It’s the old truism: Follow the Money!
Dan Steinbock is the author of The Obliteration Doctrine and The Fall of Israel, . He is the founder of Difference Group and has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net/
Cross-posted from Sheer Post
Secretary Antony J. Blinken meets with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar in Attard, Malta, December 5, 2024. (Official State Department photo by Chuck Kennedy)
New York (Special to Informed Comment) – In December 2022, Israeli Ministry of Energy launched the Fourth Offshore Bid Round offering new exploration licenses.
A year later, it awarded licenses to several Israeli and international companies: Eni (Italy), Dana Petroleum (UK, a subsidiary of a South Korean company, and Ratio Petroleum (Israel).
The problem is that these tenders violated international law.
Illegal offshore tenders amid huge onshore destruction
A few months later in June 2023, following years of stalled talks, Israel approved the development of the Gaza Marine field, while Egypt’s state-owned EGAS (Egyptian Natural Gas Holding Company) was to lead extraction efforts in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority. Nonetheless, Israel stipulated that Hamas must not benefit financially.
Ironically, PM Netanyahu had for years ensured, as part of his Gaza strategy, that Hamas can receive multi-million-dollar shipments, via intermediation. The double-faced ploy used Hamas to disrupt the Palestinian Authority (PA), to keep Gaza weak and ultimately to reap the gas benefits to Israel.
As a net effect, active gas exploration or production could not commence due to the ongoing tensions in and around the Strip, which undermined investment and infrastructure development. The resulting stalemate status quo harmed Egypt’s mediation and interest in fostering regional energy stability.
As Israel initiated its ground assault in Gaza a week after October 7, 2023, Energy Minister Israel Katz pledged on X “all the civilian population in Aza [Gaza’s Hebraized name] is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”
But Netanyahu’s veteran Likud ally had another, equally destructive role. Katz’s Ministry awarded the exploration licenses to the companies on October 29, 2023, violating international law.
It was just two days after the lethal fury of the full-scale invasion in Gaza of the Israeli military.
Palestinian rights groups protest licenses
Due to his actions, Katz contributed deliberately and directly to Palestinian genocide in Gaza and could be charged in the ICJ genocide case, together with Prime Minister Netanyahu and ex-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Katz contributed to and was directly responsible for the weaponized famines that facilitated the genocide.
By early 2024, almost in parallel with the South African genocide case against Israel, the Israeli Energy Ministry’s decision was protested by several Palestinian human rights groups.
Based in Haifa and Beersheba, Adalah demanded Israel revoke the tenders which violate international law. In turn, Al Mezan, Al-Haq, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) appealed to licensed companies to refrain from participating in acts of pillage of the sovereign natural resources of the Palestinian people.
A law firm representing these groups sent a warning letter to the Italian state-owned firm ENI that it should not exploit the gas fields in an area called Zone G. They said that roughly 62% of the zone lies in maritime areas claimed by Palestine. Consequently, “Israel cannot have validly awarded you any exploration rights and you cannot validly have acquired any such rights”.
For half a year, these appeals were effectively ignored by Israel and the United States, its primary military supplier and financier. Things changed in August 2025, when the PCHR released a report concluding that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza.
Positioning for gas exploration bonanza
As ceasefire talks intensified and property tycoons like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff began to dominate negotiations using Tony Blair as the public façade, U.S. State Department sanctioned three Palestinian human rights NGOs for having “directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio added that “the United States will continue to respond with significant and tangible consequences to protect our troops, our sovereignty, and our allies from the ICC’s disregard for sovereignty, and to punish entities that are complicit in its overreach.”
Previously, the Trump administration had sanctioned the ICC in response to its investigation and arrest warrants for PM Netanyahu and his former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes committed in Gaza.
The opposition to Palestinian human rights is the common denominator between the Trump administration, which initiated its domestic suppression campaign against Palestinians in January, and the Netanyahu cabinet, which began its efforts to decimate leading Israeli human rights groups weeks later.
However, Rubio’s timing was in line with efforts to neutralize potential legal challenges in the aftermath of the ceasefire when offshore explorations would take off. Furthermore, the three Palestinian NGOs – Al Haq, Al Mezan and the PCHR – just happen to be the ones that in February 2024 had confronted the Israeli gas exploration licenses offshore Gaza.
These were not just human rights groups that had long, highly-regarded track-record and that had assisted ICC and other international organizations in their pursuit for human rights in the Middle East. They were also likely to protest vocally and internationally, if the Palestinians’ energy rights were to be shunned.
Just as Israel had ejected Al Jazeera and other major news organizations from Gaza to shape crisis reporting, while subjecting leading Western news media networks to its military censorship, it seemed to target these human rights organizations to minimize negative publicity in gas exploration.
U.S. administrations and the role/s of Blair in Gaza
As the U.S.-mediated ceasefire is taking hold of Gaza, the Trump administration is pushing its peace plan, which is premised on post-genocide opportunities for infrastructure and property development. In this quest, Tony Blair is the public face; Jared Kushner, the commissioner; and the Trump White House, the architect.
But the other side of the story involves gas – and former British PM’s two-decade long effort to cash on the promising deals, vis-à-vis his Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), with its staff of more than 900 people to advance his ideas in up to 45 countries.
As British PM, Blair developed a great interest in the Middle East, including the Bush Jr administration’s 2003 war on Iraq. Swearing by the false allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Blair steered the UK into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis earning him a reputation as a war criminal. Ironically, in Gaza, he will oversee the “Board of Peace.”
In the Middle East, Blair liked to tout his 2009 success of securing radio frequencies from Israel to allow the creation of a second Palestinian cell phone operator (while also allowing JP Morgan to profit hugely). What was left unmentioned was the reality that Israel released the frequencies in exchange for a deal from the Palestinian leadership to drop the issue at the UN of Israeli war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
This was the Gaza War of 2008-09 which served as a prelude to and early test of the Obliteration Doctrine that would account for the Gaza genocide barely two decades later.
Making Gaza safe for American capitalism
When Blair left Downing Street, he initially engaged in lucrative commercial and prestigious philanthropic activities, including advising the U.S. financial giant JP Morgan for $1 million per-year and Zurich Insurance for a six-figure salary, and PetroSaudi on how to do business in China (for a 2% commission), while serving as the Middle East peace envoy for the Quartet of the US, UN, EU and Russia.
As the lines between advising, salaries and politics grew blurry, Blair consolidated his activities in 2017 – including his Faith Foundation, Sports Foundation, Governance Initiative and Tony Blair Associates – into his Institute for Global Change.
In Blair’s view, the extraordinary level of contemporary uncertainty is addressed by basically two types of politicians, “reality creators and reality managers.” He saw himself as a “reality creator.” Managing the game was not for him; dominating it, was. That was the key to success and profits.
His institute was cloned in the image of the Clinton Foundation, another equally controversial operation, initially portrayed as a quasi-philanthropic pursuit, but criticized as a shrewd revenue-machine cashing on the poorest conflict-ridden countries.
By 2022, Blair’s Institute made more than $145 million in revenue. The critics saw TBI as a lobbying organization bankrolled by billionaires and countries, controversial track-record in human rights, and an overall approach dictated by neoliberal corporate interests. Gaza was no exception.
In July, the Institute’s people reportedly participated in a controversial meeting in which post-war Gaza plans were outlined in a presentation “led by Israeli businessmen and used financial models developed inside Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub.” Featuring plans for a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone”, the “Great Trust” project included a proposal to pay “half a million” Palestinians to leave Gaza, to attract real estate investors to the area.
The technology story
Another side of the TBI is its great interest in technology, presumably to cut costs on the public sector and promote public good. Those efforts are dictated by indirect cash schemes, thanks to one of TBI’s biggest donors, Larry Ellison. Ellison is the co-founder of the global technology company Oracle which has a market cap of $825 billion. It has invested in the Trump administration and its Secretary of State Rubio. Reportedly, Ellison has donated or promised $300 million to Blair’s Institute.
Digitalization of health systems and other public-sector activities is one of Blair’s pet projects and perhaps one that he is likely to promote in Gaza. This interest seems to originate from the early 2020s, when Oracle bought the healthcare IT company Cerner for $28 billion.
With a secular Jewish background, Ellison has longstanding ties with Israel. Since 2017, with the first Trump administration and its Messianic Israel champions, Ellison has donated increasingly to militant causes, including $16.6 million to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, and a controversial archaeological dig in Arab East Jerusalem. In 2019, a $1 billion lawsuit was filed against several Israel supporters, including Ellison, for conspiring to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Israeli-occupied territories, committing war crimes, and funding genocide. In 2021 Ellison, who had previously hosted Netanyahu in his Hawaiian island, offered the Israeli a post at Oracle, while seeking to protect the PM from corruption charges.
Recently, Ellison’s son David consolidated the Hollywood studio and once-great CBS News under his control, while installing self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief and reportedly participated in an Israeli government-led plot to surveil and suppress pro-Palestine activists in the US, including targeting American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
These are the benefactors behind Tony Blair’s Institute and his role as the director of Gaza’s peace and development.
Still another déjà vu?
The efforts to develop the Gaza Marine natural gas field have been hindered for almost three decades. With the prospects of ceasefire, these efforts are accelerating.
Irrespective of their official mandates, the “reality creators” that have already positioned themselves in the area – property developers like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, and political intermediaries, such as Tony Blair – are likely to use their current posts to cash on the Gaza opportunities in the future.
After two years of infrastructure destruction and genocidal atrocities in Gaza, the Strip is ecocide-ridden.
Haunted by a series of moral hazards and interests of conflict, Blair will be in charge of an area cleansed of armed conflict and presumably buzzing with development, a “special economic zone” through which foreign capital can flow and overseen by his international “board of peace.”
The quasi-colonial protectorate pledges boldly in the name of “reformed Palestine” in which Palestinians have little or no say – once again.
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