Blair and Peace in the Middle East.

AuthorGreene, Toby

Blair, Labour, and Palestine: Conflicting Views on Middle East Peace After 9/11

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC, 2013

Reviewed by Tom Cordiner

When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party in July 1994, foreign policy was a long way from the top of his list of priorities. This is unremarkable enough; incoming leaders of the major parties across the post-war period almost invariably adhered to the principle that there were no votes in foreign affairs. With much to do in terms of modernising the party, its image, and its domestic policies, Blair and the key architects of New Labour initially said very little about international issues. Blair's programmatic book of speeches and lectures, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, contained just two references to foreign policy, both of which concerned Britain's relationship with Europe (1); furthermore, the new leader's Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, recalled that when he first came to work for Blair in 1994, 'Tony knew very little about foreign policy'.

We therefore get little hint from the early days of the New Labour project of the crucial role that foreign affairs generally, and the Middle East specifically, would come to play in Blair's premiership. One journalist has even concluded that in the end Blair's whole political career 'pivoted on the Middle East' (Boulton, 2009, 75). There has been a great deal of interest from journalists and scholars in the most prominent aspect of this--the Iraq war and its origins--but there have been few sustained attempts to explain British policy towards Israel/Palestine under Blair's leadership. This is the aim of Toby Greene's valuable book. The need for such a study is clear; Blair always connected policy towards Saddam's Iraq with the urgent need for progress on Israel/Palestine; as he told Labour's annual conference in 2002, 'some say the issue is Iraq. Some say it is the Middle East Peace Process. It's both.'

After Blair left office, the decision to participate in the US-led invasion of Iraq came to dominate analysis of his premiership and often overshadowed domestic achievements. Policy towards Israel/Palestine has understandably not loomed as large as Iraq in the major accounts of New Labour, but discussion of it has found a secure, if undeveloped, place in all of the standard texts on Blair's leadership. A good example is Andrew Rawnsley's excellent portrait of New Labour in office, End of the Party, which argues that Blair's unqualified support for Israel during the 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon was crucial to the unravelling of his premiership. Closer scrutiny of Blair's thinking on Israel/Palestine thus has the potential to enrich our understanding of his decade in power in several respects.

Greene takes up the challenge. The focus of his book is the period between the September 11th attacks in the United States and Blair's leaving office in June 2007. This is a clearly written account that contains findings that will interest general readers, as well as scholars and students of contemporary British political history. The central sections of the book show that Israel/Palestine was a recurring feature of a variety of prominent political debates during the early 2000s. Sometimes these were about the conflict itself, but often Israel/Palestine was brought up as a factor in a diverse set of important episodes such as Blair's response to 9/11, the decision to participate actively in the US-led invasion of Iraq, and in dealing with the prospect of the radicalisation of British Muslims around the time of 7/7 bombings in London.

Blair's world view

When looking narrowly at policy towards Israel/Palestine, Greene rightly shows the array of interconnected factors that influenced Blair's thinking, particularly that over time he came to increasingly support Israel as a besieged fellow democracy amid an 'arc of extremism' in the Middle East. Greene does a good job of demonstrating that Blair held distinct ideas about the world after 9/11 and that this led to clashes with those in his own party. Blair would later characterise his post-9/11 thinking not as Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' but rather as a 'clash about civilisation'. Greene's central contention is that when it came to Israel/Palestine, Blair's views 'hardened over...

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