London, October 04: Palestinian official, Nabil Shaath, has considered Tony Blair, former British premier and current Mideast Quartet envoy, as being “useless.”
Shaath stressed that recently Blair “talks like an Israeli diplomat, selling their policies. Therefore, he is useless to us.”
Speaking to reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Shaath said that the proposal introduced by Quartet for renewal of direct peace talks was too vague.
He said while the Palestinian authorities have not yet urged the Quartet to substitute Blair, it was totally clear that he was not any more interested in Palestinian circles.
“Everyone had reservations about Blair’s performance, but we don’t want to embarrass him anymore. If you want to do it, you wait until things have quietened down.”
Describing Blair as Israel’s defence attorney, Shaath said Palestinians thought he would be a real support to them when he was chosen as Quartet envoy. “But he gradually reduced his role to that of asking the Israelis to take down a barrier here or a barrier there… He really escaped all the political requirements of his job as representative of the Quartet.”
Palestinian authorities have considered Blair untrustworthy ever since he was appointed special envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East when he left Number 10 Downing Street in June 2007. He was then asked by the US government to take on the part political mediator in the run up to the Palestinians’ bid for statehood at the United Nations. But was “parroting exactly what the Israelis wanted,” said Shaath
Analysts condemned the British foreign policy, declaring how people could ever think that the words “Blair” and “peace” would share the same significance. As he has been the one who involved Britain into five wars, and refused to condemn Israel when it was attacking Gaza in 2008/9, killing over 1,400 Palestinians.
Acting Palestinian Authority (PA) chief Mahmoud Abbas officially submitted his bid for UN recognition of a Palestinian state to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on September 23.
More than 100 countries have so far officially recognized Palestine as a sovereign state based on the pre-1967 borders, the boundaries that existed before Israel captured and annexed East al-Quds (Jerusalem), the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
——Agencies