Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask

by Francis Beckett

  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 th
e 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.