Those complicit in ‘genocide’ planning Palestinians’ future

Last week's White House meeting to discuss a post-war plan for Gaza was unlikely to reassure Palestinians and Arabs who were not invited. The meeting was attended by ex-British Prime Monister Tony Blair, former presidential adviser Jared Kushner, envoy Steve Witkoff, and, unexpectedly at the end, Israeli prime ministerial aide Ron Dermer. This is hardly the personnel to devise a plan for Gaza's governance and reconstruction. Instead the meeting was part of a neo-colonial effort to dictate terms to Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank.

Blair is, of course, the most high-profile appointee whose presence lends false credibility to post-war Gaza planning by Westerners. Blair's regional record has not been positive. While in office from 1997-2007, Blair joined US President George W. Bush to wage a deadly and disastrous war on Iraq in 2003 with the aim of toppling that country's president Saddam Hussein as he was seen as an obstacle to regional peace with Israel. An estimated one million people died in Iraq during and as a result of the war which spawned Daesh and another war between 2014-2019 that involved the US and its Western allies. Daesh fugitives continue to roam the desert in western Iraq and eastern Syria. International law experts say Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes.

To court the Arabs after the Iraq war debacle, Blair urged the Quartet – made up of the US, UN, EU, and Russia – to issue by the end of 2005 a roadmap for the emergence of a Palestinian state. Blair would have known that this initiative would come to nothing due to the special relationship the US has with Israel. In 2005 Blair endorsed the US-Israeli understanding which said under a deal for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, major Israeli settlement blocs housing 93,000 would remain in place although they are illegal under international law.

In 2006, Blair vetoed a UN Security Council resolution demanding Israel end its war on Lebanon as he sought to continue the conflict to enable Israel to decimate Hizbollah. Blair was subsequently forced to leave office due to this stand and was promptly appointed the Quartet's Middle East envoy. In 2010, Blair said reaching a peace agreement based on the two-state solution was not unrealistic. During the presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2017) who promoted the two-state solution, Blair said he regarded Israel's plans to build settlement homes in East Jerusalem as undermining talks without proposing sanctions. Blair resigned from the Quartet in 2015 after achieving nothing.

In December 2016, he founded the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) to advocate peaceful solutions for conflicts, including in the Middle East. In February 2025, the TBI and the Boston Consulting Group drew up a plan adopted by the Trump administration to transform Gaza into an investment zone and tourist destination. This was dubbed the "Trump Riviera" and involved the expusion of at least half Gaza's 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza. When there was international outrage over this plan, TBI staff admitted they had taken part in post-war planning for Gaza, but the Institute said it did not participate in discussions of or endorse this plan which was condemned by Palestinians and Arabs.

Jared Kushner served as Trump's regional adviser during his first term in office (2017-2021). In 2020, Kushner put foward a plan to "save the two-state solution" under which Pales-tinians would gain a state with restricted sovereignty in Gaza and in most of the West Bank. While this would include land swaps from inside Israel, it would annex 30 percent of the West Bank, all its settlements and the Jordan Valley, and retain nearly all East Jerusalem. This was a mockery of the two-state solution which mandates a sovereign Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Kushner is a real estate investor and newspaper publisher who married Trump's daughter Ivanka. Kushner has longstanding personal and family ties to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Kushner heads a family foundation which has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Israeli West Bank settlements. While most of the donations have been to settlement religious institutions, at least $298,000 were given between 2010-2022 to the "Friends of the Israeli Defence Forces" which runs educational and cultural programmes for Israeli soldiers. Palestinian analyst Diana Buttu told US Public Radio in 2016, “If anyone was foolish enough to believe that a Trump administration might succeed in negotiating a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, this is further evidence of their delusions.”

Peace envoy Steve Witkoff is another real estate dealer who has known Trump for 40 years and plays golf with him. Although Witkoff has had no political experience, he was chosen for this highly sensitive and delicate job which involves neogitations over Iran's nuclear programme, a Gaza ceasefire and an end to the war betweeen Russia and Ukraine. In July, during a brief visit to besieged and blockaded Gaza, Witkoff paused at the US-Israel Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) which doles out limited food to chaotic throngs of desperate Palestinians, 1,400 of whom have been shot dead by the Israeli army since the GHF began operations on May 27th. So far, Witkoff does not seem to have convinced Trump to halt GHF distributions or demanded that Trump tell Netanyahu to end his five-month blockade of Gaza. UN experts say this has led to deprivation, starvation, and famine in the strip.

Interloper Ron Dermer is the Florida-born Israeli politician who has served as minister of strategic affairs since 2022 and hostage negotiator since early this year. After working as Israeli economic attaché in Washington from 2005-2006, he had to give up his US citizenship. Dermer has become a close adviser to Netanyahu and has been involved in talks with the Palestinians.

Director of the Palestinian Besan Centre for Research and Development Ubai al-Aboudi told The Guardian, "There is not a single Palestinian at the table whether it’s the Palestinian leadership or representatives of Palestinian civil society and the wider Palestinian communities.

"This is colonial practice. Palestinians must decide their own governance and future. But instead, while we are being genocided, the same powers complicit in the genocide are planning for our future."