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Tony Blair’s leaked presence at the recent White House discussion of Donald Trump’s “Gaza Riviera” plan is either good news or outrageous. Good news if he used his influence with Trump to terminate this obscenity. Dreadful news if he were to be party to it.
The plan itself was first outlined to an incredulous world by Trump in February. The details have now emerged. It involves the expulsion – the de facto imprisonment – of 2 million Palestinians, while the US administers the exclave for 10 years. Each Palestinian would be paid $5,000 each plus four years’ rent somewhere else and one year’s supply of food. Gaza is then rebuilt as a skyscraper wonderland of artificial intelligence investment and tourism. It would be a second Dubai yielding up to $400bn for developers.
The scheme’s private contractors would be the same “humanitarian” trust now supplying food to the famine-hit territory. Trump said that the Palestinians would be better off “living beautifully in another location”. The Americans might one day see a “reformed and deradicalised Palestinian polity … ready to step in its shoes.” It is inconceivable that the plan would be deemed acceptable anywhere, apart from in Israel.
All parties to any war have a moral obligation to plan for its aftermath. As the principal sponsor of Israel’s reaction to the Hamas atrocities of October 2023, the US is now party to the destruction of over 90% of Gaza’s built environment and the killing of 63,000 of its inhabitants. As moral obligations go this must border on unprecedented. But when Israel eventually occupies all of Gaza, it and the US will doubtless claim victors’ rights to do as they please.
If morality might have been off the agenda at Blair’s White House meeting, the question is: was reality present? There are plenty of possible futures already being mooted for Gaza. They include one backed by Egypt and the Arab League states for its $53bn reconstruction. Another might be a reversion to the 1993 Oslo settlement, which has been periodically undermined by Hamas and Israel. Another might conceivably include some coalition of Palestinian and Israeli development interests under Israeli control.
No realisable plan can involve the mass clearing of any land of its historical population and its theft for colonisation by an alien power. Gaza could never be a second Dubai. It would be an embattled ruin plagued by factionalism and terror. For 10 years Washington would be responsible for an embattled building site, until it got bored and left it to its fate, as it did Saigon, Baghdad and Kabul.
The United States may be the world’s most successful state but its attempts at imperialism have been dismal. The first was in the 1900s when Teddy Roosevelt approved the takeover of the Philippines and coveted parts of the Caribbean and Latin America. Attempts to police the world have constantly led to mission creep into prolonged bouts of intervention. General MacArthur almost succeeded in invading China during the Korean war. Having a global presence went to the head of George HW Bush in Kuwait, when he declared a ‘new world order’ under American control. He generally acted in keeping with his army chief, Colin Powell’s, later warning that “if you break it, you own it” but he still invaded Somalia.
His son, George W Bush, followed his foreign policy adviser Condoleezza Rice’s plea that America’s armed forces not be used as “a global police force. They are not the world’s 911 [call centre]”. Bush agreed until al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks had him and his neocon colleagues itching for war and nation-building. In Iraq he promised to deliver a democratic Iraq, greater American influence in the Middle East and settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict. America for a while “owned” south Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and, for a brief while, Lebanon, all at horrendous cost and loss of life. In every case, the gulf between the stated goal and its realisation was enormous.
Noninterventionism has a long and respectable history in the US. Every president toys with it until the trumpets of glory and the sheer power at their disposal summons them to war. The most recent and near hysterical anti-interventionist was none other than Donald Trump. His hostility to Nato collectivism, his tariff wars and turning against Ukraine, demonstrated a near-obsession with detaching the US from the world’s ills. Not for him the Kennedy/Johnson mission to liberate the world and bring “freedom”.
As recently as last May in Saudi Arabia, Trump excoriated “so-called nation-builders [who] wrecked far more nations than they built … intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
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He told his Arab audience that the Middle East had been created “by the people of the region themselves … pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies.” At the time he was arming Benjamin Netanyahu to the teeth.
Gaza faces an awesome task of reconstruction, and yes, the US has a moral responsibility to assist. But Trump has dreamed up a colonial intervention that not a single Arab – or other western – state is likely to support. It seeks merely to validate and capitalise on Netanyahu’s horrific invasion. It is lurching down the same grim road taken by one American president after another. The only question is: did Blair say so?
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Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
