Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, I shall endeavour to be here for our midweek Clubland Q&A taking questions from Mark Steyn Club members live around the planet at 3pm North American Eastern - which is 8pm British Summer Time/9pm Central European. Hope you can swing by.

~That Trump Gaza deal? To be honest, I don't have a clue. Might be - for the first time in three-quarters of a century - a genuine breakthrough, as opposed to the phone-baloney breakthrough of the Oslo "accords".

On the other hand, I am instinctively opposed to anything that bigs up Tony Blair - even under Trump's chairmanship, as the new "Board of Peace" will be. As a UK correspondent emailed this morning: why put the Anti-Christ in charge of the Holy Land?

To apportion blame more widely, the "Palestinian" question is intractable in part because it has had the misfortune to attract a unique amount of interference from the international do-gooder set. Re all this Euro-Commonwealth recognition of a non-existent Palestinian "state", I said the other day that the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation didn't need another krappistan to add to the five dozen UN votes they already have. But it's actually worse than that: were "Palestine" to rouse itself to rise to the low-grade dysfunctional level of your typical no-name Islamic krappistan, it would be a marvel to behold, and we would all rejoice.

Why can it not do that? One reason is that the "Palestinians" have been the preferred transnational house pets of the Blairite class for generations. The late 1940s was the era of the great population displacements in both post-war Europe and the Indian sub-continent. Hundreds of millions were on the move hither and yon. On the Continent alone, there were an estimated sixty-five million "displaced persons"; over ten million ethnic Germans were kicked out of Mitteleuropa (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania) with the blessing of the Potsdam Agreement. Where are they know? Who knows? But they're not "refugees" in UN "camps". All but two had closed by 1952, and that last pair were gone from Europe by the end of the decade.

It's different in "Palestine". "Palestinians" are the only people on earth with their own purpose-built UN agency, and a fat lot of good it's done them. Gaza and the West Bank are the House of Lords of Displaced Persons (the old House of Lords, I mean, before - guess who? - Tony Bollocking Blair wrecked the joint). So official UN refugee status is passed down the generations ...like an English marquessate, except with all eleven kids inheriting the title. "Oh, so you fled in 1948? During the, er, Naqba?" "Er, no, that would be my great-great-grandfather. I was born in 2004."

Can you imagine what India or Central Europe would look like today if they'd applied that model? Instead, as is usually the way in such matters, the winners won, and the losers left. See the Empire Loyalist Parkway on the north shore of Lake Ontario: they were New Yorkers once. Or would you rather they'd been kept in official League of Nations refugee status since the New York Naqba? Venturing from their accommodations to gang-rape the hippie chicks at Woodstock?

Even in "Palestine", everyone with any get-up-and-go is got up and gone three generations back. They're the charming, urbane doctors and lawyers one occasionally meets in Paris and London. What remains in the UN "refugee" "camps" is the most comprehensively wrecked pool of human capital on the planet. Which is why the Egyptians and the Gulf monarchies et al want nothing to do with them. In 2003, just after the toppling of Saddam, I was on the Iraqi-Jordanian border, where I'd been told the UN had set up a huge refugee camp in preparation for the millions who'd be fleeing Baghdad. There was exactly one family there, with whom I spent a pleasant hour or so: a handful of Palestinians who'd been denied entry into Jordan. As I wrote in The National Post of Canada (here it comes, folks!) twenty-two sodding years ago, it's easier for a Palestinian to move to Toronto and become a subject of Queen Elizabeth than to move to Riyadh and become a subject of King Abdullah.

There's a reason for that. Would you want to hire this crowd as busboys and bellhops for Trump's new Gaza-lago resort?

So I am sceptical about this plan unless its intent is to weaken and ultimately destroy the transnational death-grip on "Palestine".As has been known for decades, UNRWA - the hereditary "refugee" agency - and Hamas are like one of those Kamala Harris Venn diagrams: around fifteen per cent of UN employees in Gaza are also working for Hamas's military wing. After seventy-five years running this racket, why would they not be?

And is Tony Blair the chap to end the racket?

De-UNRWA the Palestinian territories. If this is truly a breakthrough, that's a minimum first step.

~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a SteynOnline Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.