decrypt.co
The Tony Blair Institute helped form a plan that proposed selling land in Gaza via blockchain tokens, the Financial Times reported Monday, after paying Palestinians to leave their land. The tokenization project would have also seen the region rebuilt with Dubai-style artificial islands and “blockchain-trade initiatives,” complete with Elon Musk and Donald Trump-themed areas.
The report was met with major uproar from Palestinian activists—one of whom described the proposed plan to Decrypt as “not just grotesque,” but “evil.”
A slide deck titled the “Great Trust” was developed by the Boston Consulting Group, or BCG, the FT reported on Sunday, with participation from two staff members from the Tony Blair Institute—an organization founded by the former UK prime minister. It was shared with the Trump administration, according to the FT, which echoed similar sentiments in February.
The deck suggested paying half a million Palestinians to leave Gaza to attract private investors to redevelop the area, following Israel’s bombings. It proposed that the public land in Gaza be put into a trust and sold via “digital tokens traded on a blockchain.” Gazans could add their private land into the trust in return for a token that would give them the right to a housing unit.
“The process referenced is a common one in real-world assets,” Chris Yin, co-founder and CEO of RWA project Plume Network, explained to Decrypt. “The title for the land is put into a special vehicle that only does one thing—in this case, a trust that holds the title. Then the shares that represent ownership in that trust are tokenized and minted on a blockchain.”
As a result, Sam Mudie, co-founder and CEO of tokenization project Savea, said to Decrypt that land in Gaza would become an international investment opportunity with tokens possibly traded on centralized exchanges.
But while the plan showcases a type of real-world asset tokenization that is increasingly being adopted by other projects, the proposal has been met with severe backlash by Palestinian advocates who see it as disturbing and opportunistic amid the violent recent conflict.
“Those fucking monsters want to steal all Palestinian land and sell it back to them?” Paul Biggar, founder of Tech for Palestine, said in response to reading the plan.
One source told the FT that the people of Gaza will be incentivized to leave, predicting via a BCG financial model that 25% of Palestinians would vacate the region. BCG calculated that relocating Palestinians outside of Gaza would be cheaper than providing support to them while reconstructing the area.
“Palestinians want to live in their home. That is the simple truth at the heart of this,” Dr. Ashok Kumar, associate professor of political economy at Birkbeck Business School, told Decrypt. He suggested that Israel’s “siege” on Gaza has been designed to “make life so unbearable for the survivors that they are forced to ‘choose’ exile.”
The Tony Blair Institute and BCG did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment. Both have distanced themselves from the proposal in comments to the FT, with the Tony Blair Institute claiming limited participation and BCG saying its leadership was misled about the scope of the project.
The deck also includes the construction of “world-class resorts” called the “Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands,” as well as an industrial area called “The Elon Musk ‘Smart Manufacturing’ Zone.”
In February, President Trump proposed that Gaza could be reconstructed under United States rule as the “Riviera of the Middle East,” a claim that now echoes the plans outlined in the now-leaked deck.
The deck also proposes a man-made coastline similar to Dubai with “blockchain-based trade initiatives.” Mudie explained that this could mean a Gaza stablecoin or processing the region’s trade on the blockchain to reduce paperwork. Yin suggested this could mean a crypto-friendly environment akin to Dubai to stimulate blockchain activity in the region.
But Palestinian supporters aren’t buying the pitch.
“Like vultures circling a dying body, men like Tony Blair, multimillionaire, war criminal, profiteer, prepare to swoop in and make millions from the rubble—buying up the land from which its people were driven,” Dr. Kumar said. “This is not just grotesque. It is evil.”
“The lives of the people and their homes are worth less than dollars to them,” Loopify, pseudonymous game developer and founder of charity CryptoGaza, told Decrypt.
Morals aside, experts believe that the deck’s tokenization goals are too lofty even for the most simplistic of cases—let alone one of the most complex regions in the world.
“Frankly, the gap between what the deck briefly alludes to and what is technically and legally possible is so vast,” Mudie finished. “Implementing commercial-scale real estate/land tokenization is probably still 2-3 years away, and that would be for small, straightforward use-cases—not massive, war-ridden plots of land in a politically and geographically contested country.”