Last week, 170 humanitarian and human-rights groups, including practically all the big names like Oxfam and Amnesty international, signed a Save The Children statement with the stark title ‘GAZA: Starvation or Gunfire—This is Not a Humanitarian Response’. The document was a damning verdict on the infamous ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (GHF), a fake relief organisation that the Israeli armed forces are using to facilitate further mass killings of innocent people in their ongoing genocide.
The GHF was created at the start of this year because the Israelis had repeatedly shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) from operating in the region. Its organisation has not been smooth: its first director resigned after barely two months, stating that it was violating rules about political neutrality and that Israel was not allowing nearly enough food into Gaza. After a few weeks of operating without a named director, Johnnie Moore Jr, a notorious right-wing Christian fundamentalist businessman, was appointed. Moore is a religious-affairs advisor to Donald Trump and has openly supported Trump’s call for Gaza to be directly controlled by the USA and developed into ‘the Riviera of the Middle East’. This was the announcement that Trump promoted with a grotesque AI-generated video depicting Gaza as a fantasy playground for the rich.
The links between GHF and the ‘Trump Riviera’ plan do not end with its current director, though. GHF was set up by a major American business-management company called Boston Consulting Group, and it was effectively run by them until June. Boston Consulting Group has shifted its interests in Gaza to working with Israeli business figures to try to realise the American president’s sick Gaza fantasies. Referring to the scheme as creating a ‘secure, modern, prosperous society’, they recently launched a set of proposals for making it a reality. This document, laughably called The Great Trust, might just have passed most of the world by, if it weren’t for the fact that another, much more familiar, organisation appears to have been involved in its production: the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, linking one of Britain’s most hated recent prime ministers to the whole scandal.
The future is the same set of terrible ideas forever, plus a genocide
The details contained within The Great Trust have met widespread, deserved ridicule, They don’t even have the benefit of originality: the big idea, such as it is, is to turn Gaza into a ‘trade and investment hub’, modelled explicitly on gulf-state cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. There are some ideas here that are inevitable, such as tax-free special economic zones, which capitalists are currently trying to establish everywhere. Other ideas are ridiculous, such as building artificial islands like Dubai has (a project that has spectacularly failed). Still others are nonsensical, like an entirely pointless blockchain technology-based trading scheme.
The plan is filled with little details intended to flatter the egos of the rich and powerful. There are proposed cities named for Saudi princes, and whole zones dedicated for the exclusive use of Big Tech companies like Tesla and Amazon. It comes across as having been designed via a box-ticking exercise of elite expectations, and for all its nightmarish supposed grandeur, it’s actually striking in its lack of originality.
For the past seven years, the Saudi state, a key funder of both Boston Consulting and the Tony Blair Institute, has been making a lot of noise about its absurd project called ‘Neom’, albeit without making much real progress on it. Neom, as much as it’s possible to describe at all, is a supposed set of futuristic cities, built in a variety of unfeasible shapes (one is supposedly going to be taller than it is wide, another is meant to have a replica of the Moon!) and filled with nonsensical inventions like robot dinosaurs (in a Jurassic-Park like entertainment zone) and flying cars. Its total cost is thought to be in the region of $8.8 trillion, though this is almost impossible for anyone to precisely verify. The small amount of construction work that has been done has resulted in thousands of desert-dwelling people being violently driven out their homeland. The whole thing is clearly intended to be a set of scams to enable Saudi’s brutal ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, to funnel sovereign investment money to Western corporations to keep them and their governments on his side.
The ‘Trump Riveira’ plan for Gaza is not quite as out-of-this-world ridiculous as Neom (I have only scratched the surface of how crazy it is, I recommend searching the internet for the full unbelievable details), but it is quite similar, and not just because both of them are built on horrific ethnic cleansing. In both cases, the objective is for the projects to act as investment cash funnels, to enable one section of the global elites to help another section (or just themselves) get even richer. All this under the guise of creating wonderous great works, as imagined by a blithering idiot.
Global change: aimed at keeping everything the same since the 2000s
As mentioned, the involvement of the Tony Blair Institute is what really raised eyebrows about The Great Trust. Blair and his people appear to have realised it was a bad look straight away: they initially denied having anything to do with it. Then, when Financial Times journalists challenged them with evidence, they changed their story to claim that two members of the Institute participated only at an ‘early stage’ and did not get involved with producing the actual presentation.
Blair established his Institute for Global Change in 2016, nine years after stepping down as British prime minister. It is sometimes called a think tank, but it is more accurate to call it a management consultancy company. He claims to have set up the organisation as a response to Brexit. This is probably true, but not in the way that he tells it. He claims that he established it as a mission-driven organisation to fight extremism and populism, and to promote ‘development’. The less glorious, more likely, motive is that he had been vying for years to get the job of President of the EU Commission but was then unable to get it after Britain voted to leave the Union.
In the years before establishing the Institute, Blair had already been amassing a vast personal fortune by offering his services as a consultant to governments all over the world, most of them dictatorships. The Institute has simply enabled him to extend this empire of influence even further, and it is often said that he is more powerful today than he was when in 10 Downing Street. Speaking of Number 10, he retains a cult following on the right wing of the British Labour Party, and it is known that Keir Starmer’s staff have been relying on the Institute for policymaking of all kinds.
Blair’s self-justification that he stands against ‘populism and extremism’ is yet another sick joke in this story, among so many others. His people have been helping the poster-boy of modern authoritarian populism, Donald Trump, implement stupid policy ideas for the amusement of.
Trump’s proto-fascist base at home. And can there be any government more extreme than those of Saudi Arabia and Israel, with whom the Institute does a great deal of work and earns millions of dollars? The Gaza outrage is only a very recent example.
One of the bleakest details in the Gaza Riviera presentation was that it explicitly called for half a million Gazans to be paid to ‘relocate’ from the region, explicitly tying the whole plan to the illegal removal of the people. This is one of the details the Institute has most desperately tried to distance itself from, since their involvement was revealed. It is genuinely quite interesting that Blair has been a touch embarrassed by the revelation of this connection, given that he is a man known for shamelessness. Remember it’s only a few months ago that he was last in the news recommending that government decarbonisation schemes be abandoned and calling on politicians not to ‘fear’ being called climate-change denialists. This was very obvious shilling for his friends in the fossil-fuel industry and prompted a rare disavowal of Blair from the Labour Party establishment, but he wasn’t concerned about people being disgusted.
The problem that his clique has with getting involved in Gaza is not that Trump, or the Israelis, or the Saudis, might tarnish his image, in fact, I think it’s sort of the other way around. Blair is hated because he told explicit lies about nuclear weapons to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. To see this absolute ghoul return to the Middle East highlights parallels with twenty-two years ago that aren’t terribly welcome: we are getting more dubious claims about nukes to justify war, and more big promises that war will be followed by a new age of peace and prosperity.
In 2003, I think it is reasonable to believe that Blair probably knew he was lying about Iraqi nuclear weapons but fully believed his claims that post-invasion Iraq would be radically improved by the imposition of capitalist globalisation. In 2025, I’m not sure any of these people still have that strength of conviction in their project: they know that their free-market, big-corporate vision for society is in decline. This is the underlying reason why, when they try to show us the future they’re trying to realise, they just end up presenting stupid nonsense: they are no more or less likely to offer the people of the Middle East safe stable lives than they are a floating city shaped like the Moon, so why not suggest the latter?
The lesson to take from all this is that elites in our society no longer see themselves as all-powerful. We shouldn’t either.