TONY BLAIR’S THINKTANK INVOLVED IN GAZA’S ‘TRUMP RIVIERA’ PROPOSAL

Mon 07 July 2025:

The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has been linked to a project widely condemned for proposing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, involving a sweeping postwar redevelopment of the besieged Strip.

Plans include a “Trump Riviera” and infrastructure named after wealthy Gulf monarchs, according to documents reviewed by the Financial Times (FT) and revealed on Sunday.

The vision, outlined in a slide deck titled The Great Trust, was created by a group of Israeli businessmen with support from consultants at Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

BCG’s plan assumed that at least 25 percent of Palestinians would leave “voluntarily”, with most never returning. It remains unclear whether Palestinians would have any choice in the matter, but the proposal has been widely condemned as ethnic cleansing of the territory’s indigenous population.

The project aimed to transform the enclave which has been reduced to rubble by Israel into a lucrative investment hub. Central to the proposal were blockchain-based trade schemes, special economic zones with low taxes, and artificial islands modelled on Dubai’s coastline.

“GREAT,” an acronym for ‘Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation,’ reimagines Gaza as a privatized investment hub aligned with U.S. and Gulf business interests, with new infrastructure looming it to the “India–Middle East–Europe economic corridor” and enabling access to $1.3 trillion in rare-earth minerals from western Saudi Arabia.

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Key Details

➤ All public land in Gaza would be placed into a development trust, whose assets would be sold to investors via blockchain tokens.

➤ Privately owned Palestinian land could be “contributed” in exchange for a token redeemable for a future housing unit.

➤ The model assumes a 25% “voluntary” relocation of Gazans, offering $9,000 per person to encourage permanent departure.

➤ The trust would govern Gaza until it is deemed “demilitarized and deradicalized,” after which control could shift to an “independent Palestinian polity.”

➤ The slide deck, including a speculative $324 billion GDP projection, was built on BCG modeling — which the firm later disavowed.

➤ One Tony Blair Institute staffer authored a document shared within the group outlining artificial islands, blockchain trade, and tax-free zones. TBI claimed the paper summarized others’ ideas and denied helping produce the final deck.

➤ The presentation features logos of companies like Tesla, Amazon, and IKEA, implying investor interest — though none were consulted or involved, according to FT.

➤ The deck includes 10 so-called “Mega Projects” — among them a “Trump Riviera,” “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone,” “MBS Ring” highway, and “MBZ Central” — designed to appeal to Trump and Gulf investors. (The image below, shared by FT, shows one slide from the deck.)

The Great Trust proposal would see Gaza’s reconstruction and governance stripped from Palestinian hands, and see local ownership and land records replaced with a tokenized system run by a foreign trust. It involves mass displacement (ethnic cleansing) for redevelopment, and advertises colonial land theft in the language of innovation and trade.

Although Tony Blair Institute (TBI) insists it neither endorsed nor authored the slide, two of its staff members participated in discussions related to the initiative.

The Tony Blair Institute was founded by the former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2016 to allegedly promote global policy reform and combat extremism.

One internal TBI document — titled Gaza Economic Blueprint— circulated within the project group, outlined ambitious economic and infrastructural proposals.

Significantly, unlike the Israeli businessmen’s proposal, the TBI document did not suggest relocating Palestinians — a notion backed by US President Donald Trump and condemned internationally as a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza.

While some ideas overlapped, the Blair Institute maintains it played no role in drafting or approving the BCG-backed presentation.

Initially, TBI denied any involvement, with a spokesperson telling the FT: “Your story is categorically wrong… TBI was not involved in the preparation of the deck.” However, after the FT presented evidence of a 12-person message group that included TBI staff, BCG consultants, and Israeli organisers, the institute acknowledged its staff had been aware of and present during related discussions. “We have never said TBI knew nothing about what this group was working on,” the spokesperson clarified.

TBI claims it was in a “listening mode” and that its internal paper was one of many analyses of postwar scenarios being explored.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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