The leaked Palestinian Papers show that the Palestinians offered big concessions, while Israel bargained in bad faith
Introducing The Palestine Papers
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.
This is the probably the most consequential series of all the leaks over the past year for the Israeli, the Palestinian, and the American governments.
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.
Here are the three articles linked to in Al Jazeera's Introduction to the Palestinian Papers:
"The biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history"
Erekat's solution for the Haram
The "napkin map" revealed
Here's a excerpt from the first Al Jazeera article:
"The biggest Yerushalayim"
"We proposed that Israel annexes all settlements"
The unprecedented offer by the PA came in a June 15 trilateral meeting in Jerusalem, involving Condoleezza Rice, the then-US secretary of state, Tzipi Livni, the then-Israeli foreign minister, Ahmed Qurei, PA's former prime minister, and Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator.
Qurei: This last proposition could help in the swap process. We proposed that Israel annexes all settlements in Jerusalem except Jabal Abu Ghneim (Har Homa). This is the first time in history that we make such a proposition; we refused to do so in Camp David.
Erekat went on to enumerate some of the settlements that the PA was willing to concede: French Hill, Ramat Alon, Ramat Shlomo, Gilo, Talpiot, and the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s old city. Those areas contain some 120,000 Jewish settlers. (Erekat did not mention the fate of other major East Jerusalem settlements, like Pisgat Ze’ev and Neve Ya’akov, but Qurei’s language indicates that they would also remain a part of Israel.)
An historic concession
Related
The "napkin map" revealed
The Palestine Papers include a rendering of the land swap map presented in mid-2008 to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.
This casts the questionable actions all three governments in a negative light. Each of the three Government is embarrassed for different reasons with different constituencies.
From the Guardian:
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
• Israel spurned offer of 'biggest Jerusalem in history'
• Palestinian leaders weak – and increasingly desperate
• The story behind the Palestine papers
The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel's annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. 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 and shared exclusively with the Guardian. The papers provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process, 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, 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.
• 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, the 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.
From Juan Cole:
Aljazeera’s Leaks Reveal Sham ‘Peace Process,’ Israeli Stonewalling
The documents could well destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization, a coalition of parties that includes Fatah, which is led by Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Among the politicians who comes off the worst in these documents is Saeb Erekat. The Palestinian Authority is revealed as feeble as a kitten. Like a a spurned suitor, Erekat kept offering the Israelis more and more, and they kept rejecting his overtures.
The documents have frank admissions. Tzipi Livni said:
"Israel takes more land [so] that the Palestinian state will be impossible . . . the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we’ll say that is impossible, we already have the land and we cannot create the state". She conceded that it had been "the policy of the government for a really long time".
Although she said that in 2007 the Olmert government was not following this policy, she admitted some parties were. And, of course, in February 2009, parties came to power that would not so much as give Palestinians a glass of water.
Erekat’s enemies, the Hamas movement based mainly in Gaza, are using the revelations to paint him as a traitor to the Palestinian and indeed the Muslim cause. I saw him on Aljazeera, where he was very defensive. London-based journalist Abdel Bari Atwan let him have it with both barrels.
Erekat and other Fatah leaders are accusing Aljazeera of forging the documents and of attempting to scuttle the Palestine Authorities’ plan to go to the United Nations to get an international resolution against ever-expanding Israeli colonies.
But even PA loyalists like attorney Diana Buttu have called for Erekat’s resignation in the wake of the revelations.
The Fatah-dominated Palestine Authority has long been regarded as corrupt and authoritarian by many Palestinians, not to mention wusses when it came to dealing with Israel. These documents demonstrate that its leaders were willing to give away just about anything to have a state they could preside over, even something that was only a state in name.
I’m not sure that Fatah can survive being discredited to this extent. Nor, likely, can the American farce of a ‘peace process’ or a ‘two-state solution.’
The Palestinian Papers show the Israeli government nakedly opting for territorial expansion and a war in Gaza over peace with the Palestinians on what amounted to Israel's oun terms.
We now know that in October of 2009 the Ehud Barrack's Israeli government was more interested in planning its war on Gaza and its continued territorial expansion in the occupied West Bank, than it was in making peace with the Palestinians on very favorable terms for Israel. The Government of George Bush with neoconservative ideologue Elliot Abrams (as Condi Rice's Director for Near East and North African Affairs pulling the strings) was no doubt, quietly playing along the the Israeli Government's plans. The Palestinian Papers also put Obama Administration in a negative light for their mishandling the US's reaction to the Goldstone Report. We Americans were lied to by George W. Bush and Hillary's State Department (no doubt with Obama's approval).
This comes from DemcracyNow.org and is used with permission:
Rashid Khalidi: Leaked "Palestine Papers" Underscore Weakness of Palestinian Authority, Rejectionism of Israel and U.S.
AMY GOODMAN:For more, I’m joined from the Democracy Now! studios in New York by Rashid Khalidi. He is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, the Department of History, and the author of several books, including Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East and Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Khalidi. Can you respond to this trove of documents that Al Jazeera [inaudible]—
RASHID KHALIDI:Well, this was the first of what is supposed to be four days of revelations of documents by Al Jazeera and by the British paper The Guardian. The concentration in the first group seems to have been on Jerusalem. And the revelations are quite striking. The most important, I think, is the degree to which not only Palestinian negotiators were forthcoming, but the degree to which the Israelis were unwilling to accept concessions. It seriously casts into doubt the idea that Israel would accept anything but complete capitulation by the Palestinians to absolutely everything they’re demanding on every front. We’ve heard about Jerusalem. There is presumably more to come.
But another thing that comes out very strikingly from these documents is the degree to which the United States is twisting the arm of the Palestinians, the degree to which American diplomats, whether Hillary Rodham Clinton or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the previous administration, are unsympathetic to the Palestinians and are in cahoots, in Aaron David Miller’s words, our lawyers for Israel—it’s actually worse than Miller, who was involved in the negotiations for many years, says, from these documents.
...RASHID KHALIDI:But many of these things, I think, fit the outlines of what we all knew, partly because people on the Israeli side, on the Palestinian side and the American side have said a great deal about the negotiations, from 1999 certainly through 2008, and the broad lines of these major concessions made by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, the broad lines of the intransigence of Israel in simply refusing to accept concessions, or rather, banking concessions and then saying, "Well, now we want more. It’s not enough for you to give up every single settlement in Jerusalem except one; we want all of them. It’s not enough for you to say that you would make concessions inside the Old City of Jerusalem; we want more, as far as the Haram-al-Sharif is concerned." The detail is what is the most striking. And I seriously doubt that, in some cases, somebody went to the trouble of forging things that showed exactly how this process took place. So, I think that we’re going to find that most of these documents probably are genuine.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Khalidi, what most struck you in these documents about the communities that the PA was willing to give up?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, in Jerusalem, there are several issues. One is that the United States, which claims to support the position which is undergirded by international law, that all settlement—across the Green Line, all settlement in occupied territories is illegal, is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, is basically pushing the Palestinians to make concessions on that principle, arguing that you will not have a deal—I believe this was Secretary Rice—you will not have a deal unless you give up—I think they were talking about Ma’ale Adumim, a settlement to the east of Jerusalem, which in fact, apparently, the Palestinians accepted to give up. The point here is, this is Palestinian land, private property in many cases, across the Green Line in territory illegally occupied by Israel and into which Israel has been exporting its population, in violation, again, of the Fourth Geneva Convention. That the United States should support a position in violation of international law might not be terribly shocking, but to see it laid out in this form, I think, calls into question, at the very least, not just the good faith of the American negotiators and of the United States in this process, but the good sense of anyone who would rely on the United States as an interlocutor or an intermediary with Israel.
Other things that were discussed, such as the Haram-al-Sharif, might be very shocking to people in the Arab and Muslim worlds, because it appears that the Palestinian Authority has agreed to some kind of shared sovereignty over one of the three most holy sites in Islam, a property that is a piece of territory that’s not just sacred but is also the property of the Islamic Waqf in Jerusalem, and have accepted that a committee of international actors, none of whom are particularly sympathetic to the Palestinian side—Arabia, Britain, the United States and so forth, Egypt and so forth—should somehow have control over this most holy site in all of Palestine to Muslims. This is pretty shocking.
These are the most important set of revelations to come out of the Middle East in a long, long time. They rise to the level of truly historic importance IMHO. The Palestinian Papers may finally provide Americans with a watershed moment, their first opportunity for an honest reassessment of America's relationship with Israel, which has remained static since the late 1970s. They could lay the foundations for a more candid debate in this country.
Doubtless the friendship between the U.S. and Israel will continue, but hopefully with less of an automatic bias by the U.S. government in favor of whatever actions Israel's far right wing ruling parties decide to take.
Also see heathlander's diary from yesterday: Explosive leaked documents: The Palestine Papers