By his own testimony, the former British PM Tony Blair wants nothing more than to resolve conflicts worldwide. Yet, his long interest in the Middle East is ridden with conflicts of interest and tech billionaire donors.
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.”
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.
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.
