As someone who supports the existence of Israel as a strong Jewish state, and the rights of Palestinians (and all people) to live in peace with full citizenship rights, I have read with interest both the news coverage of the so-called "Palestine Papers," and the resulting diaries here on DKos. One area of controversy is why, assuming the PA's territory-for-peace offer was as described, Israel turned it down so summarily. I've seen the explanations offered by some here, involving Israel's alleged colonialism and unwillingness to negotiate, but those reactions in fact demonstrate the likely true reason: Israel knew the PA could never follow through on its offer.
The allegations arising out of the Palestine Papers suggest a major, unprecedented shift in the potential willingness of the Palestinian Authority to cede claims to Jerusalem in exchange for a peace deal. (This is something that I have argued here would be absolutely critical for any successful peace.) Assuming (as I do) that Israel's response was not entirely or even significantly based on bad faith, what other reason could there be for the flat out rejection and failure to even mention the offer in public? It's clear to me: the Israelis knew full well that there was no way that the PA could ever make good on such an offer, as its own populace would never support it, so it was essentially irrelevant to the progress of the negotiations.
Just look at the reaction to the disclosure by Al Jazeera. Rather than simply trumpeting the disclosure as an example of Israel's intransigence, Saeb Erekat, the PA's chief negotiator, says that the release makes him out as a "traitor," and that the leaks are false. UCLA Professor Saree Makdisi, in an editorial in the LA Times, writes in part,
The major revelation from the documents, indeed, is the illustration they furnish of just how far the Palestinian negotiators were willing to go to placate Israel.
Men like Saeb Erekat, Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei — the lead Palestinian negotiators in all these years — are of a type that has come forth in every colonial conflict of the modern age. Faced with the overwhelming brute power with which colonial states have always sought to break the will of indigenous peoples, they inhabit the craven weakness that the situation seems to dictate. Convinced that colonialism cannot be defeated, they seek to carve out some petty managerial role within it from which they might benefit, even if at the expense of their people.
These men, we must remember, were not elected to negotiate an agreement with Israel. They have no legitimacy, offer zero credibility and can make no real claim to represent the views of Palestinians.
And yet they were apparently willing to bargain away the right that stands at the very heart of the Palestinian struggle, a right that is not theirs to surrender — the right of return of Palestinians to the homes from which they were forced during the creation of Israel in 1948 — by accepting Israel's insistence that only a token few thousand refugees should be allowed to return, and that the millions of others should simply go away (or, as we now learn that the U.S. suggested, accept being shipped away like so much lost chattel to South America).
Kossack Heathlander similarly condemns the PA's negotiators in his diary about the Palestinian Papers:
Most of the Arab world’s anger so far has been directed not at the Israeli government but at the PA. This makes sense: Arabs take Israeli rejectionism for granted. Unlike many liberals in Europe and America, they cannot afford the luxury of delusions about our ally’s role in the region. The PA’s collaboration has also long been clear, but the extent of the betrayal revealed in the documents is nauseating. They record Abbas greeting Condoleeza "birth pangs" Rice with, "[y]ou bring back life to the region when you come." "I would vote for you", senior negotiator Ahmed Qureia told Livni; Ariel Sharon was my "friend", Abbas enthused. We already knew about the PA’s collaboration with the US and Israel to overthrow Hamas; its support for the Gaza siege; its close cooperation with the Israeli military; and its diplomatic manoeuvres to bury the UN inquiry into the 2008-9 Gaza massacre. These new leaks promise to reveal how PA "leaders were privately tipped off" in advance about the Gaza massacre – something previous leaks have already confirmed.
Seumas Milne, in The Guardian, goes so far as to fondly reminisce about the days of the PLO as a purely terrorist organization, which was "Yasser Arafat's heyday":
It's a tragedy for the Palestinian people that at a time when their cause is the focus of greater global popular support than ever in their history, their own political movements to win their rights are in such debilitating disarray. That has been one of the clearest messages from the cache of leaked documents al-Jazeera and the Guardian have published over the past few days. It's not just the scale of one-sided concessions – from refugees to illegal settlements – offered by Palestinian negotiators and banked for free by their Israeli counterparts. The constant refrain of ingratiating desperation is in some ways more shocking. While Israel's Tzipi Livni rejects the offer to hand over vast chunks of Jerusalem as insufficient – adding "but I really appreciate it" – and Condi Rice muses over resettling Palestinian refugees in South America, the chief PLO negotiator, Saeb Erekat, is reduced to begging for a "figleaf".
It's a study in the decay of what in Yasser Arafat's heyday was an authentic national liberation movement. Try to imagine the Vietnamese negotiators speaking in such a way at the Paris peace talks in the 70s – or the Algerian FLN in the 60s – and it's obvious how far the West Bank Palestinian leadership has drifted from its national moorings.
Here too (per the AP) is Hanan Ashrawi, a senior PLO member:
The report is bound to inflame Palestinian public opinion, said Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
"Palestinian opinion is still quite adamant about Palestinian rights," she said. Palestinians "are not willing to entertain, if this is true, any of the compromises that were revealed in the documents."
Contrast this with Israel's repeated and actual granting of land it actually held for peace, with forced withdrawal of its often protesting citizens, from Sinai and even Gaza. Further, most of the world takes it as a given that Israel must and will withdraw from even more of its annexed and controlled territory for peace with the Palestinians and Syrians. For that matter, when Barak offered significant concessions even on Jerusalem and refugees at Camp David in 2000, and Arafat (perhaps no longer in his "heyday") rejected them, the rejection was in spite of the fact that Olmert would and could have carried through on his offer had it been accepted.
Whatever Abbas and his negotiators may have said, as per the Palestinian Papers, was never going to turn into reality, and the Israelis knew it. If a significant offer of land concessions that is likely to move the peace process ahead is considered "betrayal" rather than "leadership" by the Palestinian people, and if (as Ashrawi asserts) those people are "not willing to entertain" the compromises that must form the basis of any successful final agreement, that then it's true: Israel has no Palestinian partner for peace. That's the true revelation of the Palestinian Papers. {ProfJonathan}