Introducing the Palestinian Papers

[Victus Mortuum]

Over the last several months, Al Jazeera has been given unhindered access to the largest-ever leak of confidential documents related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are nearly 1,700 files, thousands of pages of diplomatic correspondence detailing the inner workings of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. These documents – memos, e-mails, maps, minutes from private meetings, accounts of high level exchanges, strategy papers and even power point presentations – date from 1999 to 2010.

The material is voluminous and detailed; it provides an unprecedented look inside the continuing negotiations involving high-level American, Israeli, and Palestinian Authority officials.

Al Jazeera will release the documents between January 23-26th, 2011. They will reveal new details about:

the Palestinian Authority’s willingness to concede illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, and to be “creative” about the status of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount;
the compromises the Palestinian Authority was prepared to make on refugees and the right of return;
details of the PA’s security cooperation with Israel;
and private exchanges between Palestinian and American negotiators in late 2009, when the Goldstone Report was being discussed at the United Nations.
Because of the sensitive nature of these documents, Al Jazeera will not reveal the source(s) or detail how they came into our possession. We have taken great care over an extended period of time to assure ourselves of their authenticity.

We believe this material will prove to be of inestimable value to journalists, scholars, historians, policymakers and the general public.

We know that some of what is presented here will prove controversial, but it is our intention to inform, not harm, to spark debate and reflection – not dampen it. Our readers and viewers will note that we have provided a comments section in which to express opinions. In keeping with our editorial policies, we reserve the right to excise comments that we deem inappropriate, but all civil voices will be heard, all opinions respected.

We present these papers as a service to our viewers and readers as a reflection of our fundamental belief – that public debate and public policies grow, flourish and endure when given air and light.

http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/201112214310263628.html

No U.S. news organizations have offered to publish this stuff, if I have heard correctly.

[Sasha]

the guardian is proving yet again to be the best of all the bad mainstream newspapers, they picked it up too:

Secret papers reveal slow death of Middle East peace process


• Massive new leak lifts lid on negotiations
• PLO offered up key settlements in East Jerusalem
• Concessions made on refugees and Holy sites



Seumas Milne (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/seumasmilne) and Ian Black (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/ianblack), Middle East (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middleeast) editor
guardian.co.uk (http://www.guardian.co.uk/),
Sunday 23 January 2011 20.08 GMT
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/1/21/1295633214775/Palestine-papers-reveal-c-007.jpg

The Palestine papers reveal the offer of concessions by Palestinian peace negotiators on areas such as the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem. Photograph: Awad Awad/AFP/Getty Images

The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/palestine-papers) has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/israel)'s annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/east-jerusalem-land-palestine-papers). This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.
A cache of thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more than a decade of negotiations with Israel and the US has been obtained by al-Jazeera TV (http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/) and shared exclusively with the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/story-behind-leaked-palestine-papers). The papers provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/timeline-middle-east-peace-talks), which is now regarded as all but dead.
The documents – many of which will be published by the Guardian over the coming days – also reveal:
• The scale of confidential concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/palestine-papers-power-weakness-negotiations), including on the highly sensitive issue of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
• How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state.
• The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.
• The central role of British intelligence in drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/palestinian-territories).
• How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel's 2008-9 war in Gaza.
As well as the annexation of all East Jerusalem settlements except Har Homa (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/palestinians-israel-biggest-jerusalem-history), the Palestine papers (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/palestine-papers) show PLO leaders privately suggested swapping part of the flashpoint East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah for land elsewhere.
Most controversially, they also proposed a joint committee to take over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City – the neuralgic issue that helped sink the Camp David talks in 2000 after Yasser Arafat refused to concede sovereignty around the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.
The offers were made in 2008-9, in the wake of President George Bush's Annapolis conference, and were privately hailed by the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, as giving Israel "the biggest Yerushalayim [the Hebrew name for Jerusalem] in history" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/palestine-papers-saeb-erekat-palestinian) in order to resolve the world's most intractable conflict. Israeli leaders, backed by the US government, said the offers were inadequate.
Intensive efforts to revive talks by the Obama administration foundered last year over Israel's refusal to extend a 10-month partial freeze on settlement construction. Prospects are now uncertain amid increasing speculation that a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict is no longer attainable – and fears of a new war.
Many of the 1,600 leaked documents (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/palestine-papers-editors-note) – drawn up by PA officials and lawyers working for the British-funded PLO negotiations support unit and include extensive verbatim transcripts of private meetings – have been independently authenticated by the Guardian and corroborated by former participants in the talks and intelligence and diplomatic sources.
The Guardian's coverage is supplemented by WikiLeaks cables (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/135224), emanating from the US consulate in Jerusalem and embassy in Tel Aviv (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/us-embassy-cables-the-documents). Israeli officials also kept their own records of the talks, which may differ from the confidential Palestinian accounts.
The concession in May 2008 by Palestinian leaders to allow Israel to annex the settlements in East Jerusalem – including Gilo, which is a current focus of controversy after Israeli authorities gave the go-ahead for 1,400 new homes – has never been made public before.
All settlements built on territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 war are illegal under international law, but the Jerusalem homes are routinely described, and perceived, by Israel as municipal "neighbourhoods". Israeli governments have consistently sought to annex the largest settlements as part of a peace deal – and came close to doing so at Camp David.
Erekat told Israeli leaders in 2008: "This is the first time in Palestinian-Israeli history in which such a suggestion is officially made." No such concession had been made at Camp David. But the offer was rejected out of hand by Israel because it did not include a big settlement near the city Ma'ale Adumim as well as Har Homa and several others deeper in the West Bank, including Ariel. "We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands," Israel's then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/palestine-papers-tzipi-livni-israel), told the Palestinians, "and probably it was not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it".
The overall impression that emerges from the documents, which stretch from 1999 to 2010, is of the weakness and growing desperation of PA leaders as failure to reach agreement or even halt all settlement temporarily undermines their credibility in relation to their Hamas rivals; the papers also reveal the unyielding confidence of Israeli negotiators and the often dismissive attitude of US politicians towards Palestinian representatives.
Palestinian and Israeli officials both point out that any position in negotiations is subject to the principle that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed" and therefore is invalid without a overarching deal. But PA leaders are likely to be embarrassed by the revelation of private concessions that go far beyond what much of their population would regard as acceptable – particularly since Mahmoud Abbas's mandate as Palestinian president expired in 2009.
The PA, set up as a transitional administration after the 1993 Oslo agreement between Israel and the PLO, is under pressure from a disaffected Palestinian public and from Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement. Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006 and has controlled the Gaza Strip since its violent takeover in 2007.
Unlike the PLO, Hamas rejects negotiations with Israel, except for a long-term ceasefire, and refuses to recognise it. Its founding charter also contains antisemitic elements. Supported by Iran and Syria, it is sanctioned as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the US and the EU, despite pressure for it to be included in a wider political process.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/palestine-papers-expose-peace-concession

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/palestine-papers

[Sasha]

This seemingly endless and ugly game of the peace process is now finally over

The peace process is a sham. Palestinians must reject their officials and rebuild their movement




http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2008/06/02/karma_nabulsi_140x140.jpg (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/karmanabulsi)


Karma Nabulsi (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/karmanabulsi)
guardian.co.uk (http://www.guardian.co.uk/), Sunday 23 January 2011 20.02 GMT <li class="history">Article history (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/23/middle-east-peace-process-over-palestinians#history-link-box)<li class="history">

It's over. Given the shocking nature, extent and detail of these ghastly revelations from behind the closed doors of the Middle East peace process, the seemingly endless and ugly game is now, finally, over. Not one of the villains on the Palestinian side can survive it. With any luck the sheer horror of this account of how the US and Britain covertly facilitated and even implemented Israeli military expansion – while creating an oligarchy to manage it – might overcome the entrenched interests and venality that have kept the peace process (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-peace-talks) going. A small group of men who have polluted the Palestinian public sphere with their private activities are now exposed.
For us Palestinians, these detailed accounts of the secretly negotiated surrender of every one of our core rights under international law (of return for millions of Palestinian refugees, on annexing Arab Jerusalem, on settlements) are not a surprise. It is something that we all knew – in spite of official protests to the contrary – because we feel their destructive effects every day. The same is true of the outrageous role of the US and Britain in creating a security bantustan, and the ruin of our civic and political space. We already knew, because we feel its fatal effects.
For the overwhelming majority of Palestinians, official Palestinian policy over these past decades has been the antithesis of a legitimate, or representative, or even coherent strategy to obtain our long-denied freedom. But this sober appreciation of our current state of affairs, accompanied by the mass protests and civil society campaigns by Palestinian citizens, has been insufficient, until now, to rid us of it.
The release into the public domain of these documents is such a landmark because it destroys the final traces of credibility of the peace process. Everything to do with it relied upon a single axiom: that each new initiative or set of negotiations with the Israelis, every policy or programme (even the creation of undemocratic institutions under military occupation), could be presented as carried out in good faith under harsh conditions: necessary for peace, and in the service of our national cause. Officials from all sides played a double game vis-à-vis the Palestinians. It is now on record that they have betrayed, lied and cheated us of basic rights, while simultaneously claiming they deserved the trust of the Palestinian people.
This claim of representative capacity – and worse, the assertion they were representing the interests of Palestinians in their struggle for freedom – had become increasingly thin over the last decade and a half. The claim they were acting in good faith is absolutely shattered by the publication of these documents today, and the information to be revealed over this coming week. Whatever one's political leanings, no one, not the Americans, the British, the UN, and especially not these Palestinian officials, can claim that the whole racket is anything other than a brutal process of subjugating an entire people.
Why has this gone on for so long and at such high cost? And why haven't the Palestinians been able to create the democratic representation so urgently needed to advance their cause? Israel, along with those who share its worldview, would assert that the problem lies with the Palestinians themselves, being part of an Arab political culture that can only breed either authoritarian governments or terrorists. Yet what these documents reveal is the extent of undemocratic, authoritarian, colonial and, frankly, terrifying coercion the US, Britain and other western governments have been imposing upon Palestinians through this unaccountable leadership.
The unconstrained power of America, the global superpower that has (now on record and in sickening detail) taken one party's side in this conflict, can be seen on every page. Everyone is implicated, from the president to the secretary of state, from the military generals who have created the security forces to implement these policies to the embassy staff involved in the daily execution of them. It also shows this policy is an absolute failure, bringing ruination upon the Palestinians and increasing belligerency from the completely unfettered, aggressive and erratic Israel, currently practising a form of apartheid towards the Palestinians it rules through force.
This uneven balance of power can only be successfully addressed in the same way every national liberation movement has addressed it in the past: through the unassailable strength of a popular mandate. Ho Chi Minh sitting down with the French, or Nelson Mandela negotiating with the apartheid regime embodied this popular legitimacy, and indeed drew their principles and negotiating positions from it. The Palestinian leadership's weak and incompetent posturing is the opposite of dignified and honourable national representation, and proves useless to boot.
On the positive side, had such deals eventually come to light, Palestinians would have rejected them comprehensively. But the worst betrayal has been what this hypocrisy has bequeathed to the young generation of Palestinians. These officials have led a new generation to believe that participating in public governance is base and self-seeking, that joining any political party is the least useful method to advance principals and create change.
Through their harmful example, they have alienated young Palestinians from their own history of resistance to colonial and military rule, so they now believe that tens of thousands of brilliant, imaginative and extraordinarily brave Palestinians never existed or, worse, fought and died for nothing. It cuts them off from any useful mobilising methods and techniques that they might draw upon today – the democratic and collective mechanisms that are needed more than ever. They have given young people the idea that there is no virtue in collective organisation, the mechanism by which popular democratic change is made and preserved.
The increasingly popular view that the Palestinian revolution was a failure from its inception, always corrupt, driven from above and never from below, is false – but it has gained credibility through the actions of the current regime. Its behaviour has nearly erased the record of the contribution made by tens of thousands of ordinary Palestinian citizens who, through the sheer force of their devotion to public life, fought for principles and created real and democratic self-representation under the worst of conditions. It is our most valuable freedom, and one well worth fighting for: the release of these devastating documents paves the way for its restoration.





source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/23/middle-east-peace-process-over-palestinians

[freepalestine]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/wikileaks-palestinian-negotiators-t148715/index.html