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-T
el 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.
Blair Inc--The Man Behind the Mask Page 4
