Tony Blair? Why not bring back Bill Clinton? If Slick Willie could get Donald Trump a deal to end the war in Gaza, he'd likely give Clinton a call. Heck, Trump might even play nice with Hillary.
Not long ago, Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner drafted Blair to jump into the talks as a way to leverage his contacts in the region and craft a plan that could get universal buy-in. The former British PM had already been working on ideas for a "day after" plan in Gaza without Hamas, but Trump and Kushner persuaded Blair to adapt that for a more comprehensive effort to end the war and bring the hostages back to Israel.
The Times of Israel reports that the Blair plan has now begun to circulate through the stakeholders, but it's still missing the vital piece of the puzzle: How do you verifiably disarm and depose Hamas? The Blair plan proposes the usual -- a multinational peacekeeping force, under a different name:
Alongside establishing an alternative to Hamas through GITA, the plan also explicitly refers to the concept of “disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration” or DDR.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio may have been referring to that very idea when he said during a press conference with Netanyahu in Jerusalem that “Hamas can no longer continue to exist as an armed element,” as opposed to asserting that the terror group should not exist at all, which has been the Israeli prime minister’s framing. ...
Backing the civil police force will be the “International Stabilization Force (ISF) — an internationally mandated, multinational security force established to provide strategic stability and operational protection in Gaza during the transitional period.”
“It ensures border integrity, deters armed group resurgence, protects humanitarian and reconstruction operations, and supports local law enforcement through coordination — not substitution,” the plan states.
In an apparent reference to its task of combating remnants of Hamas, the plan says the ISF will “conduct targeted operations to prevent the resurgence of armed groups, disrupt weapons smuggling and neutralize asymmetric threats to public order and institutional functions.”
This 'ISF' proposal would sound like a good idea, except that this has been the Western strategy to freeze conflicts for decades. The UN used it in Lebanon for the last 40 years to disarm Hezbollah and keep them out of the sub-Litani region. How did that work out? UNIFIL won't lift a finger to stop Hezbollah in that area, which has led to repeated conflicts between Israel and Lebanon, and finally a full-scale war that is still ongoing, as UNIFIL won't enforce the terms of the most recent cease-fire either.
No one takes "peacekeeper" forces seriously, least of all radical Islamist terror networks. That model doesn't end wars; it extends them into perpetuity. Which country plans to send troops to engage Hamas in urban warfare as a means to disarm and dismantle them, other than Israel? The US won't do it. The UK won't do it. The Saudis aren't about to do it, nor the Jordanians, nor the Egyptians, who could solve the whole problem by annexing Gaza again and putting under military administration. The premise is absurd.
Unfortunately, this is the foundation of Blair's Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA) plan. Blair has made some great Power Point slides and org charts to lay out how GITA will govern Gaza as soon as Hamas gets disarmed and displaced, all of which means nothing until Hamas gets disarmed and displaced. Perhaps if everyone lets Israel finish the job in Gaza and finally destroy Hamas, GITA has some chance of success, but only if the IDF carries out the security mission. And Israel is not likely to do so only to hand the whole thing off to Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah, as Blair hopes to accomplish with GITA.
I don't blame Trump for at least giving Blair an opportunity to participate. However, Blair has been part of the problem for decades, along with the Clintons, and practically every other Western leader since Operation Desert Storm. They have pushed strategies to freeze the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the hope that more rational leadership would emerge from the PLO and Hamas. Instead, their weakness and vacillation has left the radicals convinced that the West has no long-term interest in opposing their terrorism, and that has incentivized the increasing atrocities in their provocations, leading directly to the October 7 massacres.
Unless and until the radicals learn that wars can be lost, that pattern will keep repeating. And if all the West can propose is more frozen conflict and feckless "peacekeepers" as a response to annihilationist terrorism, then actual peace will never be achieved.
If the West truly wants peace, make it clear that we will stand by and do nothing to contain Israel until they defeat Hamas the way the West defeated Germany and Japan in World War II, or until Hamas capitulates and goes into exile without its arms or its funding, and that the return of the hostages must be unconditional and immediate before any hostilities cease.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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