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The Selling of the "Palestine Papers"

(Washington Post) Jackson Diehl - Anyone familiar with Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over the last decade will find nothing surprising about the supposed revelations in the "Palestine Papers." Since at least the time of the 2000 Camp David talks brokered by President Bill Clinton, Palestinian leaders have accepted that Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem will be annexed by Israel in a two-state settlement, and that only a handful of Palestinian refugees will "return" to the Jewish state. What's sensational about the leaked documents, which appear to come from advisors to the Palestinian negotiating team, is the way they are being marketed and how Palestinians are reacting to them. According to Al Jazeera, the negotiating positions on Jerusalem and refugees are shocking betrayals of the Palestinian cause. For Britain's Guardian, they demonstrate the intransigence and the perfidy of Israel and the United States - for supposedly failing to embrace such far-reaching concessions. These are gross distortions. The reported Palestinian compromise positions have been widely (if quietly) accepted by Arab governments. Israel, for its part, responded with far-reaching compromises of its own: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Abbas a Palestinian state with sovereignty over Jerusalem and all but 6% of the West Bank. It was Abbas, not Olmert, who refused to go forward during those 2008 talks. The leak of the documents seems motivated by a desire to bury the already moribund peace process. "Al Jazeera is trying to destroy Abbas, and the Guardian wants to get Netanyahu," an Israeli official observes. For years the Palestinians have systematically failed to prepare their public opinion for the concessions that will have to be part of any two-state settlement. Is it really conceivable that Israel would or could tear down east Jerusalem neighborhoods where 190,000 of its citizens now live, or allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to move inside its pre-1967 borders? No one seriously engaged in Middle East diplomacy - American, Arab or European - thinks so. But that has never been explained to most Palestinians. In fact, Abbas and his Palestinian team are currently refusing to negotiate with Netanyahu in part because he has refused to freeze construction in east Jerusalem Jewish neighborhoods - the same neighborhoods that the Palestinians have agreed that Israel will keep.
2011-01-26 09:05:46
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