U.S. President Donald Trump put forward a peace plan this week that he says promises to end the current fighting in Gaza if Hamas accepts it. That has raised the question of what would come next for Gaza, politically and economically. What’s already clear is that the scale of devastation in the Palestinian territory has been unfathomably vast.
What is the scale of reconstruction necessary in Gaza? What has Tony Blair, who could oversee a postwar Gaza, been doing since leaving office as British prime minister? What might be motivating Hamas’s decision-making at this point?
Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: Trump says the goal of his plan would be for Gaza to be redeveloped. What is the scale of the reconstruction that would be necessary here?
Adam Tooze: This question of reconstruction and redevelopment is so difficult to really wrap one’s head around because the scale of the destruction is so immense. They think it’s like 50 million tons of rubble is what Gaza has been reduced to by the Israeli onslaught since Oct. 7. An astonishing mountain. It’s like 12 pyramids’ worth of material. Apparently, 2 million tons of it is contaminated with asbestos. There are huge amounts of unexploded ammunition and ordnance, and, of course, there are, we must expect, thousands, if not tens of thousands, of bodies mangled and decomposing among this detritus. So the rebuilding effort, if and when it starts, will be spectacularly demanding and difficult.
But then I think also in broader terms, one has to ask oneself, what does one really mean by reconstruction in this context? Because Gaza, before October 2023, was a siege economy. I mean, from 2006, from the Hamas victory onward, especially from 2007 onward, it was really subject to a very, very severe Israeli blockade. So reconstruction means what, exactly? And if you look at the plans that are being proposed, in many cases, it doesn’t really amount to reconstruction—that is, a kind of restoration of what was there before—but the phrase that’s used in some of them is somewhat different; it’s reconstitution. Which is remaking, really, Gaza. And that’s clearly the intent behind this Trump-Netanyahu plan; it’s not really to reconstruct or restore but to remake Gaza. Which is a very different type of proposition. They backed away from the overt program of ethnic cleansing and mass removal of Gazans. But I think the project remains quite clearly not one of restoring Gaza to the status quo ante but of making it, remaking it in quite a different image.
CA: Trump’s plan envisions a transitional body—the Gaza International Transitional Authority—that would oversee the territory for some unspecified period of time. It apparently would be overseen day-to-day by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Is the idea of having a ruling body that is staffed by foreigners a colonial, and exploitative, idea in essence? Or are there other, more analogous precedents?
AT: I don’t know whether exploitation is really the appropriate category here. It seems more as if humiliation is the order of the day. I mean, exploitation would imply there was some sort of business contract or some sort of unequal exchange that was going to go on. Whereas I think this structure above all is a way of avoiding the political problem, right? They’re terrified of the possibility of allowing Gaza sufficient autonomy for Palestinian politics to reemerge, which in the wake of Israel’s onslaught is likely to contain hugely radical elements bent on retaliating and seeking vengeance unsurprisingly for what’s happened.
What it really reminds me of is less full-on colonial structures than kind of League of Nations mandates from the aftermath of World War I, which of course Palestine was for decades until the aftermath of World War II. And they’re these weird sort of halfway houses between, you know, they can’t really retreat backward to a full-scale imperial annexation, and crucially, of course, what the negotiators are trying to do is hold at arm’s length the announced ambitions of certain radical factions within Israeli politics to simply absorb Gaza, and on the other hand, the very mainstream Israeli position that the idea of independent Palestinian statehood is anathema and must be avoided at all costs as well.
And since Oct. 7, there’s been a variety of really quite strange suggestions. There was that Israeli vision of tribal groups, which they apparently sought inspiration from the United Arab Emirates as a model. And now we have this. The immediate problem is the violence being done to Gaza by Israel. But the peace plan is preoccupied with Gaza no longer posing a threat to Israel. Because Israel has managed to entrench so hard this idea that fundamentally all of their action is justified by the threat that Gaza poses to them, however disproportionate, however violent, however clearly ultimately genocidal their intent is.
And so that’s what this framework is organized around. And yeah, I mean, the selection of the people involved. Blair at least was an elected politician with government experience, but Marc Rowan, what business does a figure like that have? I mean, he’s a prominent American supporter of Israel, and he’s an immensely rich man. But other than that, what is his role here? It’s extraordinary, absolutely amazing—such a sign of the bankruptcy of governmental forms and political language at this point.
CA: What has Blair otherwise been doing since leaving office at British prime minister? He’s had a consulting firm, but what does that even mean exactly?
AT: You know the standard story about Blair and the aftermath of his long premiership was that his first priority was simply to get rich, right? Because it had been tough being a British prime minister presiding over the neopatriotic enthusiasm of the late ’90s and the 2000s constantly hobnobbing with immensely rich people and himself living off a modest salary. And thankfully there were no major corruption scandals during his time in office, so he set off diligently to make plenty of money afterward. He was the Middle East envoy for the Quartet for a while, but on the private sector side, he was an advisor to J.P. Morgan and Zurich Financial Services, both jobs he started in January 2008, so just before the financial crisis.
He then set up his consultancy firm, Tony Blair Associates, in 2008, also in the middle of the financial crisis. And his client list notoriously consisted of a whole list of players not entirely irrelevant to the situation. So, Kazakhstan from 2011 to 2015; the Kuwaiti government; the sovereign investor of Abu Dhabi; Mongolia; the Serbian government, where he set up a delivery unit that was paid for by the Emiratis; and then Azerbaijan. And that was wound up, however, in 2016, by which point Blair and [his wife] Cherie had acquired the level of affluence that felt comfortable for them, I think. And then they founded the Tony Blair Institute, and that has become his main vehicle recently.
And as the New Statesman has recently reported, the key thing there is that Blair has teamed up with Larry Ellison of Oracle, who briefly was the richest man in the world recently, and has received what, by British standards, is an absolutely gigantic endowment of like over 230 million pounds, which for a British think tank is huge. I think they have up to 900 staff now. And Ellison is also a prominent supporter of Israel. And the Tony Blair Institute is deep, deep in the Middle East, which is also of course a major center for artificial intelligence, and very, very much on the AI bandwagon. And those were the new kinds of trajectories for Blair when the news broke about the role of his institute in the Gaza planning, which appears to have really been quite deep and thorough and ongoing for a period of time and to have had the backing of this coalition of players.
CA: Hamas is a group that has clearly talked and thought about martyrdom. Is there an economics of martyrdom that we should be considering in this context? Might Hamas even be willing to accept the destruction of Gaza at this point?
AT: There’s a horrible kind of economy by which the more the numbers of martyrs pile up, the more the dead weigh on the living, and the more the logic of not allowing their sacrifice to be in vain becomes compelling. This is also a logic that you see in other wars that were hard to end. And with Ukraine and Russia, we might see this as well. At some point, it will be virtually impossible for either side to accept a compromised peace because it would imply that the many hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed for nothing. And so there are, in conflict situations like this, what you might think of as kind of emotional economies that kick in. And after all, in Hamas’s case in particular, the movement really gained its prominence precisely through its intransigence. This was the thing that distinguished it from other Palestinian movements.
But on the other hand, they’ve also always been a three-stranded movement. There’s the military wing, the Qassam Brigades. There is the political movement, which still has considerable support. And then the third thing is there’s an apparatus of Hamas power, coercive power, that of course has been torn up, rocked, and largely attrited at this point but nevertheless is another thing that Hamas does. It’s an organization that knows how to survive. And the struggle that presumably is going on right now will be between those three groups within the movement. The military command is now devolved to somebody called Ezz al-Din al-Haddad apparently, who is still alive and still in Gaza City by all accounts and is in command of what is left of the military wing in the tunnels of Gaza. Then there’s the leadership in Qatar, which is doing the negotiation. And then there is the apparatus of the party, which is maintaining diplomatic links with Iran and shuffles money in and out to support prisoners and so on. And so all of those different constituencies within Hamas will have different perspectives.
The basic problem is that the four essentials on which all three wings agreed were no disarmament, large-scale prisoner release for hostages, Israeli withdrawal not just redeployment, and reconstruction with access guarantees. And of those, large-scale prisoner release for hostages is in the package, you could say. At a pinch, maybe you could describe the process as one of Israeli withdrawal, though whether it meets the standard that Hamas would expect, it’s hard to say. But one and four are clearly not met. It’s a surrender what’s being proposed here. There’s safe passage for Hamas militants who give up their weapons and sign on the dotted line saying they will abandon the fight, but that’s essentially a surrender. And reconstruction, what is being proposed is, as we were saying at the top, not really the restoration of old Gaza but this bizarre halfway house of kind of international mandate.
And if Hamas does agree, it will have to reconcile itself to the fact that it has crossed at least two of its four red lines. So this is going to be a very difficult decision. But I think one thing we can say for sure is that the plan, even if Hamas accepts it, the ultimate logic of this plan is to depoliticize the conflict, depoliticize Gaza, and reduce Gaza to 2 million grateful Palestinians, happy to live under the benign administration of technocrats supervised by the great and the good of the international elite. And that’s, in the end, why Hamas cannot be part of this solution and, in the end, also why I think this model is illusory. Because you can’t imagine that after this campaign, that could possibly be a viable or realistic outcome, to be honest. Because what they want to do is end politics in Palestine. What they don’t want at any price is actually negotiate with live and kicking Palestinian politicians.
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