Anyone old enough may remember Robert Fisk, the late and acclaimed British journalist, bestowing the title ‘Lord Blair’ on the (still very much alive) former prime minister, in sarcastic acknowledgement of his blood soaked role including his services rendered in the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq and also the so-called ‘War on Terror’.   (Kut-el-Amara, in the Ottoman vilayet of Iraq is where British forces suffered a humiliating defeat during World War I).

Fisk had always considered Balfour, Sykes and Picot to be the ‘epitome of Middle Eastern hubris’. When Blair, in his role as the Quartet Middle East envoy, went to Jerusalem on a mission to ‘create Palestine’ in 2007, an enraged Fik asked: ‘Has this wretched man learned nothing? How can Blair possibly be given this job?’ 

Fisk never lived to see the second act, in which Trump appointed the disgraced former prime minister to his ‘Board of Peace’, and as viceroy of the new colony of Gaza. On 30 September 2025, with characteristic bluster and fanfare, Trump unveiled his 20-point ‘peace plan’ at a press conference alongside Netanyahu. It was, POTUS declared, ‘a big big day, a beautiful day, potentially one of the great days ever in civilization’, while awarding himself an ‘A for settling 7 wars’, and reflecting that this ‘hadn’t happened for 3,000 years’.   

Trump’s proposal seems to be taken straight out of the colonial and neo-colonial playbooks of the 19th and 20th centuries: unlawful mandates, partitions, and the reduction of human justice to territorial division.   What is actually new about any of this, apart from the lethal AI warfare of the 21st century, is that complicit western governments are apparently willing to effectively endorse live-streamed genocide and a modern-day ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ that would have shamed Herod himself.  

As anybody even vaguely familiar with the region knows, history and context are everything, with both being, needless to say, entirely absent from this latest iteration of US ‘peace diplomacy’. This is no surprise to Palestinians and the broader region who are all too familiar with lies, distortions and misrepresentations.

Some historical background is clearly in order here. Let us start with the secret 1916 Sykes–Picot, agreement, in which Britain and France conspired to carve up the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman empire, with Britain seizing what is now Iraq, Transjordan (current-day Jordan) and Palestine, while France took what became Syria and Lebanon. For the British, it hardly mattered that they had already (in the 1915 Hussein–McMahon correspondence) promised an Arab kingdom to the Sherif of Mecca (great-great grandfather of Jordan’s King Abdulla II). British duplicity then entered something of an apogee with the 1917 Balfour declaration, which promised to create a ‘Jewish national home’ in Palestine while blithely ignoring Arab Palestinians (re-labelled as ‘the non-Jewish inhabitants’) who accounted for more than 90 per cent of the population when Jews owned no more than two percent of the........

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