Why Tony Blair and Jared Kushner were at the White House to discuss Gaza

Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are attending a White House meeting on Wednesday to lay out US and Israeli plans for the fate of post-war Gaza, according to media reports.

The meeting comes days after Trump said he expected Israel's war on Gaza to end within "two to three weeks". Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, then said on Wednesday that the war would be finished by the end of the year. 

“It’s a very comprehensive plan we’re putting together on the next day that I think many people are going to be – they’re going to see how robust it is and how well-meaning it is,” Witkoff said, addressing the meeting at the White House.

“And it reflects President Trump’s humanitarian motives here.”

Blair and Kushner’s involvement, however, combined with the lack of any Palestinian voices at the meeting, is going to raise concerns about the fate of post-war Gaza among Palestinians, and potentially some of the US’s Arab allies.

Witkoff has been consulting with Kushner on post-war Gaza for “several months”, according to Axios.

'Move the people out'

Middle East Eye reported in February that Trump’s widely discredited plan to forcibly displace Palestinians and turn Gaza into a US-owned “riviera” echoed almost word for word Kushner’s previously stated plans for the enclave.

Kushner served as Trump’s Middle East advisor during his first term in office. He is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka.

The Kushner family has most recently been in the news because Jared’s father, Trump’s ambassador to France, has clashed with President Emmanuel Macron over his decision to recognise a Palestinian state.

Kushner called for the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza as early as 2024.

“Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable,” Kushner said in February 2024.

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"It's a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel's perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” he added.

MEE also reported on an obscure professor of economics at George Washington University who said in an August 2024 podcast that Kushner had consulted with him on a paper about how to reconstruct post-war Gaza - and it fit almost word for word with what Trump has called for.

“The place to start is to dig up the entire place. Then you have to figure out what to do with the local population. You gotta move them around. Everything’s gotta go…nothing vertical stands,” the professor, Joseph Pelzman, said in a podcast called “America, Baby”, hosted by Israeli professor, Kobby Barda.

Pelzman, who said his paper went to Kushner, also said the US should “lean on Egypt” to accept forcibly displaced Palestinians because it is a “bankrupt…really broke” state.

Also expected to be in attendance at the White House meeting is Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer, a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Notably, no reports have said that the US’s Arab allies, let alone members of any Palestinian factions, will be attending the meeting.

Blair's economic blueprint for Gaza

Egypt and Jordan were alarmed by Trump’s flirtation with the forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.

Egypt, which shares a land border with Jordan, is concerned that the influx of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians could destabilise the country and potentially lay the ground for Palestinian resistance groups to operate from difficult to police territory like the Sinai Peninsula.

Egypt spearheaded a plan backed by the Arab League that called for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to return to Gaza and a United Nations peacekeeping force to deploy to Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Kushner is widely seen as having sidelined the PA during Trump's first term in office. He clashed with US intelligence officers whose mandate was to support the authority, former US officials told MEE. 

Although the Arab League backed the plan officially, MEE reported that the UAE launched a campaign to put pressure on Egypt and prevent the US from considering the plan. The UAE’s ambassador to the US, Yousef al-Otaiba, said earlier this year he “didn’t see an alternative” to the forced displacement of Palestinians.

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Kushner enjoys close ties with the UAE, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar. All these powerful Gulf states have invested in Kushner’s private equity fund, Affinity Partners.

Kushner was the chief architect of the 2020 Abraham Accords agreements, which saw Morocco, Bahrain and the UAE normalise ties with Israel. That decision was viewed as a betrayal by Palestinians and their supporters, who have long counted on a united Arab front to withhold recognition until the creation of a Palestinian state.

Blair has also been active in discussions related to Trump’s Gaza takeover plan. In July, The Financial Times reported that the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) took part in discussions about turning Gaza into a “riviera” and building an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone”.

Those grandiose plans partly reflect how little concrete work has been done on Gaza reconstruction. Musk, the US billionaire, has recently fallen out with Trump.

But the plan was outlined in a slide deck created by a group of Israeli businessmen with support from consultants at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Although TBI insists it neither endorsed nor authored the slide, two of its staff members participated in discussions related to the initiative.

TBI was founded by Blair in 2016 to reportedly promote global policy reform and combat extremism.

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

These included a deep-water port linking Gaza to the India-Middle East-Europe corridor, as well as visions for artificial islands off the coast. It’s not clear how much Blair himself has consulted with Trump. Working India into the project would prove awkward at the moment as Trump has slapped 50 percent sanctions on the Asian country.