10.07.2025

Tony Blair and the banality of evil

BCG and the Tony Blair Institute have modelled plans for Israel to relocate Palestinians out of Gaza, a second Nakba, a war crime, for which all involved ought to be publicly tried and, if found guilty, suitably punished, says Eddie Ford

For decades now there has been a concerted campaign to say that comparisons between the Israeli government and Hitler’s regime are somehow ‘anti-Semitic’. Of course, the crimes of the Nazi’s involved the death of millions across the face of the whole of mainland Europe. But what Israel has done, and proposes to do, with the Palestinian population in Gaza inevitably - and rightly - leads to just such a comparison.

How else do you respond to the latest comments by Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, except by resorting to Nazi imagery? He is clearly advocating the ethnic cleansing of the entire Palestinian people of Gaza - a war crime that has clear genocidal intentions. According to Haaretz, Katz has ordered Israel’s military to prepare for establishing a camp on the ruins of the city of Rafah, which he has grotesquely called a “humanitarian city”.¹ At a briefing for Israeli journalists, the minister said, in blood-chilling terms, that all Palestinians would go through “security screening” before entering, and once inside would not be allowed to leave - presumably a prelude to expulsion into Egypt’s Sinai, that or death through disease and starvation. Israeli forces would control the perimeter of the site and initially “move” in 600,000 Palestinians. Eventually the entire population of Gaza would be confined there, and Israel aims to implement “the emigration plan, which will happen”, says Katz - a scheme that immediately conjures up images of the mass transportation of Jews for resettlement in lands conquered to the east.

First Nakba

Obviously, what is intended is a second Nakba - more devastating that the first one, between 1947 and 1949, especially as a grim fate must surely await those Palestinians who refuse to follow Israeli orders to move into the vast concentration camp. But this hideous scheme has the blessing of the Donald Trump administration. After all, he has already suggested that the Palestinians should leave Gaza in order to “clean out” the strip and Benjamin Netanyahu has enthusiastically promoted forced deportation, often presenting it for good reason as a US project, given that the Israeli war machine is an extension of US power. And, of course, within the Netanyahu coalition cabinet there are eager advocates of new Zionist settlements in Gaza, like finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who openly advocates a Greater Israel.

Katz has declared that work on the “humanitarian city” could start during a ‘ceasefire’ that could possibly arise from the visit that Netanyahu made to Washington at the beginning of the week - this being the first meeting between himself and Trump since the Israeli-US triumph in the 12 Day War with Iran. As well as preparing for the ethnic cleansing of the Gazan population, the Israeli PM told Trump that Israel would nominate him for a Nobel peace prize - at which point you can either laugh or cry. But, I suppose, it makes perfect sense. After all, the Nobel peace prize has always been awarded to those who have done some sort of service to the ‘international community’, well, that or to those who need to be flattered.

Hannah Arendt famously talked about the “banality of evil” in relation to Adolf Eichmann and his 1961 trial in Jerusalem, saying that he was neither a sociopath nor a fanatic, but merely a mundane and average bureaucrat managing the task of mass extermination.² Mossad hunted Eichmann down and secretly smuggled him out of Argentina for a high publicity show trial before the world’s press and media.

Actually, Eichmann was no average bureaucrat. A committed Nazi, he participated in the January 1942 Wannsee conference which prepared the way for the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution. Anyway, in Jerusalem Eichmann admitted neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply “doing his job” and “obeyed the law” according to the Führerprinzip system. This is what caught Arendt’s attention - though, of course, that line of defence did him no good before an Israeli court intent on arriving at a death sentence. He was hanged in 1962.

But update Arendt to 2025 with the notion that he was just a consultant providing a service for a government client. A Financial Times investigating team ran a big splash on July 4 about the Boston Consulting Group - one of the world’s big three management consulting firms - that had modelled the costs of “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza, and entered into a multimillion-dollar contract to help launch the grossly misnamed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. This was deliberately created so that Israel could, with a good conscience, kick out UNRWA with its 400 distribution sites and replace them with four ‘food aid hubs’. GHF is, of course, integral to the Israeli genocide. Huge numbers displace themselves … and risk being shot, either by trigger-happy IDF troops, or contractors. So far at least 400 have been killed.³

Then the FT ran a follow-up on July 5 about the involvement of the Tony Blair Institute with the BCG, participating in a ‘post-war’ Gaza plan that imagined kick-starting the strip with a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone” - led by Israeli companies under a redevelopment programme called the ‘Great Trust’. In line with Trump’s proposals, it suggested the possibility of paying half a million Palestinians to leave the area and attracting private investors to develop Gaza.⁴

Dodgy dossiers

Everyone will be familiar with former PM Tony Bair and his obvious lies in dodgy dossiers about Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”, its supposed ability to launch biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to do so, and so on - all with the intention of providing a justification for the invasion of Iraq. In other words, the guy has form. And now, states the FT, a TBI document says that the genocidal war against the Gazan people had “created a once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild Gaza from first principles” as a “secure, modern, prosperous society”.

In June 2025, the BCG formally terminated its contract with the GHF, claiming that the work it had done was “pro bono”. However, the Washington Post reported that the BCG submitted invoices of over $1 million per month and it was later revealed by the FT that the BCG’s work was more extensive than previously disclosed, covering more than $4 million of contracted work. This included modelling work on the post-war reconstruction of Gaza, with cost estimates for giving hundreds of thousands of Gazans ‘relocation packages’ worth $9,000 per person in exchange for them leaving the territory - all entirely voluntarily, of course! They then got out their spreadsheets and estimated the ‘living costs’ for the Gazans who had agreed to ‘voluntary relocation’ would include $5,000 for subsidised rent for four years and subsidised food for a year, assuming that a quarter of Gazans would leave, and that three-quarters of those relocated would never return. The model calculated relocation outside Gaza to be $23,000 cheaper, per Palestinian, than the costs of providing support to them in Gaza during reconstruction - so, a ‘bargain’.

One person familiar with the details of the project tried to make out that there should not be any controversy, as “there is no coercive element here and the plan is not incentivising people to leave”, as the 25% figure is merely a “plug number” - apparently “it is not a plan to empty Gaza”. For all that, the BCG then fired two senior partners, both from the firm’s US defence and security practice, calling the work they oversaw for the GHF “unauthorised”, issuing a statement on July 6 saying it “fully disavows” the individuals concerned and claimed it “was not paid for any of this work” - more dissembling and scapegoating.⁵

As for the lying TBI, its first response was to sternly tell the FT that “your story is categorically wrong” and it “had no input whatever into its contents”. When the paper provided details of a 12-person message group used for the project - including two TBI staff, BCG consultants and Israeli business executives - and also an unpublished document called the ‘Gaza Economic Blueprint’, the TBI quickly changed its tune. Now it claims it “never said” that the TBI “knew nothing about what this group was working on or that they weren’t on calls in which the group discussed their plans”. The TBI has always had ‘honourable intentions’, because Blair had sought a “better Gaza for Gazans” for the past two decades, just like previously he had sought a better Iraq for Iraqis! “It has never been about relocating Gazans,” the TBI informed the FT, which is a proposal that it “has never authored, developed or endorsed”.

It is a disgusting story, in which all are guilty - BCG, TBI, Israeli capitalists and government - all are involved in some way with the Gaza genocide.

Yes, the Keir Starmer government is fully complicit with genocide too - allowing UK firms to sell parts for F-35s used by Israel to bomb and massacre Palestinians. Then look at the fake moral outrage of the government - and the official opposition - over Glastonbury, Kneecap and Bob Vylan - who should be applauded for their integrity and courage in calling out as evil the war crimes committed by Israel and its accomplices.

Then we have Lisa Nandy, culture secretary, complaining that BBC executives or reporters are not being sacked for transmitting their performances. But rather than BBC staff and freelancers being sacked, why isn’t Nandy herself, David Lammy, Yvette Cooper and Sir Keir being hauled up before the courts?

Different regime

Well, of course, it won’t happen … but, with a different regime and different courts, it would. Remember, that is something that Marxists talked about, of course. Long before the Bolsheviks were in government, they debated the death sentence. While Marxists generally oppose the death penalty, it was Plekhanov, the Menshevik leader, who raised an obvious objection - do we not want to shoot the tsar after a show trial?

When the Romanovs were killed at Ekaterinburg on the orders of the Ural soviet, Lenin was furious - not because he was shedding any tears for the royal family, but rather because he wanted to put these people on trial before the world, with Leon Trotsky acting as the chief prosecutor. He wanted them found guilty, because they were guilty.

That is very much our attitude, and not just towards the obvious war criminals like Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich and Israel Katz. CEOs of arms companies, consultancy firms and non-profits which aid and assist the genocide must be made to answer for their crimes too.

1. archive.is/AFtRG.↩︎

2. wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#Banality_of_evil↩︎

3. Financial Times July 4 2025.↩︎

4. Financial Times July 5 2025.↩︎

5. bcg.com/news/6july2025-clarifying-bcg-involvement-with-aid-in-gaza.↩︎