The Architect of Ruins Returns: Why Tony Blair in Gaza is an Insult to History

The silence of a graveyard is distinct from the silence of peace. As the dust settles on the fragile ceasefire in Gaza, the living are left to count the dead among the rubble. In Washington, however, the noise is just beginning.

On 15 January 2026, the White House announced that Tony Blair would join Donald Trump’s newly formed “Board of Peace.” He will sit alongside US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, and World Bank President Ajay Banga to supervise the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.

Blair describes himself as “honoured” by the appointment. He calls the initiative an “extraordinary achievement.”

For the rest of the world, this is not an achievement. It is a grotesque historical rhyme. The man who helped break the Middle East is now being paid to glue it back together.

The Spectre of 2003

To understand the visceral anger this appointment generates, you first must look back to the fevered months of early 2003.

I remember sitting in a working men’s club in Bolsover, watching the news as Blair made his case for war in Iraq. He spoke with the same technocratic assurance he displays today. He told us of “imminent threats.” He cited the September Dossier. He warned that Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes.

It was a masterclass in persuasion. It was also a fiction…

The intelligence was weak. The sources were unverified. The dossier was “sexed up” to manufacture consent for a war that did not need to happen.

The consequences were material, not theoretical. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died. A functional state was pulverised. The sectarian vacuum pulled the entire region into a vortex of violence that birthed ISIS and destabilised the world.

Blair has never faced a tribunal for these failures. Instead, he has walked through the revolving door into the lucrative world of global consultancy. His return to the region now, as an arbiter of “peace,” sends a chilling message to the victims of war: accountability is for the weak.

A Boardroom, Not a Peace Process

One look at the “Board of Peace” and we see the reality. It is not a diplomatic body. It is a real estate consortium.

Blair is not just sitting with diplomats. He is joined by Steve Witkoff, a property developer and Trump donor. He is joined by Marc Rowan, a private equity billionaire. He is joined by Jared Kushner, whose primary qualification is his marriage to the President’s daughter and his close ties to Gulf capital.

This is not a panel designed to uphold international law. It is a board of directors for “Gaza Inc.”

The structure is telling. The day-to-day management of Gaza has been delegated to a “National Committee” of Palestinian technocrats. Yet this committee has no real power. It operates under the strict supervision of the Trump-Blair board.

This is the ultimate neoliberal fantasy. Democracy is replaced by “governance.” Sovereignty is replaced by “oversight.” The people of Gaza are not treated as citizens with a right to self-determination. They are treated as tenants in a distressed asset, to be managed by foreign consultants.

The Technocrat’s Delusion

Globalisation, Oligarchy and the Politics of Peace

Blair’s career embodies a specific political trajectory. He began as the hope of British social democracy. He ended as the high priest of globalisation.

Under his leadership, the Labour Party abandoned the structural critique of capitalism. They accepted the market as the ultimate arbiter of value. In Britain, this meant PFI contracts that enriched private companies while draining the public purse. Abroad, it meant “liberal interventionism” that enforced Western hegemony at the barrel of a gun.

Blair’s journey from Labour leader to globalisation advocate encapsulates a broader political shift. His embrace of neoliberal economic integration and market-driven policies was an acceleration of the ideological departure that began under Margaret Thatcher, a move away from industrial Britain’s social contract towards a Britain integrated into global capital flows, financial services and deregulated markets.

For many in Britain’s industrial heartlands and working communities, this trajectory was abandonment. The social fabric of mining towns, manufacturing centres and urban working communities frayed as deindustrialisation took hold. Blair’s government, while investing in social programmes at home, never cracked the structural dynamic that hollowed out these communities. Abroad, his endorsement of interventionist policies further cemented the image of an elite detached from ordinary people’s priorities.

His appointment to this board confirms that the ideology has not changed. It assumes that political problems can be solved by economic incentives. It assumes that if you build enough hotels and tech hubs on the ruins of refugee camps, the people will forget they are living under occupation.

“The architects of disaster should not be hired as the builders of the future.”

This view ignores the material reality of the Middle East. The conflict is not about GDP. It is about dispossession. It is about justice. You cannot build a durable peace on a foundation of colonial oversight, no matter how many billionaires sit on the board.

This context, in which geopolitical decisions are routinely shaped by a transnational elite whose power flows seamlessly between corporate capital, international institutions and political office, fuels deep scepticism about initiatives like the Gaza Board. When the authors of past interventions are rebranded as custodians of peace without reckoning or accountability, resentment is not merely understandable; it becomes structural. It hardens into memory, replaces hope with bitterness, and bequeaths to the next generation a politics shaped not by reconciliation, but by inherited grievance and unfinished war.

Gaza needs reconstruction. It needs water, electricity, and housing. It needs the world to step up.

But reconstruction without representation is just another form of occupation.

By appointing Tony Blair, Donald Trump has signalled that this process is not about the rights of Palestinians. It is about the interests of the powerful. It is a gathering of the very men who view war as an opportunity for restructuring, rather than a tragedy to be mourned.

If we want true peace, we must demand justice. We must demand a process led by the people who live on the land, not by the men who bombed it or the consultants who profit from it.

Tony Blair has had his chance to shape the Middle East. The graveyards of Iraq are testament enough to his success. He should not be given another shovel.

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