Tony Blair's Controversial Peace Proposal

Tony Blair has apparently found a new way to bring peace to the Middle East,

erase Palestine. Not the occupation, not the settlements, not the

settlers driving Palestinians from their homes, Palestine.

Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's former ambassador to the UN says

he learned from a

ministerial-level source that Blair was dispatched on behalf of Donald Trump's

so-called Board of Peace with an extraordinary request; The

Palestinian Authority should remove references to Palestine from its

school books, and it gets worse. According to Greenstock's account,

Palestinians

were not only asked to delete the word Palestine, they were being asked

to replace it with Samaria, the Biblical Hebrew name used by

Israel for part of the occupied West Bank and embraced by the

Israeli settler movement. Think about what that means.

Palestinians are being asked not merely to surrender the name of their homeland,

they're being asked to adopt the name preferred by the people

dispossessing them, to rewrite their geography,

rewrite their history,

and teach that rewriting to their children.

There's something monstrous about demanding that a people describe their own

land in the language of those dispossessing them.

And consider the grotesque inversion of priorities.

Across the occupied West Bank, Palestinian land is being swallowed by

settlements and outposts. Settlers attack villages, torch

homes and cars, destroy olive groves, terrorize

families, drive people from land they've inhabited

for

generations, entire communities face displacement.

And amid all this, the man supposedly helping to make peace

arrives with a message for the Palestinians, "Change your textbooks."

Apparently, erasing Palestine on the ground

is not enough.

It must disappear from the map, from the textbook, from the vocabulary of

Palestinian children. And who better to deliver the message than

Tony Blair? Our celebrated peace mediator.

Of course, Blair says Greenstock's account

is a complete fabrication.

Fabrication from Tony Blair of all people, the man who took

Britain into the catastrophic Iraq war on claims about

weapons of mass destruction that proved disastrously fake.

And after helping unleash one of the most disastrous wars in modern Middle

Eastern history, Blair underwent an extraordinary career

transformation. He became a Middle East peace

envoy. You really couldn't invent it. And his record as an envoy?

Well, Palestinian officials accused him of

privileging Israeli security

demands over Palestinian rights.

Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath said Blair's meager

achievements reflected his efforts to please the Israelis, and that's

diplomatic language. Former British diplomats eventually called

for him to go.

Then came Blair's other great post Downing Street vocation, making money,

a great deal of it. Banks, corporations, governments, Gulf

monarchies, especially Gulf monarchies.

His consultancy empire earned tens of millions with commercial

relationships stretching from Kuwait to Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund

Mubadala. Apart from Israel, Blair seems to reserve his warmest

affections in the region for its dictators and autocrats.

After the military overthrew Egypt's elected president

and security forces carried

out the bloody Rabaa massacre of protesters killing hundreds in broad

daylight,

Blair emerged as one of the most enthusiastic Western advocates of the

country's new dictator, Abdel Fattah el Sisi.

Apparently Arabs are entitled to neither democracy nor rights.

Tony Blair, on the other hand remains perfectly

entitled to their rulers'

minions. And now this same man has been entrusted

with

helping determine the future of Gaza.

But perhaps Blair isn't an embarrassing anomaly on Trump's board of peace.

Perhaps he's its perfect representative. Look at this peace process.

Gaza lies devastated. Palestinians still mourn their dead.

Families still live in tents, and the self-appointed custodians of

Gaza's

future discuss investment, real estate,

coastlines, uh, productive assets, and even the prospect of

giving the deeply compromised Palestinian authority a subordinate

small role comes with yet another condition: Erase Palestine from

Palestinian textbooks, replace it with Samaria, and they

call this Palestinian Authority reform.

For decades, Palestinians have been told renounce

resistance, police your

own people, satisfy Israeli security demands. This

is not reform.

This is an endless test of submission.

Give up your land piece by piece, then your sovereignty, your

rights, your history, finally, your name.

Surrender yourself concession by concession until there's nothing

left of you to concede or surrender.

And now comes the final perversity, participate in your own erasure.

Falsify your own geography, your own name with your own hand.

The settlers bulldozer and the occupying army are not enough.

The Palestinian must be made an accomplice in his own

disappearance. The British government Blair once led

is condemning what Foreign

Secretary Ed Miliband calls appalling settler terrorism and

promising measures against Israel's illegal settlement project.

Blair meanwhile, is busy pressuring Palestinians to remove

the name of the

state his own former party says it is trying to save.

And on the very day Greenstock's account emerged, a video circulated of

Israeli settlers singing before Netanyahu about Palestinian

villagers and towns names disappearing.

The settlers sing the wish, Blair carries its bureaucratic translation

to

Ramallah. Netanyahu changes the map through

settlement and occupation,

Blair changes it topographically.

He twists the Palestinians arm with the settlers gun to their heads.

And let's dispense with the fiction about Blair's politics.

Blair is neither Labor, nor socialist, nor meaningfully of the Left.

He's not even the third wave politician he once pretended to be.

Today he's a far right Zionist concerned with lining his own pockets and

serving the interests of the powerful.

In the Middle East, his priorities have become perfectly clear

Arab

money and the advancement of an Israeli supremacist agenda

across the region. But there's one thing Blair Kushner,

the so-called Board of

Peace and their friends in Israel's annexationist Right have badly

miscalculated. Palestine is not theirs to erase.

They have the armies, the bulldozers, the money, the diplomatic

machinery, but none of it has extinguished the

Palestinian attachment to the land.

None of it has erased Palestinian memory, and none of it has produced

the Palestinian disappearance they have spent generations trying to

engineer, quite the opposite. Palestine has become a cause carried by

millions across the world, so call it Samaria

or whatever name you conjure up.

Rename the hills, bulldoze the homes, rewrite the maps,

erase Palestine from every textbook you can lay your hands on, you will

still have the same problem, the Palestinians are still there

and so is Palestine. Tony Blair and his grotesque board

of peace will become historical footnotes.

Palestine will not.