Former British prime minister Tony Blair was recently sent by Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to pressure the Palestinian Authority into replacing the word “Palestine” in school textbooks with the Jewish name “Samaria”, according to a report by Middle East Eye.
Jeremy Greenstock, who served as Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003, told Middle East Eye that Blair had attempted to pressure the Palestinian Authority, saying that if it was serious about being regarded by the Board of Peace as capable of reaching an agreement with “Israel” to end the war on Gaza, references to “Palestine” should be removed from school textbooks.
In an extended interview on David Hearst’s podcast, parts of which were translated by Arabi21, Greenstock said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected the demand.
Greenstock added that his former boss was facing “difficulties” in his new role overseeing post-war administration in Gaza on behalf of the Board of Peace.
“I recently understood that he was asked by the Board of Peace to go to Ramallah and demand that any mention of the word Palestine be removed from the Palestinian educational curriculum if they wanted the Board of Peace to treat them as capable of reaching an agreement with Israel to end the current conflict that began from October 7 onwards,” Greenstock said, adding that he had received the information from a ministerial-level source.
“But the mere fact that the Board of Peace requested that this be included in the Palestinian educational curriculum makes me question the principles on which the board operates, and its understanding of justice, fairness and the history of this issue,” he added.
Middle East Eye said the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change denied that the former British prime minister had made such a demand.
Blair is known to have travelled to “Israel” in mid-August alongside Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Nikolay Mladenov, the High Representative for Gaza.
During the interview, Greenstock defended Blair’s role in the Iraq War and praised him for persuading then-US president George W. Bush to seek United Nations authorisation before the invasion. However, he sharply criticised Blair’s current role on the Board of Peace, the body established by the US president to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction.
Greenstock Calls the Board of Peace an Arbitrary Committee
Greenstock, who left government service in March 2004, described the Board of Peace as an “abstract and arbitrary committee” whose composition would have no meaningful impact on the ground, whether with Israel or the Arab side of the Palestinian issue.
“I do not think the Board of Peace is a structure strong enough to carry the burden of the difficult decisions that will have to be taken over the future of the Palestinian territories,” he said.
US President Donald Trump established the so-called Board of Peace after Washington brokered a ceasefire agreement in October last year to end the Israeli war on Gaza.
On Tuesday, Israeli authorities began imposing their school curriculum on more than 45,000 Palestinian students in government schools in Jerusalem as part of a broader crackdown on education in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Middle East Eye learned that a revised curriculum is being circulated secretly for consultation in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Earlier this year, UNRWA in Lebanon, which is banned by “Israel”, faced a coordinated campaign over its school curriculum.
UNRWA in Lebanon replaced the word “Palestine” with “the West Bank” and “the Gaza Strip” on some maps included in sixth-grade regional geography materials, a move that triggered strikes and protests.
This came despite an independent review team led by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna finding no evidence to support Israeli accusations that UNRWA employees had participated in terrorist organisations, although the review issued 50 recommendations aimed at “strengthening the neutrality of the United Nations organisation”.
Meanwhile, in Britain, a cross-party group of MPs called for an investigation into the British Museum’s removal of the terms “Palestine”, “Palestinian” and “Israeli occupation” from its displays.
A Middle East Eye investigation found that the museum’s decision to remove the terms came as a direct response to pressure from pro-Israel activists.
Warning to the New British Prime Minister
During the interview, Greenstock, who was among a group of ambassadors who called for a ban on all goods originating from illegal Israeli settlements, issued a clear warning to new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham over the need to confront Israel.
“Unless the Burnham government stands up for basic principles, how can it act according to them anywhere else?” Greenstock said.
“How can Andy Burnham go to Kyiv and support President Zelensky because the Russians invaded Ukraine illegally, in violation of United Nations principles?” he added.
A Warning to Israelis
Greenstock also directed a warning at Israelis.
“If I were an Israeli citizen, I would be concerned about my country losing its appeal as a soft power in the world. This is extremely important in the long term, and of enormous significance for peace and security in the Middle East, because some kind of settlement and security agreement with the Arab states and Iran must be reached after this fighting ends,” he said.
“There has to be some kind of settlement. We cannot invade Iran by land with the army, remove the regime, then withdraw and expect Iran to become a completely different country. That is not going to happen.”
Greenstock noted that Britain and the United States had not won a war since the Kosovo War, arguing that the principal reason for repeated failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria and now Iran was America’s excessive reliance on military force.
He said the legitimacy of using weapons to impose political will had diminished considerably.
“We now live in a world where power has been distributed in many different ways and where soft power has become more important. The ability to persuade rather than coerce has become extremely important as the world has become freer and the number of decision-makers, particularly governments, has increased. The legitimacy of using weapons to impose one’s will has diminished in the eyes of the world.”
Iran War and the Mecca Agreement
Greenstock said Trump had misunderstood the nature of Iran from the beginning of the war.
“I saw no evidence that Washington had studied the possibilities that could result from an attack on Iran, including Iran’s ability to strike the other side of the Gulf and its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz, which they may have viewed simply as a matter of laying mines and then removing them,” he said.
“They did not calculate the asymmetric power of drone warfare, not only as a physical attack on different aspects of your military strength, but also as a deterrent to commercial shipping, oil movements and normal maritime trade, as well as the possibility of ships being targeted by drones in addition to the laying of mines in the strait. None of that seemed to me to have resulted from advance planning in Washington before the decision was made.”
Greenstock said the timing of the war had not been dictated by Israeli intelligence alone.
He argued that the decision to launch strikes on Iran was not coincidental, as it came at the height of speculation surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein files and legal cases being pursued against the Trump administration.
“It is no coincidence that the timing of the attack on Iran was influenced by events taking place domestically,” Greenstock said.
On the Mecca Agreement, Greenstock said the recently signed deal between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in Riyadh had emerged as a response to declining confidence in US power.
“The Mecca Agreement is a very clear statement of interest in self-sufficiency, but it does not cover every aspect of it. More needs to be done, and more will be done,” he said.
Greenstock identified two main reasons for declining confidence in the United States across the Middle East.
The first, he said, was that American military superiority would not clearly translate into political reform in the Middle East in the way Arab states had once hoped, nor even into compromises they might be willing to accept.
“American military power is therefore not achieving what it claims it can achieve,” he said.
At the same time, Greenstock said the United States was making clear, both rhetorically and practically, that its own interests under the slogan “Make America Great Again” came before the interests of its allies or any compromise concerning those interests.
As a result, he argued, both America’s image and its substance in the eyes of its Arab allies had diminished as events unfolded.
Greenstock said the world had entered a different era in which ethical principles in foreign policy were gradually disappearing.
“These are the standards and principles set out in the United Nations Charter and all the conventions associated with the United Nations. We are moving towards a more deliberate, and perhaps somewhat destructive, pursuit of national interests,” he said.
“This is a completely different situation from when I left government service in 2003. In 23 years, the world has changed remarkably, and nowhere has been affected by this, or seen a greater impact on regional politics, than the Middle East.”
“There is no set of principles that must be followed in the Middle East. The Arab states, which are the most numerous in the Middle East, have not come together to formulate some kind of framework, perhaps like the one we developed in Europe through the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe.”
