Yesterday’s revelation that Washington and Tel Aviv are grooming Tony Blair to run Gaza should be filed under “too grotesque to parody.” After almost two years of Israeli pulverisation, genocide, starvation, and dispossession, the survivors are to be rewarded with the return of the war criminal who helped midwife Iraq’s destruction. Blair, the perennial smirking statesman, is being lined up to govern Gaza through a so-called ‘transitional authority’ — a colonial protectorate by another name.

The logic is as insulting as it is familiar: Israel wants to pose as exiting Gaza while retaining control and avoiding censure; Trump wants a deal he can brand as a ‘triumph for peace’; the world powers wants a respectable frontman capable of eloquently airbrushing genocide. And so Blair, a colonial governor redux, is trotted out to administer the ruins — a grotesque figure who has never faced justice for his own war crimes, entrusted with the role of Trump’s Viceroy to oversee post-genocide ‘reconstruction’ of Gaza destroyed by his fellow war criminals who share his impunity, and with its remaining population dismissed as collateral damage.

Blair’s fingerprints are already all over the Trump–Kushner ‘resort’ plan for Gaza - primo beachfront visions of blingy Trump-themed hotels and leisure zones for wealthy tourists atop the bulldozed rubble of one of the oldest cities on Earth. This is how Trump and Blair view the Middle East, as a real estate portfolio and lucrative resource hub. Blair offers the PowerPoint deck; Trump slaps on the gold leaf. Either way, the people come last.

Trump’s former ambassador to Türkiye, Tom Barrack, summarized this worldview in one breathtaking quote to reporters yesterday, telling them breezily: “There is no Middle East. There’s tribes and villages. Nation states were created by the British and the French in 1916. But the Middle East doesn’t work that way. It starts with individual, family, village, then tribe, community, religion. Lastly, Nation.” Translation: forget history, sovereignty, citizenship, human rights — it’s all just tribal furniture waiting to be rearranged by Western fixers. A perfect rationale for turning Gaza into a gated tourism compound run by consultants.

And who better to play colonial overseer than Blair? Palestine, let’s not forget, was once a British ‘protectorate,’ a status that allowed Britain to oh-so-generously donate another people’s country for Israel’s foundation. Now along comes Pasha Blair to reprise the role. This is colonialism-plus: this time without even the pretence of a “civilising mission.” The old empires at least lied about uplift and left some rail networks; today’s simply talk of “management,” “stability,” and “development.” The pith helmets have been swapped for consultancy decks, but the sneering contempt and bone-deep racism are the same.

Blair’s record makes him the ideal candidate — if the aim is insult. His stint as ‘Middle East envoy’ was another spit in the face of long-suffering Palestinians and of the Iraqis whose nation he reduced to rubble on false pretences. Despite helping oust Saddam Hussein on patently false allegations, Blair has always preferred authoritarians and autocrats to democracies, because autocrats sign contracts while peoples resist. He cultivated friendships with Gaddafi and Assad, recommending a knighthood for the latter, and was effusive in his praise of Putin, who he saw, like Assad, as an essential partner in the apparently endless ‘War on Terror’.

The same ‘War on Terror’ narrative was gleefully seized on by Putin and Assad, as well as by Iran’s regime, to justify their obliteration of Syria until the Syrian people finally overthrew Assad last December. Netanyahu now chants the same script to justify genocide in Gaza, and strikes on Lebanon, Syria, and even Qatar. Blair’s role has been to provide a liberal gloss — to nod gravely while tyrants commit atrocities, so long as they dress it up as counter-terrorism.

This Putin fandom isn’t an aberration but a pattern. Blair was one of the first Western leaders to hail Putin as a responsible ally and essential partner after 9/11. Trump’s admiration for Putin is more gaudy but no less real. Netanyahu too has embraced him for years. All of them have played their part in laundering their own and Putin’s gangsterism as valiant resistance to terror. Now, as Putin escalates attacks across Europe, striking NATO territory and raising the risk of wider war, the cost of their servile indulgence and of their peers’ complicity is coming due.

In truth, Putin’s indifference to European lives and freedom is no different from the indifference that he, Blair, Netanyahu and successive US presidents have shown to Arab lives and freedom. Perhaps Putin’s values are more consistent — at home and abroad, regionally and globally, asserting absolute power and crushing dissent are his sole focus. The historical echoes are also strong: in the 1920s and ‘30s, Mussolini normalised genocide in Libya and Ethiopia before Europe felt the flames; in the 2010s and ‘20s, Putin and Assad did so in Syria, and Netanyahu does so in Palestine, with the unctuous megalomaniac Blair offering his services as custodian of the rubble (and of the offshore gas resources).

The plan for Gaza is not reconstruction. It is occupation by spreadsheet, a plantation run by a man whose legacy is bloodshed, obstruction, and consultancy contracts. A people who have survived genocide are to have not justice, freedom, or fundamental rights, but an administrator. No binding timetable for sovereignty. No reparations. Just a man whose legacy is the devastation of Iraq, whose pragmatism meant fawning over dictators, and whose consultancy fees are always paid in blood.

But history does not stop for tyrants or their middlemen. Syrians won their freedom despite the overt efforts of Putin and Khamenei and the covert efforts of Netanyahu and assorted Western leaders to prop Assad up. No matter how hard the world tries to crush Palestinians, to replace their rights with checkpoints, subjugation, and now technocratic fig leaves, history moves forward, not back. Blair and his patrons are modern Canutes, straining to hold back the tide with airstrikes and spreadsheets. The waves of freedom will come in all the same.

- Ruth Riegler