No room for toxic Blair on Gaza peace council
There are moments when history rises from its long slumber and delivers a verdict with the clarity of a hammer striking iron. Tony Blair’s exclusion from the proposed Gaza peace council was one of those moments—unambiguous, unforgiving, almost biblical in its finality. A man who once strode the world stage with the swagger of a liberator found himself barred from the very region he helped set ablaze. For the Arab and Muslim states, his name is not synonymous with diplomacy or statesmanship. It is a synonym for catastrophe.
No peace for a warmonger
Blair’s bid for a seat at Gaza’s reconstruction table collapsed under the weight of a legacy he can neither outrun nor whitewash. His cheerleading for the 2003 invasion of Iraq—a war justified with doctored dossiers and apocalyptic fantasies—left a wound that never healed. The armies marched, the bombs fell, and a nation was torn limb from limb under the banner of “liberation.” To the Arab world, the image of Blair standing shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush remains an indelible emblem of deceit. It is not forgotten. It is not forgiven.
Arab and Muslim states delivered their objections with unusual unanimity. Their message was blunt: the architect of Iraq’s ruin cannot masquerade as Gaza’s healer. Their opposition carried so much force that Donald Trump, who initially praised Blair as a “very good man,” quietly backed off. Even Trump recognised that he could not install a mediator whose face triggers a collective memory of invasion, occupation, and the shattering of an entire region. Blair was deemed “unacceptable to everybody,” a diplomatic euphemism for exile.
Supporters of Blair brandished his role in Northern Ireland as a credential for peace. But this was a brittle shield, quickly shattered by the record of his years as the Quartet’s envoy—eight long, barren years in which he accomplished nothing of substance. Critics recalled a diplomat more comfortable giving speeches than breaking deadlocks, a man who padded his portfolio with corporate consulting and Gulf advisory roles while Gaza starved under blockade. Even in the corridors of Brussels and New York, Blair’s tenure was whispered about with the sort of polite embarrassment reserved for failures no one wants to acknowledge publicly. If this was the résumé he hoped would usher him into Gaza’s peace council, it proved to be a hollow vessel.
Kissinger, the Blair parallel
His exclusion was not merely a political calculation—it was a moral reckoning. Blair carries the same curse that dogged Henry Kissinger, the statesman celebrated in Washington and reviled nearly everywhere else. Kissinger collected the Nobel Peace Prize with one hand while the other was still stained with the ash of bombed Cambodian villages. He haunted the halls of power, but he never shed the shadow of war crimes. In the Global South, his presence triggered rage, not reverence.
Blair’s legacy follows the same tragic arc. Like Kissinger, he tried to reinvent himself as a sage of international order, as though the ruins of Baghdad and Fallujah would politely fade into the background. At the same time, he pontificated about democracy and stability. He misread the room. The Arab world did not forget who lit the fires.
Winston Churchill
Nor is Blair’s condemnation without precedent. Winston Churchill, lionized in Europe for defying Hitler, carries another reputation across the colonised world: the man who starved Bengal, who crushed uprisings with brutal force, who dismissed entire peoples as barbarians unworthy of self-rule. Churchill sought to step into the post-war era as a global elder statesman, but in India, Kenya, and the Middle East, he was remembered not as a liberator but as an imperial overseer who weighed the value of lives in racial hierarchies. The pattern is unmistakable: men who lit fires with ruthless conviction cannot later pose as firefighters. History does not forget, and the blood they spilled follows them into every chamber, every council, every plea for relevance.
Blair, too, discovered that reputations bifurcate along geographic lines. In London, he is debated. In Washington, he is welcomed. In the Middle East, he is distrusted, dismissed, or despised. His attempt to rebrand himself as a trustee of Gaza’s reconstruction was an act of self-delusion—one that Arab and Muslim states swiftly corrected.
By sidelining Blair, the Trump administration may have opened the door for Jared Kushner and real estate tycoon Steve Witkoff, men with their own controversial qualifications but without Blair’s uniquely toxic legacy. Even so, reports suggest Blair may linger in the background, offering peripheral advice from the shadows. But the message is unmistakable: he will not sit at the center. He will not be the mediator, the saviour, the architect of Gaza’s future. His time has passed. His name is too heavy with blood.
Blair’s banishment speaks to something larger: the enduring memory of the Iraq War across an entire region. The mass graves, the dismembered cities, the rise of sectarian militias, the birth of ISIS—these are not abstractions. They are lived histories. When Blair attempted to enter the chamber of peace, those memories stood before him like sentinels, demanding he turn back.
In the end, Blair’s humiliation is not a footnote in the saga of Gaza. It is a testament to a truth this region knows intimately: the men who ignite wars rarely make credible peacemakers. They carry the smoke with them. They drag shadows into every negotiation. They summon ghosts into every room. Blair’s exclusion is not a diplomatic manoeuvre—it is a judgment, a warning, a reminder that the wages of war are not just destruction but exile from the councils of peace.
He sought a role. Instead, he found a verdict: get lost. History does not forget.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.