ administration in the West Bank. Almost no one wanted Hamas, which has run Gaza since 2007, to remain in charge. Most do not care who rules as long as the bombing stops and there is food to eat, says a former civil servant fleeing Gaza city.

nformed sources say gita is modelled on the international administrations that oversaw East Timor and Kosovo’s transitions to statehood. Initially it could be based in el-Arish, an Egyptian provincial capital near Gaza’s southern border. gita would enter Gaza, once the strip is stable, accompanied by a multinational force. Under the plan, those sources insist, Palestinians would not be encouraged to leave Gaza, Gaza and the West Bank would be reunited and Gaza would be gradually handed over to the pa.

Mr Blair’s record in the region hardly endears him to them. As prime minister he joined America in invading Iraq in 2003. In his eight years as envoy of the Quartet, a group comprising America, the eu, Russia and the un, tasked with implementing a road map to Palestinian statehood, Israel thumped Gaza four times and tightened its grip on the Palestinian territories.

Mr Blair often calls Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, hoping to persuade him of his vision. But like the two-state solution, he might yet find that talks about the future just buy time for Israel to create alternative facts in the present.