The return of ‘Lord Blair of Kut-el-Amara’ – Middle East Monitor

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 land. 

After a series of defeats, British forces occupied Gaza and General Allenby made his victorious entry into Jerusalem in December 1917.  A military administration was immediately set up in 1918, designated Occupied Enemy Territory Administration (OETA/ South) i.e. Palestine.  Shortly after, a Zionist Commission headed by Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) was established and proceeded to Palestine to lay the groundwork for a ‘Jewish national home’. Its actions provoked the Military Administration, which opposed Zionist colonization and acquisition of land as the exclusive property of the Jews, on the grounds that the military administration was bound under international law to preserve the ‘status quo’ of the occupied territories.

The Zionist Commission certainly pushed even the patience of the military administration, whose officers frequently complained to their commanders of ‘a state within a state’. Edwin Montagu (1879–1924) an anti-Zionist Jewish member of the cabinet and Secretary of State for India, had already warned against the Balfour declaration in October 1917, describing Zionism, with considerable prescience, as ‘a mischievous political creed’ that would promote antisemitism.  Lord Curzon, (1859-1925) war cabinet member and leader of House of Lords, asked, in the same month, what international observers are still asking today, namely ‘what was to become of the people of the country’?

On 8th January 1918, Woodrow Wilson published his ‘14 points’ for world peace, which banned secret treaties, prohibited the annexation of colonies, and demanded that the wishes of the peoples concerned should be the primary consideration in any peace settlement.  

In April 1919, the Arab Congress in Damascus insisted on the absolute independence of Syria, extending from the Taurus mountains in the north to Rafah in the South, Palestine being an integral part of Syria.  The congress completely rejected the Balfour declaration, and chose Emir Faisal, leader of the Great Arab Revolt, as monarch of the whole of Syria. 

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The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 responded by creating an ‘Inter-Allied’   commission of Inquiry to Ottoman lands to ascertain regional wishes. The British, French and Italians refused to participate in the fact-finding commission, and so the American-led party of 40 members proceeded alone, under the leadership of H.C King, president of Oberlin College in Ohio, and C.R Crane a respected businessman and prominent Democrat. 

The Commission began work the following June, and toured the ‘length and breadth of Syria’, ie ‘Greater Syria’, before submitting its main recommendations to the League of Nations two months later, effectively endorsing this position on the grounds ‘[t]he country is very largely Arab in language, culture, traditions and customs’, while recommending ‘serious modification of the extreme Zionist program’. Acknowledging the extent of Palestinian Arab opposition to Zionist proposals, it added that ‘no British officer consulted by the commission believed the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms’.  The American King-Crane report remained secret until 1922, when only parts of it were published. This, incidentally, was also the year when, on 22nd June, the British House of Lords passed a motion (60 votes in favour to 25 against) rejecting the mandate on grounds of its violation of the McMahon pledges to Sherif Hussein, and because of its inherent injustice to Palestinians. 

On 19th September 1919, Balfour, then in Paris, submitted his ‘Memorandum Respecting Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia’ to the British government, brazenly stating: ‘Are we going “chiefly to consider the wishes of the inhabitants?”  in deciding which [ mandate] is to be selected?… we are going to do nothing of the kind. …  They may freely choose, but it is Hobson’s choice after all’. 

Balfour made it crystal clear that although the mandate system was understood to be a ‘trust of civilization until nations could stand alone’, this was still old style 19th century colonialism disguised in a ‘civilised’ new cloak now called the ‘Mandate’ system. 

Faisal’s short-lived kingdom of Syria abruptly ended, when French troops, with British connivance, entered Damascus on 25th July 1920 under general Gouraud and deposed him. This was the beginning of the French and British mandates in Syria and Palestine, producing shock waves that continue to reverberate in the Arab psyche. Meanwhile, the Zionist Herbert Samuel launched his war against Arab nationalism, even before he assumed his role as Palestine’s first High Commissioner, strongly opposing the unity of Syria and advising the British government that recognising Faisal as King of Syria, ‘would take the heart out of Zionism’. 

The military administration (OETA/ South) was replaced by civil administration on 1st July 1920. When General Bols, the military commander handed over the Palestine administration to the new High Commissioner, he told him he wanted him to sign a receipt. When a bemused Samuel asked for what, Bols replied, ‘for Palestine’ and produced a slip of paper that said: ‘Received from Major-General Sir Louis J. Bols, – One Palestine, complete-’, with the date and a space for Samuel’s signature.  After hesitating, Samuel signed and added ‘E&O.E’ (‘Errors and Omissions Excepted’).  This ominous anecdote was recorded in Herbert Samuel’s memoirs, and the original slip was sold in auction in New York many years ago.

The Mandate’s legal authority under most of Samuel’s term, however, was open to question because the League of Nations only ratified the mandate in 1922, with it coming into force in September 1923. However, as the peace agreement with Turkey was not signed until August 1924, the Mandate was therefore, from 1920 until 1924 a de facto authority that presided over occupied territory, and was as such, bound by the restrictions of the Hague Convention of 1907.  In other words, it had no authority to change the status quo and introduce measures that would apply in the longer term. This was perhaps moot in any case, as the British made it quite clear they had no intention of honouring obligations that might otherwise be presumed to apply under the Mandate. 

Throughout the remainder of its unhappy and deeply troubled existence, Mandate officials continued their efforts to square the circle by reconciling the needs and priorities of Palestinian Arabs with the commitment to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This eventually culminated in the events of 15 May 1948, when the exasperated British swiftly withdrew and abandoned the mandate to the United Nations. The Jewish state was born on the same day. When the newly-born United Nations despatched the Swedish aristocrat/ diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte on a mediation mission to achieve peace and return the refugees to their homes, the Jewish extremist terror organisation Lehi (a forerunner of today’s extremists sitting in the Knesset) assassinated him in Jerusalem on 17 September 1948. This killed any meaningful peaceful mediation from the outset. 

The ensuing wars, death and destruction were inevitable, being forecast and foretold by numerous Arab, British and international observers from the Balfour declaration of 1917 onwards. 

Far from being uniquely egregious, Trump’s latest diplomatic tour-de-force is very much in the pedigree of past US interventions in the Israeli-Palestinian ‘conflict’ that became synonymous with duplicity and a studied indifference, bordering on callousness to the essential needs of Palestinians, along with the injustice they have suffered, and indeed continue to suffer. It would be no exaggeration to say that this ‘peace diplomacy’ became, over the course of successive administrations, synonymous with a conscious and deliberate oversight of the established historical facts, to the point of being institutionalised in a ‘process’ far more important than ‘peace’. Like international law, history became seen as an obstacle that needed to be ‘worked around’ or even ignored entirely. 

However, as has long been observed, and indeed established, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. Trump’s appointment of Blair, (and others), is a case-in-point, requiring oversight not only of up to one million dead Iraqis, but also an established colonial style, whose lineage can be traced from the early years of the 20th century up until the present day. This has condemned Palestinians -who have tediously cautioned that there cannot be peace without justice-, to historical injustice without end. In this and innumerable other respects, Palestine’s past is very much its present. 

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