Gaza is an occupied territory. Its borders, airspace, imports, exports, and even calories are controlled by Israel and its Western backers. Gaza does not need another flag flown above its ruins; it needs the right to rebuild on its own terms.

The Mirage of “Transition”

Western governments are preparing a plan for Gaza’s postwar administration. The proposal, advanced through quiet coordination between Washington, London, and Jerusalem, would establish a new international body called the Gaza International Transitional Authority to govern the territory for several years following the conflict. The concept, promoted as a stabilization effort, is said to draw inspiration from earlier foreign-led missions in Kosovo and Lebanon.

At the center of this “plan” was the risible suggestion that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair should lead the authority, overseeing Gaza’s reconstruction, policing, and governance on behalf of the self-proclaimed international community.

Gaza Governor Blair. “You What?!”

Tony Blair, then British Prime Minister, gave George W. Bush political cover for the invasion of Iraq which resulted in the deaths of over 1,000,000 Iraqis. On July 23, 2002, as recorded in the infamous Downing Street Memo, Blair’s government reviewed the case for the war and concluded that “the [U.S.] intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Put another way, President Bush was lying about Iraq being a threat.

The British government, led by Blair, knew Bush was lying. Tony Blair gave special legitimacy to that lie. The U.S. attack on Iraq commenced seven months later.

Blair’s slavish devotion to the Western narrative, no matter how totally corrupt, credentials him well to lead a proposed Gaza International Transitional Authority, an interim body that would rule Gaza for several years before handing power to a restructured Palestinian Authority.

This is an imperial project by definition, one that would embed permanent control, deepen division, and ensure that Gaza will be subjugated. What a surprise.

Enter Tony Blair as a peace envoy, illustrating the grotesque inversion of reality wherein an architect of war becomes an exemplar of peace for a people who have experienced the ravages of genocide at the hands of the very western interests Blair continues to serve. 

More recent reports indicate President Trump or Trump-aligned representatives will also take part in this pretense of governance, but my guess is that the grim implications of such an endeavor will give the White House pause and provide even more encouragement for the appointment of Blair as Governor of the Gaza Occupation, packaged as reform.

The proper motto of this cynical rebranding of colonial rule by the same powers who drew the map of the Middle East, should be: ‘What is broken, stays broken.’ Under this condition, imperialism as humanitarianism becomes war as peace.

Who better to keep this wretched system in place than Blair, who as the envoy of the Middle East’s Quartet (composed of US, EU, UN and Russia) from 2007-2015, served Israel’s interests alone.

Kosovo: Occupation Disguised as Liberation

Let’s dive deeper into the proposition that Blair and his advocates present Kosovo and Lebanon as what they propose to do in Gaza, demonstrating that international administration can produce liberal democracy.

In their telling, NATO’s 1999 intervention was a triumph. Milosevic’s forces were expelled, the United Nations assumed control, and a stable state eventually emerged.

But history tells a different story. Under the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, foreign officials assumed full executive, legislative, and judicial control.

Local leaders were reduced to consultation. At first, this was accepted as liberation. Within five years, it was understood to be not liberation but occupation.

Riots erupted in 2004. The phrase “UNMIK equals governance by bullets” captured the truth of an unaccountable government imposed without consent. .

Kosovo today is undergoing an even more rigid implementation of a failed and wrong headed model of forced fracture and sectarian governance masquerading as peace and democracy. It is a place where Western powers celebrate the illusion of stability while maintaining the reality of dependency. The Kosovo model which institutionalized occupation under international management is proposed for Gaza.

Lebanon: The Architecture of Division

Both Kosovo and Lebanon were built on the same imperial premise: Divided peoples are easier to control than united ones.

The Lebanon model entrenched colonial sectarianism under local disguise. Under the French Mandate beginning in 1920, Lebanon became a testing ground for what the West still calls power sharing. France redrew borders to create a Christian majority state under Maronite leadership and wrote sectarian identity into the constitution.

The National Pact of 1943 later codified this arrangement, guaranteeing each religious community fixed control of the highest offices: The presidency to a Maronite Christian, the prime minister to a Sunni Muslim, and the speakership of parliament to a Shia Muslim.

What looked like balance was in truth a system of permanent division. This structure was not born from Lebanon’s culture. It was born from French colonial strategy, designed to preserve influence by keeping the country internally fragmented.

Over time, sectarianism became not a reflection of society but its architecture. Patronage, corruption, and militia rule followed. Every community became a fiefdom, every ministry a prize for one sect’s elite.

When civil war erupted in Lebanon in 1975, the fault lines had already been laid by this colonial inheritance. The war was the logical outcome of a system that defined citizens first by confession and then by allegiance. Even the Taif Agreement of 1989, which ended the war, merely recalibrated the quotas. It did not remove the sectarian scaffolding that guaranteed paralysis.

The result is a nation where governance itself is gridlock, where corruption, inequality, and dependency masquerade as coexistence.

That Lebanon is now invoked as a plan for Gaza, manufactured fragility presented as multicultural harmony, endless negotiation sold as peace demonstrates the West knows nothing about Lebanon and even less about Gaza.

Repeating History in Gaza

Applying the Lebanon approach to Gaza is to deliberately reproduce the conditions of conflict and call it reconstruction. It is to confuse division for diversity, subjugation for security, and occupation for order.

Gaza is not a failed state in need of administration. It is an occupied territory. Its borders, airspace, imports, exports, and even calories are controlled by Israel and its Western backers. It has lived under blockade and bombardment for years. Its economy and infrastructure are systematically strangled.

An imported administration, armed, funded, and directed by outsiders would not bring relief. It would extend the existing system of colonial control, formalizing it under international management.

Such a mission would amount to the same outcome: Foreign rule as liberation.

Gaza does not need another flag flown above its ruins; it needs the right to rebuild on its own terms.

Lessons Unlearned: From Sykes-Picot to Blair

Western diplomats, custodians of the system that created the crisis, describe such missions as temporary. Gaza knows what ‘temporary’ means: Decades of interim arrangements that never end, checkpoints that never close, and an occupation that has metastasized into permanence.

From the Sykes-Picot Agreement to the Balfour Declaration, Britain and its allies carved the Middle East into artificial states, installed sectarian governments, and called it order, creating conditions for the sectarian government of Israel born of partition and maintained through military dominance.

The fossilized thinking of Sykes-Picot and Balfour creeps along through the hoary pretense that the so-called civilized West must oversee the unstable East, through an insidious colonial mission repackaged as a twenty-first century imperative.

A Tale of Two Leaders

Tony Blair and I stood on opposite sides of history.

Blair used his office to justify the invasion of Iraq. I used my position as a member of the United States House of Representatives to try to prevent it.

I was not a head of state, but I used every power in the congressional parliamentary playbook to challenge both Bush and Blair, including helping to mobilize millions of people against the Iraq war.

That contrast matters. The same governments that waged that war based on lies now want to place Tony Blair in charge of Gaza, as if the co-author of one tragedy could administer the cure for another.

What Real Peace Requires

The attempt to manage Gaza as an isolated province under international administration is the latest stage in a century of colonial containment. It mirrors the British Mandate’s logic; to stabilize through control, to promise independence while denying it in practice.

This is not a conflict between two equal sides. It is a prolonged occupation underwritten by Western arms and Western diplomacy. To speak honestly about peace in the Middle East is to confront that reality.

A real peace cannot be built upon partitions, blockades, and externally imposed governments. It must begin with the recognition of Palestinian sovereignty, not as a concession but as a right. It must mean the end of occupation, the dismantling of apartheid systems, and the restoration of equality under law.

Until the world is willing to face the full moral and historical truth of Palestine, every transition plan will simply be another name for domination of what was once a single, continuous homeland concertedly reduced to isolated fragments.

The land of Palestine exists as disconnected enclaves, each surrounded by military checkpoints, walls, and settlements built as instruments of control, in defiance of international law.

Gaza is sealed from the sea and air. The West Bank is carved into zones of occupation, each overseen by Israeli forces and illegal settlers. East Jerusalem is being erased through bureaucratic strangulation and displacement. What remains of Palestine is a patchwork of prisons, the deliberate outcome of a violent colonial system which makes mockery of self-governance.

Israel’s government, shaped by apartheid policies and militarized expansion, has created the instability it now claims to fight. It has normalized violence, dehumanized millions, and extinguished any hope for peace.

A transitional authority in Gaza is not meant to change that underlying reality. The true transition, from occupation to coexistence, from apartheid to equality must begin inside Israel.

Dennis J. Kucinich served sixteen years in the United States Congress and twice ran for President of the United States on a platform of peace, truth, and constitutional integrity. He led the opposition to the Iraq War and introduced Articles of Impeachment against President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for misleading the nation into war.

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