Jonathon Cook – Blair’s latest deceit-riddled column vilifies the UK left to justify genocide

Tony Blair, the man who led Britain into a disastrous and illegal war on Iraq more than 20 years ago based on false information, is still very much a sought-after commentator in the UK media.

His regular political pronouncements are treated as pearls of wisdom; his columns as consequential insights from a globe-striding elder statesman.

Even his leading role on Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, the US president’s panel of autocrats seeking to elbow the United Nations – and international law – off the world stage, appears to have done little to dent his claim to moral authority.

Blair, more than anybody, illustrates the capacity of western leaders – with the help of a complicit establishment media – to rewrite their criminal past and escape accountability in perpetuity.

The former British prime minister’s latest political intervention is a lengthy, and typically repugnant, article published by the Sunday Times newspaper. It effectively blames “the left” for an arson attack last month on four ambulances owned by a Jewish charity in London.

No, Blair hasn’t unearthed any startling new information tying leftwingers to the attack. His article is a pure disinformation – propaganda designed to malign those critical of Israel.

More on that in a moment.

But as a prelude, let us note that there are many terrible things going on in the world right now that might be considered more pressing for Blair to write about than the torching of a handful of ambulances: whether it be a genocide in Gaza – where Israel destroyed not just four ambulances but the enclave’s entire health sector – or an illegal, joint US-Israeli war on Iran that has similarly targeted medical centres and other civilian infrastructure.

Twisted logic

Blair once served as a Middle East envoy to an international body known as the Quartet. In that role, he spent several years shuttling futilely between his eponymous institute in London and Israel and the Palestinian territories.

There are, however, two self-evident reasons why Blair may have been averse to dedicating his latest column to the catastrophes unfolding in the Middle East.

First, because his close allies – the leaders of the US and Israel – are indisputably the ones committing the crimes of genocide and aggression respectively in Gaza and Iran.

And second, because Blair was himself responsible for launching, alongside the US, a war of aggression on Iraq in 2003.

But it is not just that Blair is in no position to moralise on matters of the utmost global importance.

He has made it his primary duty in public life to excuse the West’s supreme crimes – crimes that, were there meaningful accountability for western leaders, would necessitate that he stand trial at the international war crimes court in the Hague.

That is the context for understanding both why Blair penned his column on the arson attack in London and the twisted logic that underpins his argument in that article.

Dirty war

Anyone who has studied Blair’s back-catalogue of opinion pieces will hardly be surprised by the Sunday Times headline: “We must end left’s unholy alliance with the Islamists.”

Or its subhead: “Parts of the left cast Jewish communities as supporters of Israel and Jews become ‘fair game’.”

Although the article ostensibly concerns an arson attack on a Jewish community ambulance service in London, Blair has much larger – carefully veiled – ambitions.

This is his latest manoeuvre in a dirty war to silence and crush Britain’s progressive left – waged by those, like Blair, who duplicitiously claim both to belong to that left and to serve as its natural leaders.

Blair is central to a cabal of so-called Atlanticists who view the world in Manichean terms, as “a clash of civilisations” between a supposedly superior, enlightened Judeo-Christian West, led by the US, and a backward, primitive Islamic East, now, it seems, led de facto by Iran.

Israel is presented as a first line of defence against this dangerous “Muslim” enemy.

Everything for Blair is seen through this racist prism.

He would sound more obviously like some Victorian, pith-helmeted empire-builder were it not for the fact that his fundamental, and fundamentalist, worldview continues to be shared by the entire UK ruling class, including the billionaire-owned media and the main political parties.

And for good reason. A Britain belonging to a “superior” West can openly aid Israel’s genocidal campaign of carpet-bombing and starvation in Gaza, and loan air bases to assist the US in its illegal war of aggression on Iran, and still pretend to itself that this is all being done “defensively”.

Christendom is still, apparently, “defending” itself against the rampaging barbarian hordes.

Achilles’ heel

In fact, Blair’s column in the Sunday Times should be seen as another front in a continuing war being waged by British prime minister Keir Starmer – a disciple of Blair – on the Corbynite left.

Their joint aim is to shepherd back into the Atlanticist fold a Labour party that supposedly lost its way under Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn’s crime was to have taken Labour towards internationalism – and the prioritising of human rights for all, not just westerners. That project necessarily entailed treating British Muslims as an integral part of British society, no less than British Jews.

Corbyn’s politics were an ideological assault on – and continue to pose a threat to – the Blair-Starmer worldview.

In other words, Blair’s article is part of a running battle – as the British establishment’s claim to moral authority is steadily eroded by its collusion in Israeli and US crimes – to prevent the progressive left ever reviving its political fortunes.

With the help of the Israel lobby, Blair and his ilk believe they have identified the achilles’ heel of a British left determined to highlight a brutal US-led western imperialism and its inherent hypocrisies.

The goal is to crop out the left’s increasingly persuasive critique of US imperialism and zoom in instead on the left’s parallel criticisms of Israel: its apartheid rule over Palestinians, its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, and its genocidal campaign of destruction in Gaza.

Blair wishes to wave all this away, as if wielding a magic wand, by labelling it as “antisemitism”.

After that move worked so successfully in fatally wounding Corbyn as Labour leader, Blair and Starmer assume the same smear can be repurposed more generally – in this case, to implicate an undefined “left” over the torching of a handful of ambulances.

It goes without saying, that in prioritising the suppression of the left’s critiques of western imperialism, Blair and Starmer are leaving the door wide open to a resurgence by the far-right – which indeed is antisemitic.

That should serve as a reminder that Blair, Starmer and the rest of the British establishment have no real concern for the welfare of the Jewish community they profess to be protecting.

If the Jewish community turns out to be collateral damage in their war on the left, then so be it.

‘New antisemitism’

In the article itself, Blair argues that a so-called left-wing antisemitism “is a pernicious and novel development in progressive politics: the alliance with Islamists”.

First, notice the sleight of hand. British Muslims who, quite reasonably, are deeply critical of Israel because its army has been committing for decades war crimes with impunity against their extended families are reduced here simply to “Islamists”.

Blair is doing to Muslims precisely what he accuses – falsely – the left of doing to Jews. He is conflating Muslims, a religious group, with Islamists, champions of an extreme political ideology.

Yet he considers it patently antisemitic to conflate Jews, a religious and ethnic group, with Zionists, champions of an equally extreme political ideology – one whose adherents still mostly deny a genocide in Gaza.

Paradoxically, Blair is laundering his own rancid Islamophobia to smear the British left as antisemites.

The imagined “alliance” between the left and “Islamists” aside, there is nothing novel about the allegation of a “new antisemitism”. It has been the blueprint for vilifying the left for decades – trotted out every time Israel is exposed committing war crimes so egregious they cannot be hidden.

As the American Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein noted in his book Beyond Chutzpah, the term “the new Anti-Semitism” was actually coined way back in 1973 by Israel’s then foreign minister, Abba Eban, to deal with what was at the time a novel development: parts of the western left had started to grow more critical of Israel.

That year, Eban wrote in a publication of the American Jewish Congress: “Let there be no mistake: the new left is the author and the progenitor of the new anti-Semitism.”

The aim was to demonise and discredit this “new left”, which had begun to appreciate that the Palestinian territories conquered by Israel in 1967 were facing permanent, brutal military occupation.

This new scrutiny emerged in the context of additional concern from Israel that it was being seen as a geopolitical liability following the 1973 war, when western powers supported Israel against its Arab neighbours. In echoes of current events, a resulting Arab oil embargo plunged the world into economic crisis.

Shrill warnings about a “new antisemitism” would re-emerge a decade later, in the 1980s.

This followed another double whammy for Israel: its so-called “new historians” excavated from the archives revelations of shocking crimes committed at Israel’s founding in 1948; and the Israeli army was exposed as committing systematic war crimes during its occupation of Lebanon, including overseeing a massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

Again, echoes from the present moment.

The only really novel development in this latest moral panic about a “new antisemitism” is that the lobby no longer needs, when Israel is in reputational trouble, to fabricate these smears itself. It can outsource the job to figures like Tony Blair.

Deep collusion

It is a sign of how insular the worldview of western leaders like Blair has become that he apparently imagines the following argument will resonate: “In its opposition to Israel, [the left] has found an animating cause. And the war in Gaza has allowed it full rein in pursuing it.”

So the problem, suggests Blair, is that the left has chosen to highlight Israel’s genocidal campaign of carpet-bombing and starvation of Gaza’s population. Presumably, he believes it should have cheered the slaughter on instead.

And therein lies the real problem for Blair. The left has also been highlighting the deep collusion of the British establishment, of which he is a figurehead, in Israel’s genocide of Gaza’s Palestinians.

The UK has provided arms to Israel, shipped US and German munitions to carry out the genocide, operated RAF spy flights to assist with Israel’s targeting of Palestinians, and run cover for Israel with continuous genocide denial.

The British establishment’s real grievance with the left is that it has pursued with “full rein” the exposure of Israel’s war crimes and Britain’s complicity in those crimes, organising regular mass demonstrations against the slaughter.

Israeli talking points

Blair continues: “Parts of the left cast the Jewish community as supporters of the government of Israel. And Jews become ‘fair game’.”

Strangely, he fails to note that it is not the left making this claim about the Jewish community. It is Jewish community leaders. They are on record regularly asserting – with little evidence – that there is almost unanimous support among British Jews for Israel.

So, accepting Blair’s logic, what should we conclude? If most Jews truly do support Israel – in fact, polling suggests that’s not close to being true in relation to the slaughter in Gaza – does Blair regard the Jewish community as having made itself “fair game” for an arson attack?

Maybe he needs to have a word with the Board of Deputies, rather than vilify “the left” once again.

Next, Blair insists that the left cannot “legitimately” criticise Israel’s two-and-a-half-year genocide in Gaza unless it first condemns Hamas’ one-day attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

He writes: “You cannot pretend that Israel does not face a substantial terrorist threat from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime and other groups that do not recognise Israel’s right to exist.”

Unravelling the hotchpotch of Israeli talking points in his column is no simple task. But let us start by noting – for the umpteenth time – that states do not have an intrinsic “right to exist”, even if peoples do.

Apartheid South Africa had no “right to exist”. That state is now relegated to the history books. A new South Africa was born in its place. White and Black South Africans exist in this new state. No one, apart from a few diehard racists, is any the poorer for the erasure of that apartheid state.

There is precisely no reason why the apartheid state of Israel, nearly 60 years into an intensifying, brutal occupation and in the third year of a genocide, should have any right to exist. It must be brought to an end like apartheid South Africa was.

That objective, whatever Blair claims, is not the preserve of the left and groups dismissed by him and the UK government as “terrorists”.

In fact, a large panel of eminent judges at the International Court of Justice ruled two years ago that Israel’s system of illegal occupation and apartheid rule had to end. Are they also culpable for the arson attack on the four ambulances in London?

The left’s recognition of the corrupt and corrupting nature of an Israeli ethnocratic state isn’t the problem. It is evidence only that the progressive left refuses to follow politicians like Blair in making endless excuses for a discredited, criminal and unsustainable status quo.

Moral abyss

But this is just Blair’s warm-up act. Now he jumps feet first into the moral abyss.

He continues: “You cannot complain about the restrictions on goods and material going in and out of Gaza unless you also reference the reasons for the restrictions: the fear in Israel that such materials will be used for the purpose of building a terrorist infrastructure, which is precisely what nearly 300 miles of tunnels underneath Gaza represent.”

Seen another way, the tunnels represent the best chance a people in a tiny territory under an illegal blockade and Israel’s regular “mowing the lawn” stand of resisting their oppressor, one of the most fearsomely armed militaries in the world.

But more significantly, and appallingly, Blair appears to be excusing Israel’s starvation of the 2.3 million people of Gaza, half of them children.

According to Blair, no one, not even the progressive left, should be allowed to criticise an Israeli siege that has blocked food, water, fuel and medicines to Gaza – unless they first justify that blockade as essential to Israel’s “security”.

Again, maybe he needs to have a word with the judges of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Because they are seeking Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, on charges of crimes against humanity over his efforts to starve Gaza’s population.

Is the ICC also responsible for torching four ambulances in London?

Meanwhile, Starmer will be delighted by Blair’s argument. After all, at the outset of the genocide, asked whether Israel had a right to cut off all essentials to Gaza answered that Israel “had that right”. The prime minister presumably represents, in Blair’s view, the legitimate “left”.

Historical illiteracy

In Blair’s assessment, not only should the left not criticise Israel, nor oppose its starvation blockade of Gaza, but it also should not use the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s killing of many tens of thousands – and more likely, hundreds of thousands – of civilians.

Blair opines: “You should not diminish the charge of genocide — whatever your views of Israel’s actions — by a barb particularly aimed at Jewish memories of the Holocaust, which was a genocide.”

This seems clear evidence either of Blair’s mendacity or his historical illiteracy. The Holocaust is not the only example of genocide. Far from it. There have been many different genocides, each unique.

And their status as genocides is determined not by “Jewish memories”, whatever that is supposed to mean, but by legal considerations set out in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Human rights groups and a raft of leading Israeli genocide scholars have all judged that the slaughter in Gaza to clearly meet those criteria.

Are they too responsible for the arson attack in London?

Gaza’s dead and maimed cannot be denied the status of genocide victims simply because such a characterisation might offend the feelings of Israel apologists like Blair.

Lesser humans

In another wantonly deceitful Israeli talking point, Blair claims “the war would have ended at any point in time if Hamas had said they were releasing the hostages”.

Yet Gaza’s problems did not start with the taking of Israelis as hostages by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Before the genocidal “war”, the enclave had suffered decades of brutal, illegal occupation and siege – abuses that continue, despite the last of the hostages being released many months ago.

In any case, Blair cannot justify the levelling of the enclave, mass murder and the engineered destitution of its people just because he can point to crimes committed by Hamas. That is collective punishment of the wider population, a grave war crime.

Blair even has the chutzpah to blame Gaza’s immiseration on Hamas’ failure to achieve “a Palestinian State … through negotiation”. As if the Israeli government has not been openly opposed for decades to a Palestinian state and to any negotiations to achieve it.

Israel refuses to speak even with Mahmoud Abbas, the so-called “moderate” Palestinian leader in the West Bank, who says security coordination with Israel is “sacred”.

Is Hamas to blame for not negotiating with itself?

Blair wonders how Britons would react “if we woke up one day and between the hours of 6am and midday, 1,200 of our citizens were murdered, including young people at a music festival, with women raped and others taken hostage”.

Set aside again the Israeli disinformation – no tangible evidence has ever been produced of any rapes taking place on 7 October – and instead ask a more pertinent question, one Blair desperately wants to distract us from.

How would Britons respond if they woke up every day for eight decades to find they were losing more of their homeland – and their homes – to colonising immigrants claiming a right to take their lands based on a supposed 3,000-year-old birthright?

How would Britons react if many hundreds of thousands of them were given lengthy prison terms, often following torture, by kangaroo military courts set up by those same colonisers with near 100 per cent conviction rates?

How would Britons feel about foreign settler militias being allowed, again for decades, to regularly rampage through their towns and villages, setting fire to their homes and cars, pointing guns at them, sometimes shooting at their family members – all watched over by paramilitary forces that not only refused to intervene to protect them but often joined in the attacks?

Blair observes of the likely response of Britons: “I suspect it would be total determination that those responsible were going to be removed as a threat, and nothing would deter us from doing so.”

And yet here is Blair writing a column condemning a British left that agrees with him. They believe the threat to Palestinians posed by Israel’s criminal settlers, by Israel’s criminal army, by Israel’s criminal government needs to be removed with “total determination”.

The difference is that Blair is indifferent to Palestinian suffering because, in a long tradition of racists, he regards them as lesser humans. He cares only when Israelis suffer a reaction to their state’s systematic abuses of the Palestinians.

Soulless creature

Blair correctly concludes by arguing that he is defending more than just Israel.

“It’s about defending reason,” he writes. “Defending facts. Standing up to the noise and intimidation to assert the truth.”

But Blair is not “defending reason”, in the sense of rationality. He is defending rationalisation – excuses for wanton criminality that currently includes overwhelming US-led western aggression towards Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba.

The British establishment, in which he is a central figure, is deeply enmeshed in those criminal endeavors, from its role sharing intelligence to Israel and the US, the latter as a member of Five Eyes, and providing air bases, weapons and diplomatic cover.

And also, as Blair does here, by manipulating the information sphere with a mix of continuous pro-war messaging and relentless demonisation campaigns against those – mostly on the left – who try to convey a little of the reality of western criminality.

Blair is not defending facts. He is defending the inhuman void into which western foreign policy sucks all those like him whose job is to whitewash imperial crimes.

And while he may face “noise” – from the the street protests organised by the anti-war left he so despises – he faces no meaningful intimidation. After all, the left does not have prisons to lock up criminals like Blair. It is the left that is being locked up – as terrorists – for holding placards opposing Israel’s genocide. That is the real intimidation.

What Blair wants is for the left to be utterly silenced so that its protests do not rouse uncomfortable twinges of guilt forcibly reminding him that long ago he became a soulless creature of the West’s war machine.

It is not just that Blair has faced no consequences for his criminal undertaking in Iraq. He has instead become fabulously wealthy, venerated by western establishments, and an oracle for an equally complicit, billionaire-owned media.

Blair is the model that proves there is no price in the West to be paid for selling one’s soul, for engineering mass slaughter in the service of a western empire.

Which is why those mass slaughters not only continue but grow relentlessly in scale.

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