Tony Blair Gaslighting Gaza’s Future
The Quest for Gaza’s Energy, Part 3
Read part 1 here
Read part 2 here
As the U.S.-mediated ceasefire is taking hold of Gaza, the Trump administration is pushing its peace plan, which is premised on post-genocide opportunities for infrastructure and property development. In this quest, Tony Blair is the public face; Jared Kushner, the commissioner; and the Trump White House, the architect.
But the other side of the story involves gas – and former British PM’s two-decade long effort to cash on the promising deals, vis-à-vis his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) and its staff of more than 900 people who are advancing his ideas in up to 45 countries.
U.S. administrations and the role/s of Blair in Gaza
As British PM, Blair developed a fascination with the Middle East, including the Bush Jr administration’s 2003 war on Iraq. Swearing by the false allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Blair steered the UK into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis earning him a reputation as a war criminal. Ironically, in Gaza, he will oversee the “Board of Peace.”
Shaking hands with Bush after their press conference in the East Room of the White House, November 2004 – over a year after the misguided and misrepresented Iraq War
In the Middle East, Blair likes to tout his 2009 success of securing radio frequencies from Israel to allow the creation of a second Palestinian cell phone operator (while also allowing JP Morgan to profit hugely). What is left unmentioned is the reality that Israel released the frequencies in exchange for a deal from the Palestinian leadership to drop the issue at the UN of Israeli war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
This was the Gaza War of 2008-09 which served as a prelude to and early test of the Obliteration Doctrine that would account for the Gaza genocide barely two decades later.
Making Gaza safe for American capitalism
When Blair left Downing Street, he initially engaged in lucrative commercial and prestigious philanthropic activities, including advising the U.S. financial giant JP Morgan for $1 million per-year and Zurich Insurance for a six-figure salary, and PetroSaudi on how to do business in China (for a 2% commission), while serving as the Middle East peace envoy for the Quartet of the US, UN, EU and Russia.
As the lines between advising, salaries and politics grew blurry, Blair consolidated his activities in 2017 – including his Faith Foundation, Sports Foundation, Governance Initiative and Tony Blair Associates – into his Institute for Global Change.
In Blair’s view, the extraordinary level of contemporary uncertainty is today addressed by two types of politicians, “reality creators and reality managers.” He saw himself as a “reality creator.” Managing the game was not for him; dominating it, was. That was the key to success and profits.
Blair’s institute was cloned in the image of the Clinton Foundation, another equally controversial operation, initially portrayed as a quasi-philanthropic pursuit, but criticized as a shrewd revenue-machine cashing on the poorest conflict-ridden countries.
By 2022, Blair’s Institute made more than $145 million in revenue. The critics saw TBI as a lobbying organization bankrolled by billionaires and countries, controversial track-record in human rights, and an overall approach dictated by neoliberal corporate interests. Gaza was no exception.
In July, the Institute’s people reportedly participated in a controversial meeting in which post-war Gaza plans were outlined in a presentation led by Israeli businessmen. It used “financial models developed inside Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub.” Featuring plans for a Trump Riviera and an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone, the Great Trust project included a proposal to pay “half a million” Palestinians to leave Gaza, in order to attract real estate investors to the area.
The technology interests
Another side of the TBI is its great interest in technology, presumably to cut costs on the public sector and promote public good. Those efforts are dictated by indirect cash schemes, thanks to one of TBI’s biggest donors, Larry Ellison. Ellison is the co-founder of the global technology company Oracle which has a market cap of $825 billion. It has invested in the Trump administration and its Secretary of State Rubio. Reportedly, Ellison has donated or promised $300 million to Blair’s Institute.
Reimagining Technology for Government: A Conversation with Larry Ellison and Tony Blair
Digitalization of health systems and other public-sector activities is one of Blair’s pet projects and perhaps one to promote in Gaza. This interest seems to originate from the early 2020s, when Oracle bought the healthcare IT company Cerner for $28 billion.
With a secular Jewish background, Ellison has longstanding ties with Israel. Since 2017, with the first Trump administration and its Messianic Israel champions, Ellison has donated increasingly to militant causes, including $16.6 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and a controversial archaeological dig in Arab East Jerusalem. In 2019, a $1 billion lawsuit was filed against several Israel supporters, including Ellison, for conspiring to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territories, committing war crimes, and funding genocide.
In 2021 Ellison, who had previously hosted Netanyahu in his Hawaiian island, offered the Israeli PM a post at Oracle, while seeking to protect him from corruption charges.
Recently, Ellison’s son David consolidated the Hollywood studio Paramount Skydancd and once-great CBS News under his control, while installing self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. Reportedly, he also participated in an Israeli government-led plot to surveil and suppress pro-Palestine activists in the US, including targeting American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
These are the benefactors behind Tony Blair’s Institute and his role as the director of Gaza’s peace and development.
Creating “new realities” in Gaza
The efforts to develop the Gaza Marine natural gas field have been hindered for almost three decades. With the prospects of ceasefire, these efforts are accelerating.
Irrespective of their official mandates, the “reality creators” that have already positioned themselves in the area – property developers like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, and political intermediaries, such as Tony Blair – are likely to use their current posts to cash on the Gaza opportunities in the future.
After two years of infrastructure destruction and genocidal atrocities in Gaza, the Strip is ecocide-ridden.
Haunted by a series of moral hazards and interests of conflict, Blair will be in charge of an area cleansed of armed conflict. Presumably buzzing with development, it will serve as a “special economic zone” through which foreign capital can flow. It will be overseen by his international “board of peace.”
The quasi-colonial protectorate pledges boldly in the name of “reformed Palestine” in which Palestinians have little or no say – once again.
The author of The Obliteration Doctrine (2025) and The Fall of Israel (2024), Dr Dan Steinbock, a visionary of the multipolar world, is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/
The original version of this series of commentaries was published by the Informed Comment (US) in two parts on October 16 and 17, 2025.
War on Gaza
War and genocide
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| FOR LEASE OR SALE; KUSHNER REALTY |
The struggles for Palestinian liberation and climate justice are one and the same, according to Marwan Bishara. The eastern Mediterranean is one of the most climate-vulnerable places on the planet. Whereas worldwide temperatures have increased by an average of 1.1°C since pre-industrial times, in Israel/Palestine average temperatures have risen by 1.5°C between 1950 and 2017, with a forecast increase of 4°C by the end of the century for the 400 million people living in the region.
Despite the majority of Middle East countries being signatories to the Paris Climate Accords, so far, their leaders have failed to meet the commitments made in the agreement. Moreover, oil-rich countries in the region continue to increase fossil fuel production. The United Arab Emirates chose to appoint the head of its state-run oil company as the president of the 2025 climate conference in Dubai (COP28), though even this farce pales in comparison to the hypocrisy displayed by their western counterparts. The US will be responsible for over one-third of all planned fossil fuel expansion through 2050. President Biden called climate change an ‘existential threat’ and announced the creation of a climate conservation corps at the same time as the US broke a record for oil production.
This hypocrisy perfectly mirrors the long-standing response of affluent, and powerful, western nations to the Palestinian tragedy, which spout words of protest but continue to provide arms and fuel to the genocidaires. On climate change, they came up with deceptive concepts like carbon offset and carbon credit to evade meaningful action and a just, swift transition to renewable energy. On Palestine, they devised unworkable peace plans that only serve to deepen Palestinian oppression. Under President Trump this willful destruction of the environment will get far worse, as he denies there is any climate crisis at all, and chants ‘Drill, drill, drill’. On Palestine, Trump follows the will of Netanyahu, demanding the complete disarmament of Hamas, the surrender of the Palestinians’ legitimate resistance to occupation.
US hegemony rests on two key pillars in the region and beyond. First, Israel as a Euro-American settler colony, which is an advanced imperialist outpost in the so-called Middle East. Israel is the number one ally of the United States and maintains US hegemony in the region and control of its vast oil resources. The second pillar is the reactionary oil-rich Gulf monarchies. The Palestinian cause is not merely a moral human rights issue, but is essentially a struggle against US-led imperialism and global fossil capitalism, i.e., a vital link in the struggle to save the planet. There can be no climate justice, no just transition to a way of life which doesn’t lead to an end to life, without dismantling the racist settler-colonial state of Israel.
Blowback from Israel’s erasure of Palestine
Equally cynical is Israel’s routine confiscation of Palestinian lands under the pretext of environmental conservation. This tactic, known as green colonialism, exposes Israel’s use of environmentalism to displace the indigenous population of Palestine and exploit its resources. Israeli green zones are primarily established to legitimise land seizures and prevent the return of displaced Palestinians, further entrenching a system of apartheid.
There is only one planet Earth. Today, the climate justice movement calls not only for action to mitigate climate change but also for fundamental shifts in social structures that perpetuate the environmental crisis, addressing issues of social equality, distributive justice, and control of natural resources. Israel exacerbates the climate risks facing Palestinians by denying them the right to manage their land and resources, making them more vulnerable to climate-related events.
Israel’s forest fires in recent years are all due to planting invasive species of fast-growing European trees—pines, cypresses, and eucalyptus—that overwrite Palestine’s identity. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) placed blue donation boxes in Jewish homes worldwide, collecting money to buy land (for the Jewish National Fund, which sell only to Jews) and plant these alien trees—claiming it was planting forests on “barren, desolate lands.”After the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist forces destroyed over 500 Palestinian villages, the JNF planted forests atop the ruins. Pine trees now grow where homes once stood in Al-Qabo, Allar, and Ein Karem.
These forests are green graves, hiding erased villages and blocking refugees from returning. Fast-growing European pines, covering 40% of JNF lands, are ecological time bombs. Their oily needles ignite easily, fueling wildfires. Native olives and carobs—trees that Palestinians nurtured for generations—make up just 5% of JNF plots. This is not conservation. It is conquest, replacing resilient ecosystems with flammable monocultures. The aim is to efface all traces of Palestinian existence, and without concern for the environmental effects. It is ecocide, and utterly criminal.
In the Naqab desert, the Yatir Forest—funded by overseas donors—displaces Bedouin communities under the lie of fighting desertification. Meanwhile, vineyards guzzling stolen water grow on stolen land, their wine marketed as a revival of ancient Judean roots. The truth? They are symbols of colonial theft, draining Palestinian wells dry.
Even nature reserves serve the occupation. Israel bars Palestinians from farming on 70,000 hectares of ‘protected’ land, while settlers build roads and parks. Bulldozers clear olive trees to create ‘buffer zones’ for settler highways. This is not conservation. It is erasure, disguised as environmentalism.
Some of the key issues
* water, wastewater, and hygiene. Even before 2023, Palestinians in Gaza were restricted to water consumption levels well below the recommended minimum. The World Health Organization recommends 100 liters of water per day per person, yet, before the most recent war, Palestinians in Gaza had access to only 83 liters per day because of the occupation-driven lack of control over their own water resources. Under the current genocidal regime, this means close to no water at all. Even before the 2023 invasion of Gaza, Israel was denying spare parts for sanitation infrastructure. All sanitation facilities have been destroyed in Gaza. As a result, some tens of thousands of cubic meters of sewage are seeping into groundwater and flowing into the Mediterranean Sea every day—resources that are used by Palestinians and Israelis alike. Settlers use 6x as much water as Palestinians on the West Bank.
* chemical and debris contamination from bombings; The debris situation in Gaza is unprecedented in several ways including: i) the extent of damage to the housing stock; ii) its geographic spread and spatial density across almost the entire territory of the Gaza Strip; iii) the quantity of debris generated; iv) the rate at which debris is being generated; and v) the expected extremely high levels of UXO [unexploded ordnance, i.e., military ammunition or explosive that failed to explode] contamination.
Previous attacks involving munitions containing heavy metals, asbestos, and other hazardous materials have already contaminated the soil with high concentrations of cobalt and other metals.36 The bombing and use of bulldozers disrupted soil layers and burned (with temperatures of explosions as high as 2000°C), deteriorated, scattered, or completely destroyed the soil (including soil microorganisms). UNEP estimates that the approximately 40 million tons of debris will take 15 years to clear. Much of the land is poisoned and unusable for agriculture.
* noise pollution; with an average of 1 bomb dropped every 10 minutes in Gaza, continuous drone and jet flights, rockets, bombardment from tanks and ships, and other military activities was noted to result in more than double the allowable limit which is the allowable limit for short periods [of 8 hours] not for months.
* food insecurity; Most of Gaza’s remaining trees, including olive, pomegranate, and citrus orchards—essential not only for food and income but also for air purification and shade—have been completely uprooted. Cutting down olive trees is rampant now in the West Bank.
* traumatic impacts of targeted environmental destruction. 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed in 1948, and millions of olive trees since then—some centuries old—bulldozed or burned. Settlers attack farmers during harvests, turning groves into war zones. This planned genocide is comparable to the genocide against natives an the buffalo slaughter in North America. This loss of connection to land and previous and future generations through olive trees is a traumatic experience, expressed in Palestinian literature and art. For example, Khaled Baraka, a 65-year-old Palestinian who was forced to flee his home, shared his anguish: These trees lived through my moments of joy and sadness. They know my secrets. When I was sad and worried, I would talk to the trees, take care of them … but the war killed those trees.
The whole world suffers
Palestinian climate activists fear that cooperation could be misinterpreted as normalizing relations before the conflict is resolved. It is a situation that Majdalani, of EcoPeace, has frequently faced in her own activism. There’s this pervasive sense of ‘we don’t cooperate with the occupier, it’s not the right political environment.’ But if we wait for the ‘right’ political environment, we will lose more land. We will have more people suffering water shortages, more farmers leaving their farms, and the crisis will continue. Unless something changes, all this is moot for Palestinians, as Greater Israel means they will most likely cease to exist, either through murder, starvation or deportation, and Israel will face all these problems without the people who actually love the land and would work most ‘fanatically’ to heal it. Israelis will use their foreign passports to escape the Hell they have created, leaving Israel to hardcore pseudo-religious fascists, a pariah state spreading its sickness, its poison across the world.
Yes, the world. Genocide of Palestinians is a dress rehearsal for the collective West’s future treatment of climate refugees, argues Hamza Hamouchene, the North Africa programme coordinator at the Transnational Institute. Colombian President Gustavo Petro: genocide and barbaric acts unleashed against the Palestinian people is what awaits those who are fleeing the South because of the climate crisis. What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future.
In the first two months of the genocide in Palestine alone, the CO2 emissions by Israel were greater than the annual emissions of more than 20 nations in the global South…. Half of those emissions are due to the transport and shipping of weaponry by the United States, which shows the deep complicity in genocide and ecocide in that part of the world, and how even the high seas are not immune from Israeli crimes.
Clearly, what is necessary now is implementation of the grassroots world campaign Boycott, Divest, Sanction and an energy embargo of Israel. Colombia has shown the way when they stopped the export of coal to Israel and more recently banned all trade with Israel and expelled all Israeli diplomats. We need the same thing from South Africa. We need the same thing from Brazil, who provides around 10% of crude oil to Israel. We need the same thing from Nigeria, from Gabon, Russia and Azerbaijan that still provide fossil fuels that are being used to massacre Palestinians—to fuel genocide, displacement, to fuel infrastructure of dispossession, to fuel the F35 bombers and AI infrastructure that kills Palestinians every day.
Petro:
Why have large carbon-consuming countries allowed the systematic murder of thousands of children in Gaza? Because Hitler has already entered their homes and they are getting ready to defend their high levels of carbon consumption and reject the exodus it causes. We can then see the future: the breakdown of democracy, the end, and the barbarism unleashed against our people, the people who do not emit CO2, the poor people.
It is not just a genocide. A lot of analysts and researchers have been coming up with terms such as urbicide, domicide, epistemicide, ecocide. How about holocide, which means the utter destruction of the social and ecological fabric of life in Palestine?
Asad Rehman from War on Want and Friends of the Earth: We’re seeing now also the same ‘walls and fences’ narrative that Israel has used in terms of the West Bank and Gaza and Palestine, now being exported all over the world… the same technologies are being transplanted all around the world. And already Israel is saying, ‘This is battle-tested weaponry. This is battle-tested surveillance’ and already… selling it to some of ‘our’ despotic regimes. That’s why we need a new internationalism, with the trade union movement at the forefront of building and rebuilding a global anti-apartheid movement.
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