Exclusive: Blair asked PA to remove 'Palestine' from textbooks, former UK envoy says

Exclusive: Blair asked PA to remove 'Palestine' from textbooks, former UK envoy says Submitted by David Hearst on Wed, 09/02/2026 - 10:30 In a wide ranging interview with MEE, Jeremy Greenstock questioned Blair's ability to act as a neutral intermediary and said he was facing 'difficulties' in his role overseeing postwar Gaza On Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair was recently sent by Donald Trump's Board of Peace to ask the Palestinian Authority (PA) to replace any mention of the word " Palestine " in schoolbooks with the Jewish designation of "Samaria", Middle East Eye has heard. Jeremy Greenstock, who was Britain's ambassador to the UN between 1998 and 2003, told MEE that Blair attempted to exert pressure on the PA and said that if it was serious about being seen by the Board of Peace as capable of reaching an agreement with Israel to end the war on Gaza , then the word "Palestine" should be erased from textbooks. In a wide-ranging interview on the David Hearst Podcast, Greenstock said the demand was rejected by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Greenstock also said that his former boss was experiencing "difficulties" in his new role overseeing the postwar management of Gaza for the board. "He recently, I understand, was asked by the Board of Peace to go to Ramallah and ask to remove from the Palestinian curriculum any mention of the word Palestine if they were to be treated by the Board of Peace as capable of coming to an agreement with Israel to end the current conflict that had stemmed from 7 October onwards," Greenstock said, adding that he received this information from a ministerial level source. "President Mahmoud Abbas said he would do no such thing," he said. "But the very fact that the Board of Peace could ask for that to be done in the Palestinian educational curriculum makes me wonder what principles the Board of Peace is working on, and what understanding they have of justice, of the sense of fairness, of the history of all of this," he added. Blair's Institute for Global Change (TBI) denied that the former UK prime minister made the request. Blair is known to have travelled to Israel in mid-August with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and high representative for Gaza, Nickolay Mladenov. The trio held crunch talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected the roadmap for Gaza, and then travelled to Cairo where they held meetings with a Palestinian technocratic group which is supposed to assume control of Gaza, as well as members of Hamas. During the interview, Greenstock defended Blair's role in the Iraq War and credited him with persuading then-US President George W Bush to seek a mandate from the UN before the invasion, but was trenchant about Blair's current role in the Board of Peace, the body established by the US president to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza. 'I don't think the Board of Peace is a strong enough construct to bear the weight of the difficult decisions that are going to have to be made about the future of the Palestinian territories' - Jeremy Greenstock, Former UK ambassador to the UN Greenstock said he didn't believe Blair was in a position to negotiate with both sides with equal respect. "Because of his record on Iraq and on Palestine since he left government, he will be seen as prejudiced. So I think he will have, and is having, difficulties." Greenstock, who left government service in March 2004, called the Board of Peace an "abstract and arbitrary committee" whose composition would not have any real effect on the ground with either Israel or the Arab side to the question of Palestine. "I don't think the Board of Peace is a strong enough construct to bear the weight of the difficult decisions that are going to have to be made about the future of the Palestinian territories." The so-called Board of Peace was established by US President Donald Trump after Washington brokered a ceasefire in October last year to end Israel’s war on Gaza. Hamas and other Palestinian factions agreed to a plan for their disarmament, but Israel has refused to withdraw until the process is complete. Since the ceasefire went into effect, Israel has repeatedly carried out air strikes and drone attacks across the enclave, with at least 1,300 Palestinians killed and more than 4,000 others wounded. On Tuesday, at least seven air strikes hit an area west of Gaza City within a 10-minute period before quadcopter drones surrounded the area and opened fire and dropped explosives at anyone moving. Erasing Palestine As part of a global campaign, Israel and its supporters have been intensifying efforts to erase the word Palestine from history books and museums. On Tuesday, Israeli authorities began imposing their curriculum on more than 45,000 Palestinian students in state-run schools in East Jerusalem, as part of a wider crackdown on education in the occupied area of the city. MEE understands that a revised curriculum is said to be in private circulation for consultation in the occupied Palestinian territories. Earlier this year, UNRWA Lebanon, which has been banned by Israel, also faced a concerted campaign over its curriculum. UNRWA Lebanon replaced the word "Palestine" with "West Bank" and the "Gaza Strip" on certain maps in its sixth-grade regional geography materials, a move that sparked strikes and protests. This came despite an Independent Review Group led by former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna finding no evidence to back Israeli accusations that UNRWA staff participated in terrorist organisations, although it did issue 50 recommendations "to strengthen the UN organisation's neutrality." Meanwhile, in Britain, a cross-party group of MPs has demanded an investigation into the British Museum's erasure of the words "Palestine", "Palestinian" and "Israelite occupation" from displays. Israel imposes curriculum on 45,000 Palestinian students in East Jerusalem Read More » A MEE investigation revealed that the museum's decisions to remove the terms came in direct response to lobbying by pro-Israel activists between October and December 2024. In the interview, Greenstock, who was among a group of ambassadors calling for a ban on all goods from illegal Israeli settlements, gave a clear warning to the new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham about the need to stand up to Israel. "Unless the Burnham government stands up for principles of a basic kind, how can it act on principles anywhere else?" Greenstock said. "How can Andy Burnham go to Kyiv and support President Zelensky because the Russians invaded Ukraine illegally against United Nations principles, to be condemned around the world for going against the United Nations Charter, and not stand up for justice in the Middle East in the Arab-Israel question?" Greenstock said that the UK needed to look "very carefully" at the weapons it was supplying Israel, and said that if Netanyahu or former defence minister Yoav Gallant arrived in Britain, they should be arrested. Both of them are the subject of arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court. "We're under an obligation through our treaty position in the UN and through our support for the statute of the ICC. I think as far as the ICC is concerned, and if anybody who had been indicted by the judges of the ICC, they should be arrested." Greenstock said he was convinced that Netanyahu's ambition was to deliver the promise he made to his father, Benzion Netanyahu, a scholar of Judaic history, to return the West Bank to Israeli sovereignty. "I'm convinced personally there needs to be final evidence of this, perhaps because it's not yet totally clear, but I'm convinced personally that Netanyahu has the ambition to deliver for his father the return of Judea and Samaria to Israeli sovereignty, and that he saw an opportunity in the 7 October attacks in 2023." He said that while the UK may be a huge admirer of what Israel had achieved as a democracy and technocratic society, he went on to add: "But if what it's doing in Palestine and in its region is against international law, is unacceptable to the majority of the public opinion in the UK, and is going much further than we ever thought Israel would go to try and kill every enemy they've got through assassination or military action rather than looking for a political settlement for all these problems, is this an Israel we can continue to trade with?" A warning Greenstock also had this warning for Israeli citizens. "If I was an Israeli citizen, I would worry that my country was losing soft power appeal around the world. It matters in the long term, and it matters for peace and security in the Middle East that there should be some sense of compromise, some compromise agreement on security with the Arab nations, with Iran when this fighting is over. "There's got to be a settlement somewhere. We can't invade Iran on the ground with soldiers and replace the regime, and then leave and expect Iran to be a totally different nation. That will not happen. "And to invade a country of 90 million-plus people with a few hundred thousand soldiers, it's just not realistic." Greenstock noted that neither Britain nor the US had won a war since Kosovo. He said the fundamental reason for serial failure in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria and now Iran was America’s overreliance on hard power, and that the legitimacy of using weapons to force your will had become much diminished. 'If I was an Israeli citizen, I would worry that my country was losing soft power appeal around the world' - Jeremy Greenstock, Former UK ambassador to the UN "We are in a world now where power has been diffused in all sorts of ways. And soft power has become more important. The capacity to persuade rather than compel has become extremely important as the world has got freer, as there have become many more decision-makers than just the governments out there. The legitimacy of using weaponry to force your will has become diminished in world opinion." Greenstock had first-hand experience of dealing with the Bush administration over the Iraq War and serving with Paul Bremer as viceroy in Iraq, as leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Reflecting on this, he said: "I think the UK did have an influence. Tony Blair persuaded, the British team persuaded the American team, and Colin Powell here was quite influential, to go through the UN in the autumn of 2002. That was the Brits at work. "But when it came to the timing of the military operation in Iraq in March 2003, Tony Blair's wish to postpone that and wait for longer until the evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was clear, was dismissed as being too much of a foot-dragging exercise." He said that as far as Iraq was concerned, Britain's influence on America when it came to the hard decisions was "second class, not first class". "George W Bush's two principal advisers were his Vice President Dick Cheney and the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. And the wisdom from the State Department expressed through Secretary Colin Powell never really entered the argument about all the nuances of what they were getting into. They were relying on hard power, and when those discussions take place and the British are involved, their influence on the hardest decisions is second class, not first class." Iran war and the Mecca Agreement Greenstock said Trump misunderstood the nature of Iran from the very start of this war. "I didn't see any evidence that Washington game-played the possibilities that might result from an attack on Iran. "The capacity of Iran to strike the other side of the Gulf, the capacity of Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, which they perhaps looked at as a matter of mining and then demining. "They hadn't calculated the asymmetric force of drone warfare, not only as a physical attack on various attributes of your hard power, but also as a deterrent to commercial shipping, to oil traffic, to normal trade at sea, of the possibility that ships might be struck by drones on top of the seeding of mines in the Strait. None of that seemed to me to have been game-played in Washington before that decision was taken." He said the timing of the war was not conditioned by Israeli intelligence alone. Greenstock said it was not coincidental that the strikes on Iran were launched when speculation about the Jeffrey Epstein files and legal cases against the Trump administration were at their height. Why the Mecca Agreement is a necessary show of force Read More » "It's not an accident that the timing of that attack on Iran might have been affected by things that were happening domestically." Greenstock said the Mecca Agreement signed between Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in Riyadh recently was a reaction to a loss of confidence in US power. "The Mecca Agreement is a very clear statement of interest in self-sufficiency, but it doesn't provide in that Mecca Agreement every aspect of self-sufficiency. More has got to be done and more will be done." Greenstock said there were two fundamental reasons for the loss of faith in the US in the Middle East. "One is that the hard power superiority of the United States is clearly not going to be translated into a reformation of Middle East politics as the Arab countries wanted, or what they would even compromise over and settle on. So American hard power is not doing what it claims to be able to do. "And at the same time, America is transparently, both rhetorically and in practice, putting its own Make America Great Again interests before any allied interests or compromise over those interests. "So both the tone and the substance in real life of what America stands for in the eyes of its Arab allies has been diminished by the trend of events." Greenstock said we were in a different era today. "We've moved into an era where moral principles in foreign policy are being gradually displaced. These are the norms and principles of the United Nations Charter and all the conventions under the United Nations family of organisations. We are moving into much more deliberate and to some extent destructive pursuit of national interest. "This is a different picture from the one when I left government service in 2003. In 23 years now, the world has changed very markedly, and nowhere has that been affected, has that had an effect on regional politics, than in the Middle East. "There isn't a set of principles to follow in the Middle East. The Arab nations, who are by far the more numerous peoples in the Middle East, have not got together to set down perhaps some kind of formula that we constructed in Europe under the Committee for Security and Cooperation in Europe." Occupation News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19 Update Date Override 0