The circulating news about appointing or delegating Tony Blair to manage Gaza in a transitional phase, supported by the Trump administration and coordinated with Kushner and others, reopens the door to international trusteeship projects over our Palestinian people. These projects were discussed in my recent article titled “Trump’s Plan: Between Recycling Trusteeship and Challenging the Palestinians,” published days ago.

Today, the idea might be presented as a “temporary solution” to market the story of reconstruction and overcoming the Hamas dilemma, but in essence, it is merely an attempt to reproduce patterns of external control over our people’s decisions and the status of the PLO as the official representative holding geographic and political jurisdiction over all occupied Palestinian territories, which are increasingly recognized internationally, as well as over our people’s future and their right to sovereignty over their land and natural resources, especially gas and oil.

Tony Blair, whose name is linked to the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of its national state, is now proposed as a savior for a besieged people groaning under the horrors of the Israeli holocaust for two years, and under oppression extending since the first Nakba in 1948, accompanied by ethnic cleansing and followed by colonial expansion crimes until today. What legitimacy can he have in Gaza? And what popular acceptance can a project that excludes Palestinians from their right to self-determination and is managed externally obtain?

Some may see the plan as an attempt to find a “middle ground” between direct occupation and the return of the Palestinian National Authority while excluding Hamas. The absence of national consensus makes these proposals feasible, as national agreement on a program of common denominators has never been a luxury but a condition for the victory of any national liberation movement from the clutches of colonialism, from Algeria and Vietnam to South Africa and many other liberation struggles, where victory was impossible without unity or at least a temporary consensus among different forces based on national interests and the national independence declaration.

However, our internal crisis today, including the weakening of the Palestinian political system, absence of general elections, decline of the national movement, attempts to confiscate national decision or compromise with various conditions, and the division following the Gaza coup, all have weakened our ability to formulate a comprehensive liberation vision and face challenges united without external dictates. All this coincided with Netanyahu’s empowerment to wage a war of extermination, destruction, displacement, starvation, and colonial expansion called annexation, policies no different from those of all Israeli governments since the establishment of the colonial entity at the expense of our people’s rights and existence to implement the Zionist idea still agreed upon by all Israeli political poles, including the so-called Zionist opposition, without realizing that a people oppressing another cannot be free themselves.

Under this reality, Trump’s proposals become futile for our people and dangerous as they may open the door to a transitional phase turning into extended trusteeship that legitimizes excluding Palestinians and completes what the occupation began in attempts to erase identity, sovereignty, and control over resources and borders in American partnership to sustain the occupation based on policies of replacement, displacement, and extermination that did not arise by chance but from the Zionist mentality without waiting for justification to implement them.

This is not isolated from a broader plan through which Washington and Tel Aviv seek to reshape the region according to their interests, using Gaza as a testing ground to reproduce colonial patterns with new faces serving the New Middle East project. The clarity of this picture increased with Netanyahu’s recent fascist speech before an empty hall at the UN General Assembly yesterday, where he reaffirmed his intention to re-occupy Gaza, establish a civil administration, and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, in addition to his speech’s confirmations on implementing the colonial Zionist project.

The path to reconstruction and stability does not pass through Tony Blair or imposed trusteeships but through immediately stopping the holocaust, ending the occupation, lifting the siege, enabling our people to build their institutions on their land with free democratic will, and reviewing Palestinian positions among various parties towards a rational struggle vision. Anything else is merely recycling the crisis under new names, prolonging the historical injustice against our people, and keeping the region hostage to instability.

In this context, President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech before the UN General Assembly in 2014, 11 years ago, gains significant dimension when he said:

“Our Palestinian people, who have preserved the traditions of the Fedayeen and their national struggle since the revolution’s start in 1965, are steadfast in their right to defend themselves and resist the racist Israeli colonial occupation, and will not relinquish their legitimate rights to freedom and independence…”

This Palestinian voice finds its echo today at the United Nations, where Brazilian President Lula da Silva described in his recent UN speech “what is happening in Gaza as genocide, confirming that it would not have happened without the complicity of those able to prevent it, and that the Palestinian people have the right to continue their just national struggle for freedom and an independent state so they are not erased from existence.”

Meanwhile, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, whose US entry visa was stopped, said in his speech, “Humanity as a whole must immediately stop the genocide,” considering that words are no longer enough and calling for an international alliance for Palestine’s freedom and the occupation’s defeat.

The convergence of these free voices with our people’s liberation struggle and the global rise of the Palestinian intifada reaffirms Palestine’s status as a national and universal humanitarian cause, returning with our people’s steadfastness and the awakening of peoples to the forefront of international agendas amid the increasing isolation and deepening crisis of the occupation state. Our liberation struggle is the struggle of the free people of the world against injustice and colonialism. Since the immortal leader Yasser Arafat addressed the international family in 1974 saying, “I have come to you carrying an olive branch in one hand and a rifle in the other, so do not let the green branch fall from my hand,” this approach must be utilized and built upon to achieve our inalienable rights.