From Balfour to Trump/Blair: They Understand, They Just Don’t Care
Trump’s 20-point Gaza plan with Blair feels like Iraq and mandate Palestine returning, staged as if history never happened and as if we were all fools.
When I first heard the news, I thought they had managed the impossible. A plan even more careless, more reckless, more scornful than Trump’s so-called Gaza Riviera scheme, which imagined Palestinians “temporarily removed” while his real estate courtiers rebuilt the enclave into a beachfront resort.
This time Palestinians are “free” to stay on their own land. Shukr ya rabb! There are only a few “issues” with this plan, one of them being that it is a colonial construct.
According to Israeli and Western reports, under Trump’s 20-point “day after” plan control of Gaza would shift to a provisional transitional authority described as a “technocratic and apolitical Palestinian committee.” This committee would operate under the oversight of an international “Board of Peace” chaired by Donald Trump and composed of other world leaders and officials, among them former British prime minister Tony Blair.
The former British prime minister who followed George W. Bush into Iraq on the fiction of weapons of mass destruction, leaving the country deeply scarred. And in a plot twist, it is that same man who now reappears as a candidate for Gaza’s future.
There is another irony. Just as Iraq was left scarred by Bush/Blair’s war, this Trump/Blair plan bears the same ethos as earlier schemes meant to manage relations between Israel and the Palestinians, including the Oslo Accords. Like so many such designs, it casts Israelis as holders of rights and Palestinians as bearers of obligations.
Jadaliyya’s co-editor and Palestinian analyst Mouin Rabbani described the scheme as another hamster-wheel construct in which no matter how hard or fast Palestinians run, they will never get anywhere because the system is rigged that way.
There are other alarming points. Suffocating parallels to past failures. Blair’s earlier stint as Quartet envoy (the US–EU–UN–Russia body for Middle East peace, a role he held from 2007 to 2015) left Palestinians with economic projects but no protection against settlement expansion, no check on settler violence, and no progress toward statehood. Many accused him of blocking it as a friend of Israel. Yet a decade later, and two decades after Iraq, he resurfaces as the man trusted to steer Gaza’s reconstruction with a plan he believes is clever.
Why does he think it is clever? Because this Trump plan models itself on the failed governing authority of Iraq, the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), set up in 2003 and shaped with Blair’s complicity as Washington’s war partner.
That body survived only a year but managed to lose eight billion dollars of reconstruction aid. The Pentagon still cannot account for ninety-five percent of the money.
At home, here in the UK, Blair remains a toxic figure, his reputation permanently scarred by Iraq. That he should be floated again for a role in Palestinian governance has been met with disbelief and weary recognition. The Middle East, it seems, is never free from the staging of the same play with (almost) the same actors.
Surely, the proposal reeks of mandate-era colonialism: almost an American ‘governor’, almost a British ‘viceroy’ that will govern Gaza. As if we have circled back a century without learning a thing.
In 1917 Arthur Balfour, then Britain’s foreign secretary, issued the Balfour Declaration (which I will examine in depth in future posts), pledging support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine while reducing the majority population to the status of “non-Jewish communities” entitled only to civil and religious rights. As George Antonius described in his seminal 1938 work The Arab Awakening, it was “the starting point of the Palestinian tragedy.”
Britain then governed under the League of Nations mandate, presenting itself as trustee of order and modernisation. In practice it presided over repression and the steady entrenchment of Zionist settlement. To imagine Tony Blair in such a role today is to revive that history in grotesque form. It is the continuation of the same tragedy Antonius identified nearly a century ago — or rather its deliberate recycling.
The way this Trump–Blair plan is being commended by Muslim and European governments as a wise proposal makes me feel hopeless not only for the Middle East but for politics today, trapped in the grip of far-right figures. Either they do not understand why we are here, or they are too brazen to care. Both paths lead not to recovery but deeper into the abyss.
Francis Fukuyama, architect of the “end of history” thesis and a lifelong proponent of liberalism, recently admitted that the twin blows behind the decline of liberal confidence and the rise of Trump and his ilk were the Iraq war of 2003 and the financial crash of 2008. The lesson, in his words, was simple: re-regulate finance and avoid launching stupid wars on lies. Neither is being done. Instead, the West enters into one fateful bargain after another, complicit in Gaza, floating a spate of “day after” plans that mock both history and our intelligence.
Ask yourself these questions
First: is there not a single Palestinian, just one, who could lead this so-called technocratic body? One Palestinian, in this whole wide world, capable of carrying Gaza through a transitional period? Does that sound plausible to you, or merely another “side effect” of this hamster-wheel system? Second: how can we believe that Netanyahu will not resume his genocidal campaign after a few weeks? How can anyone trust a war criminal who only recently tried to kill Hamas’s chief negotiator in Qatar? Are these the actions of a man who seeks peace or intends to respect any plan? You know the answer.
The Turkish Fighter, the American Engine, and AKP Factions
The commotion after Erdoğan’s meeting with Trump at the White House last week has not subsided in Turkey. Trump’s unusually gentle, almost obsequious manner, the Instagram videos that shows how much Trump respects Erdogan fed the sense that some darker backstory or plot was about to unfold.
Yes, the US ambassador to Turkey and envoy to Syria, now familiar to readers of this publication as a tactless businessman, blurted out that he and Trump had concluded the way to win over Erdoğan was to grant him “legitimacy.” Yet the serving of legitimacy was so over the top it led everyone to question what was really happening here.
Even Erdoğan’s loyalists shared these suspicions. His small circle that wields power is said to be divided into three main strands, with the lower ranks split into further strands: one behind his son Bilal Erdoğan, another around his son-in-law and former finance minister Berat Albayrak, and the third under Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.
(This configuration is reminiscent of Mubarak’s Egypt and not unlike the way Trump operates. Did you know that Erdoğan first sent a message to Trump through his son Junior, saying Turkey would like to buy 300 Boeings if Trump invited him to the White House? This is how stately these two are.)
The apparatchiks belonging to these different camps around Erdogan have since squabbled over how positive, or positive at all, the US trip really was. Into this uncertainty came FM Fidan, whom Trump singled out as one of “the clever ones” alongside intelligence chief İbrahim Kalın, and whose announcement only deepened the rift.
Speaking two days after Erdoğan’s White House meeting with Trump, Fidan admitted that KAAN - Turkey’s fifth generation fighter jet - cannot enter serial production because its engines are still waiting to be delivered to Turkey pending approval from the US Congress. “Restrictions in our relationship with the United States will inevitably push us to seek other options,” he warned.
The claim reignited an evergreen debate. KAAN’s manufacturing was marketed to the Turkish public as the aircraft that would replace the F-16s and mark Turkey’s passage to technological independence. Ankara signed a contract with Jakarta in July to deliver forty-eight of them, and the first flight was meant to herald serial production by 2028. Yet the revelation that its engine is American exposes how little has changed since the 1950s, when Turkish squadrons depended on US supply chains and the Pentagon’s goodwill.
That dependence became stark in 2019, when Erdoğa bought the Russian S-400 missile system in defiance of Washington. The purchase was trumpeted as ‘a sovereign choice’, proof that Turkey would not be dictated to by NATO allies. The result was the opposite. The US responded by ejecting Turkey from the F-35 program, freezing delivery of six jets already paid for and cutting Turkish firms out of the supply chain. KAAN was then cast as the answer, a national fighter jet that would show Ankara could stand on its own. Yet to get off the ground, it still needs an American engine. Not good. Bad for optics, worse for real independence.
The head of the Presidency of Defence Industries, later clarified what Fidan had blurred. Twenty KAANs are scheduled for the Turkish Armed Forces by 2028, but until 2032 they will run on General Electric’s F110s. The jet that Erdoğan hails as a symbol of sovereignty cannot fly without a piece of American hardware. The “domestic and national” mantra collapses at the point where propulsion meets politics.
The main opposition CHP seized on the irony pointed out that Erdoğan has long paraded KAAN as evidence of a defence industry ninety percent local in content, a boast recycled in every election season. Now it turns out the aircraft depends on the very country that cast Turkey out of the F-35 program.
Fidan’s words also cut uncomfortably within the government’s own ranks, with some pro-government pundits calling his admission a faux pas, something best left unsaid to the public. Another display of fictionalisation within the small circle. It was a reminder that the AKP’s power rests on a show of strength that cannot conceal its material dependencies. Both inside and outside.
An article that opened my horizons