Sunday 1 March 2009

Blair Discovers Gaza

The Middle East peace envoy, Tony Blair, triumphantly announced that 62 years of bitter conflict were now at an end, after he finally found out where and what Gaza was and spent five minutes there.

The former Prime Minister - who has spent almost two frustrating years peering at an AA map and asking directions from passers-by - stepped gingerly across the border at an armed Israeli checkpoint yesterday.

For the first three minutes he kept jumping nervously back into Israeli territory within a few seconds - but he finally summoned up the courage to take a few hesitant steps into Gaza itself. Encouraged by the cheerful laughter of the Israeli border guards, he tried shouting, "Hello, I'm Tony Blair and I've brought you some peace!" to a Palestinian youth who was spraying graffiti on the massive concrete wall which seals off the Palestinian territory from the outside world - but the youngster immediately dropped his can of paint and ran away.

Mr Blair then said hello to a scrawny goat, which looked up apathetically and wandered off to look for more weeds. Somewhere in the distance a lorry backfired, and the Middle East peace envoy hurriedly leapt back into the safety of Israel, his historic peace mission fulfilled at last.

"I have reached out to the Palestinian community, and held talks at all levels," Mr Blair later told a press conference, after a change of trousers. "Apart from Hamas, of course, who I am told are very bad people. I can now confirm, having been there and seen for myself, that Gaza is a very peaceful place indeed and I didn't see a single Palestinian blow themselves up, or be blown up by the peace-loving armed forces of Israel, in all the time I spent there."

An Israeli general sitting next to Mr Blair then whispered something in his ear.

"Oh. Apparently I had talks with a representative of Hamas, too," he went on. "Well done, me. Er... was that the street artist or the goat?"

Mr Blair concluded the press conference by saying that he looked forward to being appointed peace envoy to Great Britain, which he thought was the next most likely trouble-spot to kick off.

"Apparently the people of that far-off, benighted land are in the grip of some appalling power-crazed madman with no mandate to govern, who is threatening to unleash his murderous police forces at any moment upon the long-suffering population of his bankrupt country," he told the world's press. "How on earth do such tyrants arise? Surely somebody ought to have stopped him years ago, when they had the chance."

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