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Sunday morning, the Guardian and Al Jazeera began to serve the world a fresh batch of WikiLeaks. This time the material, while wide ranging and covering nearly a decade, was not random. This time the document dump encompasses material related to the Israel-Palestine peace process. The picture is nothing if not depressing; the story is one of desperation, humiliation and dead-ends stretching out over a decade.
Al Jazeera: 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.
The material is voluminous and detailed; it provides an unprecedented look inside the continuing negotiations involving high-level American, Israeli, and Palestinian Authority officials.
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Guardian: Palestine papers news
Who will be most damaged by this extraordinary glimpse into the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Perhaps the first casualty will be Palestinian national pride, their collective sense of dignity in adversity badly wounded by the papers revealed today.
Many on the Palestinian streets will recoil to read not just the concessions offered by their representatives – starting with the yielding of those parts of East Jerusalem settled by Israeli Jews – but the language in which those concessions were made.
To hear their chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, tell the Israelis that the Palestinians are ready to concede “the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history ” – even using the Hebrew word for the city – will strike many as an act of humiliation.
COMMENTARY
Sinking Peace: WikiLeaks Posts 1,600 Pages on Decline of Middle East Talks
The explosive news will be the great concessions made by the Palestinians to the Israelis in round after round of talks. Palestinian negotiators appear to have offered to allow Israel to annex all but one of the East Jerusalem settlements, a point of contention between Israelis and Palestinians for decades. Even the ever-unresolved question of a Palestinian Right of Return — that is the right of Palestinian refugees driven, forced or scared out of Israel in 1948 to return to their ancestral homeland — appears, on the Palestinian side, to have been wobbly at best. The offer, apparently, was for a tiny number of returnees — a thin veil, in other words, to save face for negotiators, but otherwise a complete caving-in on the issue.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
