The Kushner-Blair Gaza plan is a moral atrocity – and a policy catastrophe | Josh Paul

Jared Kushner and Tony Blair's neocolonial venture would be an incompatible transplant that would be rejected by the body

On my first day in Baghdad, after the mortar fire had subsided, I made my way to my office in the Republican Palace and set about the first task I had been given: writing a new policy for the Iraqi police on pregnant officers. To be clear, I was 26 and knew nothing about policing, nor about pregnancy, nor, for that matter, about Iraq, but I was part of the Coalition Provisional Authority - the American government that had been imposed after the war - and this policy, I was told, was what Iraq needed.

Five years later, I found myself sitting in a plush hotel suite in Jerusalem, as Tony Blair - one of the architects of the Iraq war, but now the quartet special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process", waxed lyrical on the economic growth that was occurring in the Palestinian city of Jenin. Having spent a significant amount of time the day before negotiating the myriad of Israeli military checkpoints that separated Jenin's dusty streets from the five-star German Colony Hotel where we were meeting, I could not square Blair's impression with my own reality.

Josh Paul served as a national aecurity consultant in the Coalition Provisional Authority for Iraq, a security sector governance adviser to the US security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian territories, and now leads Washington DC-based non-profit advocacy group A New Policy