A HANDS-OFF ENVOY: BLAIR IN THE MIDDLE EAST

‘For Tony Blair to say, “I would like to talk to you about the peace process” is a very different entry point from saying, “I would like to get an oil concession in the east of your country for a client or I would like to become an adviser to your country.”’

– JAMES WOLFENSOHN, BLAIR’S PREDECESSOR AS MIDDLE EAST ENVOY.

‘Jim Wolfensohn resigned because he is a man of great principle and courage who did not want to be used. They had to find someone who would play the game, and Tony Blair accepted the role.’

– DR HANAN ASHRAWI, PALESTINIAN NEGOTIATOR.

At 8 a.m. on 27 June 2007, a big white removal van drew up outside 10 Downing Street. A man stood at the corner where Downing Street meets Whitehall – the nearest the public can get to No. 10 – with a placard saying, in huge capitals: ‘GOOD RIDDANCE’. Around him were a large number of protestors against the Iraq War. As far as anyone knows, there was no one there to support the outgoing PM.

But if Tony Blair noticed the stark contrast between his last day as Prime Minister and the day, ten years earlier, when he had entered the building in triumph, he gave no sign of it. In Parliament at midday he gave his standard non-apology for Iraq, saying of Britain’s soldiers, ‘I am truly sorry for the dangers they face in Afghanistan and Iraq. I know some people think they face these dangers in vain. I don’t and I never will.’

There was something for MPs to congratulate him on. That day he was stepping down not just as Prime Minister, but also – unusually for a retiring PM – as Member of Parliament for Sedgefield, and he announced that he had accepted an invitation to become Special Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East. The Quartet is an international diplomatic group consisting of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia. Its website spells out Blair’s mission:

Tony Blair is charged with implementing a development agenda in line with the Quartet’s mandate: promoting economic growth and job creation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and supporting the institution-building agenda of the Palestinian Authority (PA). The goal is to produce transformative economic change on the ground, underpinning the top-down political process.

In the House of Commons, the Rev. Ian Paisley said, ‘He has entered upon another enormous task. I hope that what happened in Northern Ireland will be repeated, and that at the end of the day he’ll be able to look back and say: it was well worth while.’

As we write, seven years later, Tony Blair, with his magnificent Jerusalem offices, his armour-plated car, his Jerusalem staff, would be a fantasist indeed if he were looking back with the satisfaction that Ian Paisley hoped for. Peace in the Middle East looks further away than ever, and the Quartet envoy seems entirely irrelevant to what is going on in the region.

Could he have made a difference? Could a different Quartet envoy have made a difference? It’s hard to say. It’s hard even to say what success might look like. All you can ask is that the envoy should put his heart and soul into it. Did Blair do that?

Blair’s appointment was not straightforward. The Bush administration in Washington drove the appointment. According to a well-placed Washington source, the State Department opposed the appointment, but Bush insisted, saying, ‘Blair sacrificed his political career for me.’

The new British government under Gordon Brown may have been privately pleased that Blair might be spending a lot of time abroad, but EU leaders were lukewarm and the Russians positively hostile – they endorsed the appointment unwillingly. The Israeli government welcomed the appointment and the Palestinian Authority was not consulted.

As the Quartet Representative (QR), Blair has to ensure that the group’s mandate and primary aim is met. The position is unpaid. He says he spends about a week a month in the region, but all of our sources – including diplomats and Middle East correspondents of British newspapers, who monitor his activities as closely as he will allow – tell us that this is an overgenerous estimate. ‘About two or three days a month’ is the assessment given to us by a veteran British Middle East correspondent, while Middle East-based journalist Jonathan Cook, who has excellent Palestinian sources, says, ‘It’s widely known that he spends as little time as he can get away with in the region.’ The typical pattern of his one week a month in the Middle East, according to a diplomat quoted by Jonathan Cook, is, ‘He’ll arrive on a Monday evening and leave Thursday morning.’1

The French journalist Jean Quatremer, Brussels correspondent for Liberation, talks of his ‘rare appearances’ in the Middle East, and the appearance of being more interested in making money.2

A Palestinian negotiator, Dr Hanan Ashrawi, told us, ‘He is very part-time. His presence is not intrusive. It does not feel like a week a month. He certainly doesn’t report to me once a month.’ If he were spending any time with Palestinian negotiators, Ashrawi would either be there or at least know all about it.

Blair’s office does not give any indication of how much time he spends in the region, but told us that journalists would not be aware of all his visits, so their estimates would, we were told, not be reliable. However, the office declined to offer its own estimate.

MATCHING UP TO WOLFENSOHN

There is no doubt that his predecessor in the job, James Wolfensohn – for whom Ashrawi had much more respect – spent much more time in the region than Blair does. Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, did the job for a year, from April 2005, after being appointed by the four partners.

Wolfensohn told us that, to do any good for the peace process, you have to put a lot of time into the work. ‘The point about the Israel–Palestinian thing is that there is an important job to do. To a degree it is a full-time job and you cannot do that on a timetable of two or three days. You cannot do anything in a rushed manner in the Arab world. Condi [Condoleezza Rice, then US Secretary of State] found this; I found this.’

Wolfensohn worked on the job of QR almost full time. By contrast, Alex Brummer, city editor of the Daily Mail, who ghostwrote Wolfensohn’s autobiography, said on his newspaper’s website that ‘far from being embroiled in his mission of deepening economic and security ties between Israel, the PA and other parties, [Blair’s] feet rarely touch the ground in Jerusalem’. According to Brummer, ‘Blair’s approach to the job has been a stark contrast to that of his predecessor as Quartet negotiator the former World Bank president James Wolfensohn …

‘The former head of the World Bank used to be in non-stop negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, shuttling between Gaza, Jerusalem and Ramallah.’

Brummer says that Wolfensohn addressed issues such as the removal of rubble left by Israeli bulldozers when, at the request of the Palestinian Authority, they destroyed the settlements inside Gaza, and organised openings at the road crossings between Israel and Gaza so there could be free movement of buses for the Arab population and goods between the West Bank and Gaza.

Brummer adds,

What the Wolfensohn experience demonstrated is that the quartet’s work was not about great geopolitical thinking or the war on terror, familiar territory for Blair’s high-flown rhetoric, but about detailed on the ground negotiations.

There is nothing exciting about bus routes, Gaza border openings and security barriers in the West Bank. But this is what being the Quartet negotiator was meant to be about. It is a job to which Blair, with his once over lightly, butterfly approach to diplomacy was entirely unsuited.

That has not bothered the former Prime Minister. The Quartet sinecure may pay him no money directly but has been a godsend for his broader ambition of making as much money for Blair Inc. as quickly as possible.

So while the Middle East has lived through some of its most traumatic and bloodiest modern episodes – the aftermath of the second Israel–Lebanon war of 2006 and Israel’s Gaza campaigns of 2009 and 2014 – Blair was hardly to be seen.

Instead of continuing with the effort to bring Israel and Palestine together, through economic and security cooperation, on the former PM’s watch the situation worsened dramatically …

Blair seemed to think that occasionally turning up at the region’s most exotic hotel – the mosaic-clustered British-owned American Colony in Arab East Jerusalem – and consulting with his negotiating team and a few local leaders and journalists was sufficient.3

Is all this a little over the top? Brummer, after all, is known to have a low opinion of Blair, as does the newspaper he writes for. It’s worth examining how much of this is confirmed elsewhere, and what Wolfensohn himself thinks; and we were able to get this from Wolfensohn himself.

Wolfensohn resigned partly because the work was so hard and unrelenting and was damaging his health, but also because he was frustrated at the lack of progress, because he thought his mandate was inadequate, and because he felt he did not have the support from the Bush administration that he should have had.

Alvaro de Soto, former UN envoy to the Quartet, says Wolfensohn was lured with a proposed job description that would have given him a writ ‘essentially covering the entire peace process’. But his final terms of reference were much narrower and were quickly whittled down further still, according to de Soto.4

James Wolfensohn arrived full of enthusiasm in May 2005. It was a turbulent time, but a time of hope. Israel was disengaging from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, which was a step in the right direction; but, in January the next year, Hamas won the Palestinian elections, and Israel refused to talk to the organisation. All the building blocks were in place for the conflict that erupted in 2014.

Wolfensohn was to monitor the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and to help heal the dismal Palestinian economy, for which he raised $9 billion. He donated money of his own to help the Palestinians buy Israeli-owned greenhouses in Gaza. He ‘devoted his considerable clout to bringing about some semblance of co-ordination between Israel and the Palestinians so as to ensure a smooth disengagement,’ according to de Soto. ‘He also worked to set out the preconditions for economic growth in the post-disengagement period.’

But it soon started to go wrong, and Wolfensohn lasted in the job only eleven months, resigning when it became clear that he had no room for manoeuvre and no power to change anything. He was a prisoner of the US and Israeli governments. ‘I was stupid for not reading the small print,’ he told the Israeli daily Ha’Aretz in an interview a year after his resignation. He might have had a minimal role in partially relieving the worst effects of the Israeli occupation on the Palestinians, and he might have been able to take small steps towards reviving the Palestinian economy through high-level fundraising, but none of that was going to make a real difference.

De Soto noted that Wolfensohn tried hard and often to get his mandate broadened, but ‘this was resisted perhaps most strongly by the US State Department, which had proposed his appointment in the first place’.

To make a real difference, Wolfensohn was clear that he needed a different mandate. He says that his attempts to expand his mandate quickly made him enemies in the State Department, most notably with the neoconservative official Elliott Abrams, as well as with Israeli leaders. He told Ha’Aretz, ‘The basic problem was that I didn’t have the authority. The Quartet had the authority, and within the Quartet it was the Americans who had the authority … I would doubt that in the eyes of Elliott Abrams and the State Department team, I was ever anything but a nuisance.’

Eventually, according to de Soto, he painstakingly cobbled together an Agreement on Movement and Access which, Wolfensohn and de Soto agreed, was wrecked by State Department interference. And that, for Wolfensohn, signalled that the end was near. Sure he could not achieve much without a better mandate, he was ready to go. De Soto wrote, ‘An attempt by Secretary General Annan late in 2006 to revive his mission met with Russian support but was received with little enthusiasm in Washington and shunned by Wolfensohn himself.’

Wolfensohn had played a useful role, nonetheless. He had helped the Gaza disengagement to go as smoothly as it could go. He also, says de Soto, ‘helped to carve out arrangements concerning the fate of Israeli infrastructure left behind by the [Gaza] settlers’. He made a ‘clever deal to buy, then transfer to the Palestinians, most of their lucrative greenhouses.’

But Gaza remained what de Soto called ‘an open-air prison controlled directly by Israel on all borders, including the sea which is tightly patrolled by the Israeli navy, and indirectly the border with Egypt.’ And, on 4 January 2006, the architect of Gaza disengagement and towering figure in Israeli politics, Ariel Sharon, fell into a coma from which he never recovered. His successor, Ehud Olmert, refused to negotiate with the Palestinians while Hamas was part of the government, and the Quartet supported this decision.

De Soto was one of many diplomats who thought that finally and irrevocably shutting the door on talks with Hamas was the short way to endless war. He pleaded for a flexible approach that would not set impossible demands on the Palestinians as a precondition of negotiations, but others in the Quartet – principally the Americans, but also the EU – refused.

That was how things stood when Wolfensohn resigned and, several months later, Blair arrived.

The Ha’Aretz interview took place after Wolfensohn’s resignation and shortly before Blair was due to take up his appointment, and Wolfensohn did not sound as though he hoped for much from the Blair mission: ‘My worry for Tony Blair is that if you read the mandate he has – it’s exactly the same as mine. It talks about helping both sides, helping the Palestinians, but there’s nothing there about negotiating peace.’5

He was in no doubt about the size of the problem facing Blair. ‘Just pretending that 1.4 million people can live in a sort of prison is not a solution at all. So I think it’s going to require, on the part of Tony Blair or someone, some real negotiations to try and get this started.’

Blair’s mandate, like Wolfensohn’s, confined him to promoting improved conditions for Palestinians by boosting their economy, as well as security coordination with Israel, humanitarian issues and institution-building. In practice he has mostly concerned himself with economic issues, and with trying to get investment into Palestine.

His work was supposed to reduce violence on both sides, but the Quartet’s concern under Blair has been almost exclusively confined to Palestinian violence. Officially at least, the goal is Palestinian statehood as envisioned in the 2003 document known as the Road Map.6

Wolfensohn told us that the mandate that Blair has as QR is identical to his own, and confirmed that this weak mandate was one of the main reasons why he resigned. He says that Blair tried to get an expanded mandate, but it was not allowed.

Dr Hanan Ashrawi told us that the mandate issue is crucial. ‘The mandate is very limiting,’ she told us. ‘It is just about the economy. The envoy should have a political mandate. It can be quite counterproductive for the envoy to work with such a limiting mandate, because it can give the illusion of motion, while not approaching the real issue.’

She thinks Wolfensohn was right to refuse to continue to work with it. ‘Jim Wolfensohn resigned because he is a man of great principle and courage who did not want to be used,’ she said. ‘They had to find someone who would play the game, and Tony Blair accepted the role.’

Blair, she says, occupies himself with the peripheral issue of getting a few checkpoints lifted, ‘But, while he gets a few checkpoints lifted, three times as many are established in other places. The point is not to get a few checkpoints lifted but to ask: why should there be checkpoints?’

Wolfensohn, talking to us shortly before his eightieth birthday, said he did not want to get into a conflict with Blair, whom he knows well. But he wondered aloud whether much could be achieved by the QR with the present mandate. The only way to solve this process is at the head-of-state level, as US President Bill Clinton did when he brought together Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, said Wolfensohn. ‘I am not sure how much power the position [of QR] has, and that is why I got out.’

Blair’s office has told the Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood that the mandate issue is a red herring, saying it is irrelevant to the mission’s actual achievements. Among these, say officials, are double-digit growth in the Palestinian economy; lifting checkpoints that severely restricted movement in the West Bank; assisting the development and training of Palestinian security forces; the easing of Israel’s blockade on Gaza in 2010; securing an additional 10,000-plus permits for Palestinian labourers to work in Israel; and persuading Israel to release a share of the radio spectrum to allow a second mobile-phone company to operate in Palestine.7

The last of these was of great interest to US investment bank JP Morgan Chase, to whose board Blair was appointed on 10 January 2008. His role seems to be to lobby governments on behalf of the bank. He became senior adviser to the bank as well as a member of its international advisory board, and JP Morgan Chase pays him £2 million a year.

James Wolfensohn told us, ‘I would guess he was very helpful [to JP Morgan Chase] because he kept in touch with a lot of his buddies and was probably in a position to give informed talks to the international board when they were interested in some particular subject. I have no doubt that to give effective responses to questions, he could utilise his excellent network and could find out what kinds of things were going on in response.

‘That job would suit him and, given that his observations were not on the front pages of the newspapers, he did something that a lot of former heads of state have done with great effect. He has helped, especially, bankers and their clients who want to see the rulers or the leaders. It has allowed him to be very well compensated. That is fair game, that is what a lot of former politicians and leaders do.’

Wolfensohn also reported a perception held, he said, by many people, that Blair may be using the post of QR to increase his general exposure to the Middle East, as distinct from having a serious focus on the peace process. You can start a conversation about the intractable subject of peace in the Middle East, but, once it is begun, other things that are rather less intractable might well come up, he told us. It’s possible to get in the door by talking about the Middle East, and, once in, to advance your business interests.

He said, ‘For Tony Blair to say, “I would like to talk to you about the peace process” is a very different entry point from saying, “I would like to get an oil concession in the east of your country for a client or I would like to become an adviser to your country.”’

Wolfensohn is careful to point out that he has not been present during Blair’s meetings with the leaders of oil-rich states, nor with potential client states, and cannot therefore say with any certainty what occurred in their discussions.

Ashrawi, too, told us tersely, ‘The role gives him access all across the region. I have no proof that he uses this to feather his own nest.’

Journalist Alex Brummer dispenses with the careful diplomatic language of Wolfensohn and Ashrawi. He has written in the Daily Mail that Blair’s role as envoy is ‘no more than a ticket to making ever more millions’ and that it ‘has been a godsend for his broader ambition of making as much money for Blair Inc. as quickly as possible’.

He added,

His big selling point as he offers himself as a deal maker around the Middle East and as a lecturer in the banking parlours of New York and Chicago is his continuing role as an international mediator. He is not just a former PM, collecting his cheques, but an active big hitter who could open the door of foreign ministries and palaces.8

It’s a theme that is echoed by several of those who have watched Blair from close quarters. An American businessman who was once close to Blair, and advised him to prioritise doing good rather than making money, has discreetly moved out of Blair’s life as he watched the progress of his work with the Quartet. He feels that Blair treats the job as a ‘calling card’. He says, ‘I have seen the whole Quartet thing not make progress; he doesn’t have much of a relationship with the Palestinians and yet he travels round the world as the Quartet Representative. My impression is that the Quartet thing is a calling card.

‘But when he meets the Sultan or the Emir … do they think they are going to talk about the Quartet or getting investment advice from him?’

Brummer told us, ‘It’s a job for a person who is interested in negotiating on details, and who is willing to work hard to do so, not for someone broad-brush like Blair. Blair should step aside and let someone with experience of dealing with low-level economic development do the job. It needs someone with practical skills.’

But Blair does not step down. Why? Brummer is sure he knows the reason. ‘The job has given him amazing access across the Middle East.’

Malcolm Rifkind offers a slightly different analysis of the reason that Blair remains. He admits that ‘being realistic about it, it gives him an entry elsewhere in the Middle East in a way that would not be so automatic otherwise.’ However, he told us that, ‘I don’t think that’s why he does it. I think he does it because he likes to continue to feel like an international statesman and not just a businessman.’

PALESTINIANS SAY NO TO BLAIR

Blair’s usefulness as QR is limited by the fact that the Palestinians have no trust in him at all. In this he differs from Wolfensohn, who worked hard and successfully to gain the trust and respect of the Palestinian negotiators, who still speak affectionately and respectfully of him.

‘Useless, useless, useless,’ the Palestinian Authority has called Blair.9

Many people – including leading Palestinians – question whether Blair has brought about any significant, useful or lasting change. Nabil Shaath – a former foreign minister, chief negotiator and senior associate of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian National Authority – told us that, when Blair took on the role of Quartet envoy, ‘we thought he would be a real support to the Palestinians. But he gradually reduced his role to that of asking the Israelis to take down a barrier here or a barrier there … He really escaped all the political requirements of his job as representative of the Quartet. He is not involved in the politics now; he comes and goes. He is confined to economic issues and the illusion of prosperity.’

Blair might argue that he did not escape the political requirements but that there were none, according to his mandate. But you can hardly expect to make a difference in the Middle East if you regard the politics as above your pay grade. He cannot escape the politics – and of course, he does not. He is simply seen as hopelessly one-sided about them. Shaath told us that Blair acted as Israel’s ‘defence attorney’ in the face of Abbas’s application to the UN for a Palestinian state to be admitted as a full member, which Shaath says gave cause for ‘serious doubt’ that Blair could carry on his duties as a neutral.

He said that the former PM told the Palestinians ‘to forget about the Road Map [which he created] and the Oslo Agreement, to forget about a settlement freeze [one of the key terms]. He has never resisted Israel changing the terms of reference, and he has gone along with the insistence on us dropping basic requirements. He is citing the Israeli position as a matter of fact, telling us to be “realistic”.’

Ashrawi told us, ‘He always tries to accommodate [Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu.’

This suggests that Blair’s role as Middle East envoy is compromised, given that the QR’s guiding principle is that ‘political negotiations can only fully succeed if there is broad support on both the Israeli and the Palestinian side and if the parties perceive that a peace agreement is possible.’10

He is not neutral: he has sided with the big battalions, with those who control what he calls the realities of the situation. Yet, oddly, it is this area he chooses to highlight in his own publicity, claiming on the Tony Blair Associates website that ‘he represents the United States of America, United Nations, Russia and the European Union, working with the Palestinians to prepare for statehood as part of the international community’s effort to secure peace.’

Dr Abdul Wahid, chairman of Hizb ut-Tahrir UK, told us, ‘Blair’s role with the Quartet is extraordinary. His is one of the most hated names in the region. He could not be seen as an honest broker.’ Jerusalem-born Dr Ghada Karmi, a fellow and lecturer at the Institute of Arab and Islamic studies at Exeter University, has said, ‘He is – at best – a total irrelevancy.’11

Since he took on the role, Blair has, at the time of writing, visited Gaza only twice. He says the security situation prevents him from visiting more often, but he speaks ‘regularly’ with people from Gaza. When he visited the West Bank city of Hebron in 2009, shoes were thrown at him, demonstrating clearly that he is not welcome.

Cherie Blair’s half-sister Lauren Booth, who is now an activist on behalf of the Palestinians, was in Hebron the day her brother-in-law’s cavalcade passed through the town and he met local leaders. She saw the local community leaders afterwards. ‘The sense of disgust and disappointment was thinly veiled,’ she told us. ‘They said, he is simply not on top of his brief. Also, they wanted to show him the narrow corridor the Israelis force them to pass through in order to go to the mosque and pray. He said no, he wouldn’t look. They said, “You have come to see the Hebronites but you do not want to see this side of the story.”’

She says that Blair threw away the trust of the Palestinians while he was Prime Minister, and needs to make an effort to recover it. Booth first went to Palestine as a journalist for the Mail on Sunday in 2005, when her brother-in-law was still in Downing Street. ‘They loved him then,’ she says.

But in January 2006 came the Palestinian Authority elections, which Hamas won with seventy-four of the 132 seats, while the ruling Fatah won just forty-five, and Blair was soon calling for new elections and backing Israeli sanctions. That year the Israelis imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the Gaza Strip, after Hamas militants seized an Israeli soldier named Gilad Shalit. A heightened blockade was imposed in 2007 by Israel in an attempt to reduce support for Hamas and pressure the authorities into returning Shalit (who was subsequently released in November 2011) after it seized power in Gaza.

Prime Minister Blair and his Israeli counterpart Ariel Sharon had demanded free elections so that the Palestinians could choose a government that could speak for them, but were now saying they did not accept the choice the Palestinians had made. It was remembered with bitterness when Blair became the QR. If he was to be effective, Blair needed to do something to show the Palestinians that he was even-handed. He has not done this, and most of what he has done reinforces the Palestinians in their view of him.

This was certainly true of his behaviour after the killing by the Israeli Defence Force of nine Turkish activists on an aid ship, the Mavi Marmara, in 2010. Israel consequently came under huge pressure to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip. It was a moment that the QR could have used to good effect.

Nabil Shaath told us that Blair’s worst moment as QR was at this point: ‘As a result [of the killing], public opinion was enraged and [US President] Barack Obama and [the EU’s foreign affairs representative] Catherine Ashton were talking about lifting the siege. I personally presented to Obama a suggestion to open the harbour of Gaza by leasing two piers in Limassol, Cyprus, and all ships proceeding to Gaza could be searched by international apparatus, and then escorted by military launch, to end all claims that Israel security will be infringed.

‘The US and EU were interested and this was the moment for Blair to use the momentum. Instead he swallowed Israeli Premier Ehud Barak’s argument completely that ending the siege should become a voluntary Israeli easing. I think for him it was a personal-risk calculation, thinking about his ability to continue in the job. His statements are so benign that they are irrelevant.’

Despite huge international pressure to lift the blockade, Blair managed nothing more than to get the Israelis to agree to allow a few more previously banned items into Gaza. But he made the best of it, taking a high-profile PR role in promoting the arrangement in the world’s media as a victory. Whatever effect this may have had in the rest of the world, in Palestine it was taken as confirmation that there was nothing to be hoped for from Tony Blair.

All of this happened before Blair finally blew any hope of gaining the respect and cooperation of the Palestinians. He did it by doing something at once so simple and so crass that it is hard to see how a man with years of political experience and a well-tuned political antennae could do it by accident. What he did was to appoint, as a consultant in the Office of Tony Blair, an Israeli intelligence official.

INTELLIGENCE OFFICER JOINS BLAIR TEAM

Lianne Pollak worked as an officer in the Israeli Army in intelligence analysis, where, according to her public profile on the professional networking website LinkedIn, she ‘led intelligence teams and intelligence processes in volatile periods, working with senior generals on a daily basis.’ After that she worked for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – the Israeli politician more loathed by Palestinians than any of his predecessors – ‘in the negotiation team with the Palestinians.’

She worked for Blair between October 2012 and May 2013, and he claims that her role in his organisation was on a project not related to the Middle East, and that he also has Palestinians working for him. This is entirely unverifiable, because of the secretive nature of Blair’s businesses. It may be true. It may also be true that she had no influence on her boss in matters related to the Middle East conflict; she did, after all, work for Tony Blair Associates, not for the Quartet. But that is the problem with wearing so many different hats: what you do wearing one hat yesterday will not be forgotten just because you are wearing a different hat today.

It was obvious to anyone – it must surely have been obvious to Blair – that Palestinians would see her appointment as an indication of how he thinks about them; that her appointment would be taken as confirmation of their worst suspicions about him. It does not seem possible that he made such an appointment without realising the devastating effect that it would have on the effectiveness of his mission in the Middle East.

Today, it would be impossible to persuade any Palestinian leader, even a moderate and sophisticated negotiator such as Dr Ashrawi, that Blair was anything but an Israeli mouthpiece. Blair seems to have accepted this; certainly there seems to be no attempt to be even-handed. After a meeting with Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu on 18 June 2014 he told the media ‘The only way forward will be when Hamas understands that the only proper choice to make if you want peace is to engage in solely peaceful means to achieve political ends.’

There was no balancing suggestion that Israel needed to do anything. Blair made his comments shortly after three religious Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and killed. This event led to the launch of the seven-week long Israeli assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014 which resulted in the deaths of some 2,200 Gazans and 66 Israeli soldiers.

While Palestinian politicians say he has done very little to promote peace with Israel, its business leaders say that he has not persuaded Israel to lift blockades of necessary goods, which stifles economic growth; and they question whether he has tried to do so.

BUSINESSMAN CRITIC

Businessman Lord (Clive) Hollick went on a fact-finding mission to Palestine in 2013 with trade union leader Hugh Lanning and Labour peer Tessa Blackstone. He told us, ‘We were told by the UN that the Palestinian economy was operating at between 20 and 25 per cent of its potential capacity. Palestinian businesses are unable to grow and realise their potential because of measures imposed by Israel such as the back-to-back arrangements which require the goods to be exported through Israel. Much-needed machinery cannot be imported into Palestine because of its alleged potential for military use.

‘If you sell software it must go through Israel. Palestinian companies therefore become subcontractors and suppliers of services to Israeli software companies, who extract the lion’s share of the profit. All this smothers entrepreneurial activity in Palestine and makes the country more dependent on international aid than it needs to be.

‘And aid goes to the Palestinian Authority and does not trickle down properly. This means that the European taxpayer is filling in the hole left by the profits, which have gone to Israel.

‘I have subsequently been told by sources close to the Israeli government that it is a matter of policy to suppress the growth of the Palestinian economy and that is only going to change as part of a wider peace negotiation.’

We understand that Blair commissioned some research on the Palestinian economy from the management consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, focusing especially on how to bring in outside investors. But Hollick believes this commissioned research misses the point. Investors will not lead the way to peace. He says that, as things stand, outside investors will not come in without having the whole profit pool; and that will not change until the political situation changes. Investment will follow political stability. You cannot expect investment to come first and create political stability, he says.

Part of Blair’s mandate as QR is to ‘support the development of the Palestinian economy and institution-building in preparation for eventual statehood’. None of this, says Hollick, will work if you start by trying to attract investment without solving, or beginning to solve, the politics. On this front, Hollick, though anxious to avoid directly criticising Blair, made it clear he was unable to detect any Blair input.

This is confirmed by those sympathetic to Blair. One of these, academic Dr Toby Greene, research director at the pro-Israeli organisation Bicom, wrote on 14 October 2013 in the Jewish Chronicle, ‘Mostly, Blair has accepted that his role is not to broker final-status negotiations, but to facilitate the bottom-up development of Palestinian security, economic and political institutions.’

An expanded mandate, of course, would have required Blair to do what Wolfensohn had done: convince the Palestinians that his mind was not closed to their grievances.

ISRAELI MOUTHPIECE?

For Blair this was always going to be uphill work, because he started with a reputation among the Palestinians for being an Israeli mouthpiece. Greene’s supportive book on Blair’s work in the region convincingly makes the case that, as Prime Minister, he ‘showed far greater sympathy for Israel, as a democratic state at threat from extremism, than many of his European counterparts, much to the dismay of many of his colleagues in his own party.’ Greene says Blair, ‘in increasingly strident terms during his time in office, rejected the idea that Western foreign policies caused [Muslim] radicalisation as “nonsense”.’12

In Britain, Blair became close to the Jewish community, but there has always been dislike and distrust between him and British Muslims, and he seems never to have tried to change that. Journalist Alex Brummer is also a vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and he says, ‘The Jewish community in Britain has good relations with Blair. Lord Levy [Labour peer and leading figure in several Jewish organisations in the UK] was the original link. Blair was the speaker at the Board of Deputies in 2010, speaking about the Middle East peace process.’

The board of advisers of his Faith Foundation includes the Chief Rabbi, but the only Muslim it contained at its beginning was a Kuwaiti politician of whom leading British Muslims have never heard, Dr Ismail Khudr Al-Shatti, an adviser to the Prime Minister of Kuwait – a politician, not a cleric or theologian. Either Blair did not trust or approve of any Muslim religious leaders, or they were not willing to work with him – or both. (We come back to the makeup of the Faith Foundation in Chapter 12: ‘Doing God’.)

This had important implications for his work as QR, for a perceived enemy of Islam is bound to find it hard to persuade the Palestinians of his good faith or even-handedness.

ENTER HAIM SABAN

Getting the trust of the Palestinians will be made even harder now it is known that one of the main funders of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation is Haim Saban, an American Israeli billionaire and one of the most prominent pro-Israeli lobbyists in America. ‘I’m a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel,’ Saban told the New York Times.13 He joins several other campaigners for Israel among the Faith Foundation’s donors, but there are no Muslims as far as anyone knows. This, says a TBFF insider, is perceived as a problem by the Faith Foundation, but there is not much it can do about it.

It’s again a question of too many hats. The TBFF could argue convincingly that accepting Saban’s money was fine. But for the QR to be so deeply indebted to Saban, even though wearing another hat, is a serious problem.

Any lingering chance that the Palestinians might grow to see Blair as even-handed vanished with this revelation, for pro-Israeli lobbyists in the USA are considered – generally with justice – to be anti-Palestinian. Palestinians cannot realistically be expected to say, ‘Ah, but this donation was in his role as sponsor of his Faith Foundation, and it does not mean that he is in hock to the Israeli lobby.’ They are bound to see Blair’s involvement with Saban as another indication that they cannot expect fairness from him.

What Blair does as sponsor of his Faith Foundation, what he does as a businessman through Tony Blair Associates and what he does as QR are sure to affect each other. He has limited his effectiveness as QR by taking Saban’s money for his Faith Foundation and by appointing Lianne Pollak to work for Tony Blair Associates. He has probably also limited the effectiveness of his Faith Foundation by his work as QR, since he seemed to have trouble getting any prominent Muslim to sit on its board, though other faiths have senior representatives there. If Blair had wanted to spend his post-PM years doing some good in the world, he would have been well advised to limit the number of activities he engaged in.

He might also have been better advised not to make a stream of speeches and statements over the years that mark him as one of Islam’s fiercest and most intractable critics.

CRITIC OF ISLAM

There is of course no reason why Blair, as a prominent citizen and former Prime Minister, should not say what he sincerely believes to be the case. But the QR is not just a prominent citizen and former Prime Minister: he holds an important and sensitive public office, and must consider to what extent his public statements curb his effectiveness. It does seem as though Blair’s effectiveness as QR is a matter of very little concern to him, since he issues a stream of statements that he knows the Muslim community will find hostile and deeply insulting.

One typical statement was made at the time of the murder of the British soldier Fusilier Lee Rigby in London in May 2013. As leading British Muslims were rushing to condemn the murderers, saying that their faith deplored such acts, Tony Blair weighed in with this: ‘There are two views of its significance. One is that it was an act by crazy people, motivated in this case by a perverted notion of Islam, but of no broader significance. Crazy people do crazy things, so don’t overreact. The other view is that the ideology that inspired the murder of Rigby is profoundly dangerous. I am of the latter view.’ He added, ‘There is a problem within Islam – from the adherents of an ideology which is a strain within Islam. We have to put it on the table and be honest about it … I am afraid this strain is not the province of a few extremists.’14

This is, of course, a view that a former prime minister is entitled to express. But it is not a view that a QR interested in making a difference in the Middle East should have expressed.

BLAIR’S SECURITY: A COST TO BRITAIN

Blair as QR is a considerable drain on the public purse – in Britain, in the UN, and in Palestine.

As a former prime minister, he receives a ministerial pension of £64,000 and a further £84,000 to run his office. He gets a car, a police driver and round-the-clock Special Branch protection. As well as this, his personal security guards claim £250,000 a year in expenses alone from the taxpayer.15

As QR, until 2011 he and his team occupied an entire floor of the luxury American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem at a cost of £1 million a year, for he has expanded his staff massively since Wolfensohn did the job with (on Alex Brummer’s estimate) six or seven staff. However, in 2011, as part of a cost-saving exercise, he moved to a purpose-built, seven-storey building on Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem’s millionaires’ row, where most of the diplomatic missions are. This costs the Quartet £750,000 a year in rent. He also requires finance from the UN Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People. In 2007 this programme spent more than $400,000 on rarely used armoured cars for Blair.

FINDING FUNDS FOR PALESTINIANS

Blair’s most obvious achievements as QR have been to facilitate large economic projects. Two such projects include a gas-extraction deal for Gaza and securing the Israeli release of electromagnetic frequencies in November 2009 for the commercial launch of a second Palestinian mobile-phone operator Wataniya (investments worth $150 million and $350 million respectively). According to an investigation for the Channel 4 programme Dispatches broadcast in September 2011, both these deals benefited the corporate clients of JP Morgan.

The gas-extraction deal saw Blair champion the development of a gas field off the coast of Gaza as a priority for the territory. The owner of the rights to operate the field is BG Group, a client of JP Morgan. A spokesman for Blair has claimed that the former PM had no idea that BG Group was connected to JP Morgan and has said any suggestion of a conflict of interest is defamatory.16

Tony Blair exerted a great deal of effort to get Israel to release the necessary mobile-phone frequencies to allow telecommunications company Wataniya International to operate a new 3G service in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Wataniya had paid the Palestinian government £181 million for the deal, but Israel controls the radio frequencies and refused to allow them to be used. The deal appeared to be dead, until Blair stepped in. For over a year he lobbied the Israeli government, speaking to Prime Minister Ehud Barak on the subject several times. It finally agreed to release the frequencies in November 2009.

More that half of Wataniya – 54 per cent – is owned by the Qatari telecoms giant Q-Tel, which bought the company in 2007 with a $2 billion loan arranged by the bank JP Morgan, according to the Dispatches programme about Blair. Q-Tel is a JP Morgan client, and JP Morgan pays Blair £2 million a year for providing ‘strategic’ advice. JP Morgan stood to make ‘substantial profits’ if the deal went through, the documentary said.

After a year of negotiations and two delayed launch dates, on 29 November 2009 Wataniya launched its service. JP Morgan stood to profit from the original setup fee, ongoing management and advice fees, and interest on the loan to Q-Tel that facilitated the deal.

For JP Morgan to expose itself to this degree of capital risk in such a volatile area when the frequency deal was not permanent was highly unusual. Its original exposure was thought to be around $200 million.

Before the deal could go ahead, Blair had to break a deadlock. The problem was that Israel had tied approval of Wataniya’s frequencies to the Palestinian Authority dropping efforts to pursue the Goldstone report on Israeli war crimes in Gaza during its December 2008 war. This was a report into human-rights violations during an earlier Gaza conflict, which left 1,400 Palestinians dead, from a team led by South African judge Richard Goldstone. The team was set up by the United Nations in April 2009, and Israel refused to cooperate with it. The report accused both the Israeli forces and the Palestinian militants of war crimes, and suggested Israel might also be guilty of crimes against humanity.

Blair succeeded in breaking the deadlock. The Palestinian Authority postponed for six months its draft UN resolution on the Goldstone Report, and Wataniya got its frequencies. Wataniya International’s chief executive officer Bassam Hanoun told Dispatches that Blair ‘played a significant role’ in breaking the monopoly in the telecommunications sector in Palestine.

The Wataniya phone network had been built but was not operational until Tony Blair’s intervention with Israeli ministers. Israel expected the Palestine communications group Paltel to share its 900-range frequency with the competitor Wataniya. Paltel was refusing to agree and Tony Blair had again to intervene to push for a ‘creative solution’.

‘I would say his prime contribution to Wataniya was negotiating the release of the frequencies. That was a milestone, obviously,’ says Bassam Hanoun. It made Wataniya’s shareholders very rich. ‘November 2009, we were nothing … And since then we have done fantastically well. We have captured 23 per cent of the market.’

Blair says that he raised the issue of Wataniya with the Israelis at the request of the Palestinian Authority. He has said that there was no conflict of interest at all, and that he did not know that JP Morgan, the bank he works for, helped finance the deal he rescued.

The extent of this lobbying was revealed in a previously undisclosed confidential letter Blair sent to Hillary Clinton on 17 September 2009, using the notepaper of the ‘Office of the Quartet Representative’. The letter was obtained using US Freedom of Information provisions and was declassified on 9 August 2012.

The letter from Blair, which is also copied to Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, Sergei Lavrov, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Carl Bildt, Swedish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, member of the European Commission and Javier Solana, High Representative of the European Union, Brussels, Belgium, was sent in advance of a meeting that the Quartet principals were holding in Trieste.

The letter starts by referring to a ‘transformative change agenda’ which embraces ‘economic development including a number of “flagship projects”.’ The ‘transformative change agenda’ is referred to many times in the letter, suggesting a Blairite, third-way mantra. The letter proceeds to give a round-up of some of the more mundane work that Blair’s office has been doing, in terms of improving the flow of trade through the checkpoints between Israel and the West Bank, and the state of relations between the Palestinian government at the time and the government of Israel. The letter up to this point is relatively low-key. At the end of the second page, we then read, ‘below I set out some of the key issues which, if delivered on soon, can give impetus to the change agenda.’

What are these projects that can radically change the economic, and implicitly political situation in the Middle East conflict? The first is bringing in a second mobile telephony operator for the Palestinian market. The second, the proposal to build a new town in the West Bank.

The letter cannot over-emphasise the significance of bringing in Wataniya as the second mobile operator. Clinton is told that this is a ‘major project, which if successful would entail the largest investment in the Palestinian economy to date.’ The price of failure, says the letter, would be grave indeed, no less than the collapse of the entire ‘transformative change agenda’. The letter reads, ‘Conversely, its failure would send entirely the wrong signal about the prospects for the transformative change agenda, and would deter sustained foreign investment in the Palestinian territories.’

Blair admitted that the Wataniya project was encountering some resistance at that time from the Israeli government, which appeared reluctant to give Wataniya a mobile bandwidth. But he said he had everything under control. ‘The Government of Israel has yet to allocate the necessary 4.8MHz bandwidth … I have recently received an assurance from Minister Barak that the necessary bandwidth will be allocated and I hope we can now resolve this on that basis.’

Why does Blair emphasise to Clinton the importance of Wataniya? He may feel strongly that the people of the Palestinian territories deserve a second mobile operator, and it is a matter of adding to their choice. By the same token, he may feel that his ‘transformative change agenda’ needs a trophy project to sell to the Quartet, to show his level of activity – which otherwise may be less than impressive – and Wataniya is it. Or could he be a little less confident than he claims about getting Israeli support for the bandwidth and he wants Clinton’s support for the bandwidth allocation, perhaps to put in a word with Jerusalem? The more Machiavellian interpretation sees Blair serving his paymasters’ interests, and indirectly his own, in the pushing of Wataniya, and the profound ‘transformative’ impact it will have on the Palestinian territories.

Aside from the mobile phone project, we hear about Blair’s support for the creation of a new town in the West Bank called Rawabi. The letter referred to above describes it also as a ‘major project…the first new Palestinian town in modern times.’ It continues, ‘Investors are ready to back an estimated $1 billion investment.’ Some roads are needed to enhance access to the site and this requires Israeli re-designating land for Palestinian use, previously reserved for Israel. The letter cites Rawabi as a case where ‘transferring designation of small, limited areas of land would unlock progress on the change agenda. My team have identified a number of specific examples …’ Rawabi is the largest private sector project in Palestinian history. It was initiated at the Palestine Investment Conference, which took place in Bethlehem in 2008. Rawabi’s development, near Ramallah, is linked to a $500 million affordable mortgage scheme. The Washington Post reported that Rawabi ‘is specifically designed for upwardly mobile families.’ The total cost of the development, mostly funded by the Qatari company LDR and Palestinian multimillionaire Bashar al-Masri, is estimated at $850 million. Al-Masri is the founder and managing director of Bayti Real Estate Investment Company. Bayti, jointly-owned by Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment Company and Massar International, was created to build Rawabi. Blair has spoken approvingly of Masri in a publication issued by Lloyds Bank. ‘It is his combination of resilience, commitment and refusal to bow to the forces of cynicism that makes his work so valuable.’

The Rawabi project involves a public-private partnership with the Palestinian Authority responsible for providing off-site infrastructure, while Bayti is tasked with the design and development of the city. The Rawabi economic growth strategy has the aim of creating 3,000 to 5,000 new jobs in ‘knowledge economy’ industries including information technology, pharmaceuticals and health care.

Blair’s letter to Hillary Clinton ends with an extraordinary incursion by the Quartet representative Tony Blair into Middle Eastern politics. Breaching his mandate to reserve his activities to the economic development of the West Bank and Gaza, Blair makes some overt references to the political situation.

On the issue of security sector control and strengthening the rule of law, there continues to be notable improvement in Palestinian security capacity. But the PA’s capacity to deliver a coherent Rule of Law effort remains more limited. Progress on reform in the security and justice sectors has been slow, as has legal reform within both sectors. Israeli Defence Forces continue to mount incursions into West Bank urban centres and maintain curfews on movement of PA security personnel. Nor can PA security and criminal justice personnel move freely between Areas A, B and C. The United States Security Coordinator and the EUPOL COPPS mission [the European Union Co-ordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support] continue to provide invaluable support to the security and rule of law sector. My primary task here is to put the arguments to the PA and the GoI on enabling actions each must take to allow the Rule of Law sector to thrive.

The situation in Gaza remains unsustainable in the medium term and highly combustible. Yet there appears to be no prospect of a substantive change in GoI policy, so long as Corporal Shalit remains in captivity. While there appeared to be a prospect of limited easing over the summer, including by allowing reconstruction materials through crossings, this has not happened.

The letter ends with some further references to the Blairite mantra of the ‘transformative change agenda’ and signs off with a reference to a meeting he is having with Hillary Clinton in New York.

GAZA’S GAS AND BG GROUP

Another client of JP Morgan is British Gas. While Blair was still Prime Minister, he promoted the purchase of a gas field off the coast of Gaza by British Gas. Then, as Middle East envoy (and as a JP Morgan board member), he lobbied the Israelis to allow development of the site, to the potential benefit of both British Gas and JP Morgan. How far Palestine stood to benefit is hotly disputed, and it is by no means clear that the proposed deal was fair to Palestine.

British Gas owns the rights to operate the field – thanks to the Blair deal – but Israel, which controls Gaza’s waters, refused to allow any further development. In Gaza – the only Palestinian territory with access to the sea – Israel has prevented the Palestinians from developing their fields, and the gas continues to lie, undisturbed, under Palestinian waters.

In November 1999, Yasser Arafat signed a twenty-five-year contract for gas exploration with British Gas. BG had discovered a large gas field between seventeen and twenty-one nautical miles from the Gaza coast, three-quarters of it in Palestinian waters. The Oslo accords gave the PA maritime jurisdiction over its waters up to twenty nautical miles from the coast.

In July 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak authorised BG to drill the first well, although companies in the Yam Thetis consortium, which was set up to operate in adjacent Israeli gas fields, petitioned the Israeli government to stop the Palestinians from developing the fields.

On 27 September 2000, on the eve of the second intifada, Arafat, accompanied by Palestinian businessmen and the media, lit the flame proving the presence of gas at the BG offshore exploration platform. Arafat declared that the gas was ‘a gift from God to us, to our people, to our children. This will provide a solid foundation for our economy, for establishing an independent state with holy Jerusalem as its capital.’

Barak’s authorisation to drill the second well, and the successful gas strikes at both, seemed to promise a potential windfall for the PA. According to the 1999 contract, BG holds 90 per cent of the licence shares and the PA 10 per cent until gas production begins, at which point the PA’s share increases to 40 per cent, of which 30 per cent would be held by Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC), a very big, privately owned construction firm (and a client of Tony Blair Associates). We shall meet CCC again.

To reduce the investment risk – since Palestine is only a small gas consumer – BG sought long-term advance gas purchase commitments from other clients, starting with Israel. In June 2000, BG proposed to supply gas from Egypt, Gaza and Israel to the state-owned Israel Electric Corporation (IEC). But the IEC refused to buy gas from Gaza, saying that it was more expensive than Egyptian gas. The real reason for the refusal, according to Israeli newspapers at the time, is more likely to have been political. Israel’s new (as of spring 2001) Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, had vetoed purchase of Palestinian gas.

In May 2002 the veto on Gaza gas was lifted, at least partly at the urging of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. But the next year there was another Israeli veto: Sharon refused to allow funds to flow to the PA lest they be used to support terrorism. Yet it had been agreed, and Israel had announced, that gas revenues to the Palestinians would be transferred to the special account that was already being used for international aid and tax-clearance revenues remitted by Israel to the PA.

Arafat died in November 2004. Mahmoud Abbas was elected PA President in January 2005, and Ariel Sharon was replaced by Ehud Olmert as Israeli Prime Minister a year later. A PA reform cycle that won Israeli and international acceptance was implemented, and, on 29 April 2007, the Israeli cabinet approved Olmert’s proposal to authorise renewed discussions with BG. Abbas and the Israeli government secretly agreed that the PA share of the revenues would be transferred through an international account that would be inaccessible to the official PA government, dominated by Hamas since the PA legislative elections in January 2006. So the government the Palestinians had elected would not be able to touch a penny of it.

On 14 June 2007, Hamas seized power in the Gaza Strip. The new government in Gaza declared that it would change the terms of the contract, and in particular ensure that the Palestinian share, 10 per cent, was increased.

Negotiations between Israel and the PA in Ramallah continued, bypassing Hamas. But, in the end, BG and the Israeli government announced that they would delay any signing until the end of the year. In December 2007, BG officially announced the end of the negotiations with Israel on grounds of insurmountable disagreements, and just over a year later BG closed its office in Israel, while keeping its office in Ramallah and retaining its concession for the gas fields.

However, Egypt’s cuts in the volume of gas being sold to Israel following the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 showed the Israeli government that it needed to have more sources of energy, to lessen its dependence on Egyptian gas. So Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu revived talks with Mahmoud Abbas about a possible gas purchase contract.

On 4 February 2011, Netanyahu announced, with Tony Blair (in his new incarnation as QR) at his side, that the time had finally come to develop Palestinian gas. He said, ‘There is a Palestinian Authority gas field adjacent to an Israeli gas field. We need to develop both simultaneously.’ A new round of negotiations between the PA and Israel began in September 2012, with Hamas reiterating its rejection of any agreement on Gaza gas reached without its participation. But the negotiations went nowhere. The military occupation enables Israel to prevent Palestinians access to their offshore resources, including their gas fields. This makes civil or commercial navigation to or from the Gaza Strip impossible.

Within months of the disengagement, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections, which led ultimately to the political separation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under rival Palestinian governments. Israel therefore felt the need to tighten its stranglehold on Gaza’s maritime access. From the twenty nautical miles established by Oslo, the area was reduced to twelve nautical miles, to six nautical miles following the Hamas electoral victory in 2006, and finally to three nautical miles in the aftermath of Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008–9.

The Israeli navy controls all maritime routes, and over the years has killed a number of Palestinian fishermen who strayed beyond the three-mile limit and within range of its gunboats. Such rules clearly make any Palestinian access to the wells impossible.17

In 2013 and 2014 there was talk of reviving the project yet again, according to the Financial Times (FT). It would have been the largest yet of several big economic projects in Secretary of State John Kerry’s $4 billion plan to lift the Palestinian economy out of its dependency on foreign aid and Israeli energy, which was to be overseen by Tony Blair.

Blair was furious that this activity was questioned in the Channel 4 Dispatches programme. It pointed out that JP Morgan advised the British Gas Group – which, as we have seen, had an interest in the Gaza Marine gas development – which he was promoting as QR. Blair told the FT’s Lionel Barber that JP Morgan advised BG elsewhere in the world, that he had never discussed the matter and that Gaza Marine was potentially a vital source of energy to the occupied territories: ‘That ridiculous Channel 4 programme that should never have been made and was a complete waste of public money …’ he said.18

But, whatever he says, many Palestinians think the deal is to the benefit of everyone except them. It has been described as an ‘act of theft’ by Ziad Thatha, the Hamas economy minister, who claims it should be up to the Palestinians alone to decide what to do with the gas, and who should benefit.19

One significant beneficiary will be Kurdish tycoon Mohammed Rashid, who has already made millions from the deal. Blair dealt with Rashid while still PM, when promoting the British Gas purchase of the gas field. Rashid has excellent connections across the Middle East, and was also financial adviser to Arafat.

Arafat appointed Rashid head of the Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF), a £1 billion company set up to make use of Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) funds. Rashid brokered the Gaza gas consortium – composed of British Gas, which holds 60 per cent of the shares, the PIF (10 per cent) and the construction multinational CCC, which has subsidiary firms in the Middle East, Britain and America.

Security and political issues blocked progress on the development of the field, but, by the time Blair left office, the gas deal had given him access to Mohammed Rashid, and, through him, a route to Libya – and his relationship with the Libyan leader the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

As so often with Blair, one activity impinges upon another, and it is not always easy to see where each fits into the overall pattern; Blair’s dealings with Libya will be unravelled in a separate chapter.

The Mohammed Rashid story comes to a sticky end. The man who was Mr Ten Per Cent in the Gaza gas deal between Israel, British Gas, the Palestinian Authority and the CCC, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison by a court in Ramallah in 2012 for embezzling millions of euros. He and two other businessmen were ordered to return €33.5 million in stolen funds.20

Blair also regularly visits Abu Dhabi for the Quartet. At the same time, his consultancy company, Tony Blair Associates, was and is providing ‘global strategic advice’ to the Crown Prince’s sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, which invests Abu Dhabi’s oil profits.21

THE KUWAIT DIMENSION

Perhaps the most serious potential for a conflict of interest comes in Blair’s dealings with Kuwait. These also properly belong to a later chapter about his commercial activities, and will be covered there; but, as so often happens with Blair, it is not entirely clear when one role ends and another begins, and the start of the Kuwait contract needs to be reported here.

On 26 January 2009, when Blair was in Kuwait for the Quartet, he met with the Emir. The former British PM was accompanied by his new senior adviser Jonathan Powell, which was odd because Blair was there officially on behalf of the Quartet, and Powell – who had been Blair’s chief of staff during the Iraq war – did not work for the Quartet: he worked for Blair’s personal consultancy.

There is a very revealing photograph showing Blair surrounded by the Emir and the Emir’s advisers, and, on a sofa a little way away, sits Powell. Even though the Emir has a large number of advisers with him, Blair has no one from the QR’s office. He is entirely alone. Except for Powell.

What came out of the meeting from the point of view of the Quartet we do not know. We do know that Tony Blair Associates picked up a stunningly lucrative consultancy contract. Kuwaiti sources familiar with the deal told Dispatches that Blair’s firm stood to earn more than 12 million dinars, the equivalent of £27 million.22

ACCOUNTABILITY ISSUES

An American businessman who was once close to Blair says, ‘There are two issues. One is getting his financial interests, which are paramount, mixed up in things like the Quartet, which should be a very high priority and have nothing to do with his business.’

Robert Palmer of the campaigning group Global Witness says, ‘There seems to be growing evidence that Tony Blair’s business activities across the Middle East may be in conflict with his peace-envoy role. It is time he came clean about all of his interests in the region and who they are benefiting.’

It is possible for Blair to have all of these potentially conflicting interests because no code of conduct applies to him. Anis Nacrour, a senior French diplomat who worked directly for Blair at the Quartet’s Jerusalem office for three years as a political and security adviser, revealed this to Dispatches, saying, ‘I think he makes his own rules depending on the experience he has as a former prime minister for over ten years.’

If Blair was still an MP or sat in the House of Lords, or worked for the World Bank or the IMF or even directly for the United Nations, he would be bound by a strict and publicly available code of conduct that demanded he set out in full all his commercial interests. But he is none of these, and, as a result, his commercial interests and those in his role as QR envoy appear to overlap significantly. Ask a question about Blair as QR and the answer – if you get one – is quite likely not to come from the Quartet’s Jerusalem office, but from a completely different Blair operation.

British journalists reporting from the Middle East have remarked with surprise on the fact that the Quartet’s press officer, Ruti Winterstein, appears to have been sidelined. They are not expected to go to her, but to Blair’s personal head of communications in London – Matthew Doyle until 2011, then Rachel Grant until 2014. Both Doyle and Grant often travelled with him to the Middle East.

Dr Nicholas Allen, a specialist in parliamentary ethics and standards in public life at the University of London, has told us that Blair’s role as Middle East envoy is not transparent. ‘Clearly, if he was holding a ministerial office in Britain, that kind of conflict, even the appearance of that kind of conflict, the appearance of that influence, wouldn’t be tolerated.’ When asked how many of the seven Nolan principles – the code of ethics for public servants enforced by Tony Blair when he was PM – appear to be undermined by Blair’s conduct and behaviour, Allen said, ‘I think there’s a good case for saying that six of the principles appear to be undermined by Blair’s conduct and Blair’s behaviour.’

Allen told us that no code of conduct applies to Blair’s role as QR because of ‘the nature of the Quartet itself. A sort of weird international governmental anomaly.’ Additionally, he said, ‘If he was really serious about bringing peace to the Middle East, you might say that it would be expedient not to have those kinds of connections. It’s going to be harder to get the trust of certain groups if they know that your own Faith Foundation is massively funded by a pro-Israeli lobby.’

He continued, ‘The question is, is this really just window dressing? Is this him just doing a jobs-for-the-boys network that’s really a cushy feather in his cap, or is it something really substantial? My horrible sneaking suspicion is that it’s possibly slightly more of a feather in the cap than anything else, but I say that on the basis of no detailed knowledge of what he’s been up to there.

‘The question is – do the people he’s dealing with mind? And that’s one of the key elements in terms of his effectiveness. Does he have regular meetings with the various sides in the Middle East? If he does and they mind, then he should stop. If he does and they don’t mind, then it’s probably not a problem. If he doesn’t meet them at all, it begs the question: what the hell is he actually doing?

‘In one sense, yes, he’s obviously in breach of them [the Nolan principles], if you take them as general ethical values, because he is clearly mixing interests, I think. That is unambiguous – there is a potential conflict of interest in some of his work.’

John Kerry’s $4 billion investment in the Palestinian economy could be the very last attempt to breathe life into the Blair mission. But where was the money? Where were the details? Max Blumenthal, journalist and specialist in Israeli politics, wrote, ‘Nearly all that is known is that Tony Blair, the Special Envoy of the Quartet, had been placed in charge of the initiative. My email and telephone queries to Ruti Winterstein, Blair’s political and media adviser at the Quartet offices in Jerusalem, have not been answered.’ We know how he feels.

Blumenthal goes on: ‘The few Jerusalem and Ramallah based reporters who requested particulars about the initiative were unable to get any answers either, with one correspondent telling me they were being stonewalled by Blair and Kerry’s people.’23

Which is not surprising, because the truth was that there was no money. The key to the whole deal, Kerry admitted, was Tony Blair; as he said this to a press conference, hardened Middle East correspondents discreetly closed their notebooks, clear at last that this was a story that was unlikely to have legs. It was all going to turn out to be smoke and mirrors.

David Horovitz, editor-in-chief of the Times of Israel, wrote that, at last,

Kerry – a veteran of four Middle East shuttle missions in his less than four months in office – unveiled the fruits of his diplomatic labours. No, he hadn’t cut a peace deal … In fact, no, he hadn’t even managed to arrange a meet between Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

So what magic had he wrought? What did he have to present to us all? An economic plan. Bigger and better and bolder and brighter than anything hitherto attempted for the Palestinians.

What? Foreheads furrowed. Fingers went to clean out eardrums. Were we hearing this right? The secretary was proposing a financially driven path to Israeli-Palestinian peace and happiness? …

How? What? Who? Where? The answer to all such questions, it seemed, was: Tony Blair. The indefatigable former British prime minister, shaking hands with those sheikhs at the side of the hall, he was going to fix it. Somehow, Tony the economic tiger was going to rustle up the necessary $4 billion in investment and – presto! – all our problems would be solved …24

Once again, it all ignores a harsh truth – the truth that Lord Hollick alerted us to – which Horowitz sums up like this: ‘Potential private investment is out there. And it can certainly flow into the Palestinian territories. But it will only flow – as opposed to trickle – after the conditions are created for long-term stability, not as the means to create those conditions.’25

The French daily Le Monde’s Jerusalem correspondent, Laurent Zecchini, came to the same conclusion:

This ‘Marshall Plan’ remains today in its box, because its implementation – which supposes a mobilisation of the private sector – requires a significant advance in Israel-Palestine peace talks … The distance separating the objectives proposed by Mr Blair from the reality of the Palestinian economy was apparent on Wednesday at the conference of Palestinian donors, held in New York.26

But, in June 2014, Tony Blair was still chasing the illusion that private-sector investment will flow in sufficient quantities to change the politics. His office was now referring to the idea as the Initiative for the Palestinian Economy, or IPE, and it is the main focus of his work as QR. This is supposed to ‘effect transformative change and substantial growth in the Palestinian economy and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs’ according to the Quartet’s website. It’s entirely separate from ‘the political negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by US Secretary of State John Kerry’.

The office said, ‘The ambitious plan was drafted by a team of policy advisers, external economic analysts and international domain experts under the leadership of Quartet Representative Tony Blair in support of renewed Palestinian–Israeli negotiations.’ It ‘focuses on catalysing private-sector-led growth in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem’. And it relies on ‘the inflow of new financing into the Palestinian economy, in particular from the private sector’.27

There’s a lot more like this, but no mention of where this ‘inflow of new financing’ is going to come from.

The fact is that it is not peace, but money – both real money and pretend money – that is at the heart of what Tony Blair does in the Middle East. And that makes it all a chimera, because private-sector money is not going to flow into Palestine without real political progress towards peace. This progress can only be hustled along by someone who is trusted by both sides – and Blair has thrown away the trust of the Palestinians.

He appears to be trying to juggle various roles. ‘In the morning he is the big Middle East negotiator,’ writes the American journalist Jacob Heilbrunn in the American publication The National Interest. ‘In the afternoons, he’s the businessman trying to lubricate connections between big shots. In essence, Blair has turned himself into a mini-corporation. He’s cashing in on his former job.’28

This is a tragedy. Tony Blair left Downing Street in 2007 with huge international prestige, and walked straight into the QR’s job. If he had devoted himself to it, heart and soul, history might have remembered the man credited with peacemaking in Northern Ireland as one of the few people in the world to have made a real difference in the Middle East, which would be enough for most of us to say: well done, Tony. His international reputation would have soared. If he wanted the European presidency – a job that, in the event, he did want, and it was denied to him – it would probably have been his for the asking.

Why did he not do so? He does not need money. He already owned several properties (though not as many as he owns now). He can command six-figure sums for speeches pretty well whenever he chooses, and so can his wife. He can be sure that his family will never want for anything. A man, however rich, can wear only one suit at a time, and sleep in only one house at a time. To be sure, the envoy’s job is unpaid, but if he had felt, for any reason at all, that it ought to be paid, the Quartet would surely have agreed a very good salary, and no one would have begrudged him that, for he would have been demonstrably earning it.

Instead, he has irrevocably contaminated the QR job with his other activities. He often takes his personal staff, not QR staff, to meetings, and his personal staff, not QR staff, often speak for him in his role as QR. His personal business and politics – whether it is being a hardline opponent of Islam, taking money from Israeli lobbyists, appointing Israeli spies to his personal staff, or taking well-paid work from Middle Eastern potentates – have been allowed to overshadow his work in the Middle East.

Maybe he really is putting in the effort, spending far more time in the region than observers are aware of. If that’s the case, why not demonstrate it, rather than needlessly allow the perception to grow that he does not? If he actually spends far more time there than journalists and the top people in the Palestinian Authority realise, it would be sensible to make himself more visible, to them and to everyone else, instead of simply saying that all the estimates we have heard are wrong. Otherwise, the Palestinians are bound to believe either that he is too busy elsewhere or that he arrives in secret and talks only to Israelis. Both these perceptions are poison to his mission.

Today as QR he is a passenger at best, a liability at worst. He is still in the job partly because the Israelis are quite sure he will never bring them unwelcome news, but, much more importantly, because he symbolises a comforting untruth to which American and Israeli negotiators are clinging: that private-sector investment in Palestine can be used as a path to peace. The truth is the one that businesspeople such as Hollick and well-informed journalists such as Zecchini and Blumenthal have been telling anyone who would listen: that progress in peace talks come first, and only when they have delivered some sort of stability will private investment follow.

We know from private sources that some old political friends have spoken privately to Blair about his role in the Middle East, and urged him to do it full time. They have said: no one can blame you if you don’t bring peace to the Middle East, but you should avoid the criticism that you haven’t tried hard enough; you should do it full time or not at all.

But we’re way beyond that stage now. Today, it’s impossible not to have some sympathy for the Palestinian view, shared now by several key people in Europe, that Blair – to paraphrase what the Tory politician Leo Amery said of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1940, quoting Oliver Cromwell – has been there too long for any good he can do, and that he should go.