He needs to be in The Hague, not in charge of the future of Palestine.
Tony Blair takes part in a panel at Truman Brewery during SXSW London 2025 on June 2, 2025.(Lorne Thomson / Redferns)
Israel’s two-year pulverizing of Gaza has accelerated the world’s becoming a place where dystopian thinking reigns supreme and we are asked to turn our entire moral compass upside down day after day.
No, systematically slaughtering Palestinians is not self-defense, much as the global mainstream media, politicians, and proponents of genocide want you to believe.
Ruthlessly flattening entire communities, hospitals, homes, schools, and religious sites is not an intricate and forensic hostage retrieval operation.
Dropping the world’s most sophisticated bombs on besieged, starving, endlessly displaced Palestinians every eight minutes and concurrently creating a society that has the highest number of child amputees in the world, is deliberate, meticulous annihilation—not war.
None of this needs saying. It’s common sense. Or at least, it should be. But such is the reality now that the unconscionable is not just permissible, but glorified too.
In that light, the solutions to the indescribable suffering become just as Orwellian.
Which brings me to blood-soaked former UK prime minister and eternal war criminal Tony Blair.
Gaza has become a place where no human can exist. It’s what Israeli officials promised, and they stuck to the task with cold-blooded meticulousness. Now US President Donald Trump, who has continued his predecessor Joe Biden’s policy of arming and facilitating the carnage, claims to have suddenly dreamed up the solution to the slaughter he is helping cause. On Monday, he unveiled a 20-point so-called “peace plan” in an appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (With characteristic humility, Trump described it as “potentially one of the great days ever in civilization.”)
Part of the plan involves Gaza being placed under a temporary technocratic Palestinian committee tasked with running daily public services and municipalities.
It also includes Gaza becoming a “de-radicalised terror-free zone” and promises that an economic development plan to “rebuild and energize Gaza will be created by convening a panel of experts who have helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.”
This is alongside a temporary International Stabilisation Force (ISF) that will immediately be deployed in Gaza, in coordination with the US and Arab partners.
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And overseeing all of this would be a new international “Board of Peace,” which would be chaired by Trump alongside other prominent figures. Among them? You guessed it: Tony Blair.
If a screenwriter envisioned the archetypal imperial “solution” to the genocide, it would include provocative buzz words like development plan and technocratic. And it would include Tony Blair. These would be in place of Palestinian self-determination, freedom and autonomy. All in the name of cruel irony.
Except this fresh hell being imposed on Palestinians is not a movie. And Blair’s participation is all too real.
Netanyahu and Blair sharing the same sentence should be in reference to a judgment handed down at The Hague, not in reports about the future of Palestine. But we’re not that lucky. Instead, we got bland headlines about the news.
“Netanyahu backs Trump peace plan for Gaza—as role for Blair revealed,” read a Sky News headline. “Warmongering butcher of Middle Eastern children backs latest colonial venture, as other warmongering butchers of Middle Eastern children light up at the prospect of inflicting yet more misery in the region” would have been more apt.
For his part, Blair hailed the news. “President Trump has put down a bold and intelligent plan.… It offers us the best chance of ending two years of war, misery and suffering,” he wrote in a statement.
If the tone sounds eerily like that of a man who sees human beings like pieces on a chessboard that can be moved, spoken for, and have their fates dictated from above, then it’s because that is precisely the reality. It’s a reality anyone who’s lived through the other horrors Blair inflicted on the world will be all too familiar with.
“Ihave no doubt Iraq is better without Saddam; but no doubt either, that as a result of his removal, the dangers of the threat we face will be diminished.… The best defence of our security lies in the spread of our values.”
Those were Blair’s words in 2004, as he justified the illegal invasion of Iraq. He spoke obnoxiously then for an entire population, claimed to know what’s best for them, and the rest is history: hundreds of thousands brutally killed, and hundreds of thousands more dying from the aftereffects. Millions internally displaced, millions of others forced to permanently flee their homeland. A country rich in history and heritage, its trajectory altered irreversibly.
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For one of the chief architects of this crime to not only escape accountability but also show his face and offer his services in the region displays a brass neck beyond belief.
Blair could have chosen to learn from history. Perhaps he could have realized that it’s not for Western imperial powers to conceitedly draw borders and carve up territories as they please. Or that those who carried out and enabled the wholesale erasure and destruction of an entire people shouldn’t be trusted to formulate ideas for their apparent thriving futures. Or that statehood and freedom are not conditional gifts that men in suits with a manufactured criteria decide to issue.
Instead, Blair looked at history, saw the sinister legacies of Sykes-Picot and Balfour, saw lines being drawn and ideas being implemented without consent of the local populations, and decided that there is no time like the present to emulate the rotten past.
Blair is, if anything, overqualified when it comes to condemning Middle Eastern countries to despair. But he’s severely underqualified when it comes to even remotely understanding the dynamics of Palestine and the struggle for liberty from Israel’s colonial orbit.
When he left office in 2007, Tony Blair served as Middle East envoy for the Quartet of international powers (the US, EU, Russia, and the UN). He was tasked with bringing economic development to Palestine and creating the conditions for a two-state solution. He left this post in 2015.
Those eight years were characterized by passivity as the two-state solution only drifted further out of reach and Israel’s one-apartheid reality was entrenched, its occupation and choking of Palestinian freedom escalating. Illegal settlements multiplied across Palestinian land, and the settlers—the very agents of Israel’s relentless land theft—grew in number.
Meanwhile, Gaza was subjected to three different destructive campaigns of bombardment during this period—in 2008, 2012, and 2014.
These failures on Blair’s watch are synonymous with the advancement of Israel’s ethnonationalist strategic objectives. Even if his CV were unreadable, its pages drenched in blood, that alone should disqualify him from helping decide the fate of a people who have endured genocide.
The only state Tony Blair played any part in sustaining for the Palestinians is the state of perpetual torment.
The omnipotent words of Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani ring louder today than ever: “You don’t mean peace talks, you mean capitulation and surrender.”
Palestinians in Gaza have been on the receiving end of an operation of annihilation, and it is they who must apparently concede and cede the stage while external powers cynically prescribe their bitter medication. They will be promised statehood and some sort of “political horizon,” but only when the provisions are satisfactorily met.
Their land, their lives, their futures, but not their choice.
So there are questions. Complex and important ones that lives rest on. How best to create an environment where Palestinians can recover and rebuild from the apocalypse in Gaza. How to manage the profound and life-changing hardships that have been imposed on Palestinians. How can legitimate statehood and freedom from the constraints of occupation and perpetual dispossession be attained?
Those are not questions Blair should concern himself with.
When the question is which war criminal should spend the rest of his life behind bars, then he can step forward.
Hamza YusufHamza Yusuf is a British Palestinian journalist based in London. His work has appeared in Declassified UK, Middle East Eye, New Internationalist, Mondoweiss, and elsewhere.