The grotesque image is almost too much to process: Tony Blair and Jared Kushner, two of the most discredited figures in modern geopolitics, seated in Washington with Donald Trump to discuss the “future of Gaza.” The White House calls it a “comprehensive plan.” It looks more like an investment pitch deck. Palestinians are nowhere to be seen.
The language has already been trialed. Trump once imagined Gaza as the “Riviera of the Middle East,” a beachfront playground for tourists and investors. Kushner spent his time as Middle East “peacemaker” recasting colonisation as opportunity, proposing land swaps and luxury zones while denying Palestinians any real sovereignty. Blair has been doing variations of the same since 2007, when he served as envoy for the so-called Quartet, advancing economic schemes while political reality ossified around him. In November 2023, Israel even floated the ludicrous idea of installing Blair as “humanitarian coordinator” for Gaza. An extraordinary proposition, given his record in Iraq. Now they are back together, dusting off the same fantasy: that you can bomb a people to rubble and then, with enough capital, convert the ruins into a market.
What is absent from this vision is glaring. There is no Palestinian agency, no right to self-determination, no sovereignty. The people of Gaza appear only as labour, as charity cases to be fed by aid convoys, or as a demographic “problem” to be relocated. Blair’s insistence that his institute has “never endorsed” forced displacement is beside the point. The deeper exclusion is political. Palestinians are not treated as subjects of their own history but as impediments to a postwar business plan.
It is a pattern with precedent. Colonialism has always followed a recognisable sequence: destroy, displace, rebuild. Clear the land through violence, declare its people unfit for self-rule, then repackage the territory as a site of opportunity for investors. Blair followed this model in Iraq, where the invasion was swiftly followed by contracts for British and American firms. Kushner’s family fortune has been built on real estate speculation, often involving the dispossession of tenants. Trump is the embodiment of branding catastrophe as opportunity. To put the three of them together in a White House meeting on Gaza is not an accident of history but a perfect distillation of how late imperial capitalism processes mass death.
Blair’s defenders say he is “building a better Gaza for Gazans.” But even if we take the line at face value, it translates into something chilling: a Gaza rebuilt to serve the needs of capital, not the needs of its people. Hotels and ports may rise where apartment blocks once stood, but the political horizon will remain the same: no sovereignty, no return, no justice. What is being offered, once again, is peace without Palestinians.
That this is happening while famine rages and bombs continue to fall only intensifies the obscenity. The world is asked to watch two simultaneous processes: Palestinians starving in breadlines, children eating from communal pots; and Blair, Kushner, and Trump sketching a beachfront resort. It is the juxtaposition itself that reveals the system with startling clarity. The catastrophe is not an obstacle to peace. It is the precondition for profit.
Liberal Europe tries to have it both ways. Britain and France float recognition of Palestinian statehood at the UN, even as Netanyahu prepares another assault on Gaza City and Trump talks of “conclusive endings.” The recognition is symbolic, the bombs material. Blair, who still claims the mantle of humanitarianism, is the bridge between these two worlds: the world of meaningless diplomatic gestures and the world of raw capitalist exploitation.
The idea that Gaza can be pacified through development schemes has always been a fantasy. What is being advanced now is worse than fantasy: it is the laundering of genocide into “peace.” For Palestinians, this represents the final insult. Not just the destruction of their homes and lives, but their transformation into a blank space on which Western leaders and developers can inscribe a new market.
What they are proposing isn’t reconstruction at all, it’s enclosure. Gaza will be fenced off as an investment zone, a place to extract profit rather than a place to live.
