International Editor Lindsey Hilsum look at the leaked papers documenting the Palestine/Israel peace talks and asks, what’s next?
My first thought on reading the ‘Palestine Papers’, leaked documents revealing how many concessions Palestinian negotiators made to the Israelis in 2008, is to wonder why the Americans didn’t push the Israelis harder to meet in the middle.
The Israelis constantly complain that they are willing to make “painful concessions” but they “don’t have a “partner for peace”. The evidence here suggests otherwise. The Palestinians are shown to be willing to accept Israeli annexation of all but one settlement in East Jerusalem – but that’s not enough. Israel says it has to have Har Homa (Jabal Abu Ghneim) as well.
The then Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, appears to have confirmed what Palestinians have been saying for years – that Israel tries to change the “facts on the ground” by building ever more settlements.
“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 is quoted as saying, adding that this has been “the policy of the government for a really long time”.
These papers suggest that the Americans did not press Israel very hard to compromise. Israel was offered 6.8 per cent of the West Bank, including the four main settlement “blocs” of Gush ‘Etzion (Ma’ale Adumim, Giv’at Ze’ev and Ariel), as well as all of the settlements in East Jerusalem, in exchange for the equivalent of 5.5 per cent from Israeli territory. But no deal.
Much of the commentary has focused on how weak the Palestinian negotiators appear to be, a suggestion that they were selling Palestinians down the river. Certainly, such huge concessions would have been very unpopular among those Palestinians who would rather hang onto the hope of a better deal. But it’s exactly what the US and European powers have been pressing the Palestinians to do for many years. So why no praise for them at that time? Why has Tony Blair, the Middle East envoy, not spoken out how far the Palestinians were prepared to go, and criticised the Israelis for refusing to move an inch?
Since Israel built a wall around its territory, the threat of terrorism inside Israel has been reduced to almost nil, so there’s no compelling reason for Israel to do a deal. Fatah was willing to compromise, because – it hoped – a deal would restore its legitimacy, giving it more power in the face of the challenge from Hamas, its internal opposition, which governs Gaza.
The leak of these papers shows that there is no peace process. It seems highly unlikely now that there will be a two-state solution. The Americans and Europeans always refer to Mahmoud Abbas, Saeb Erekat and the rest of the Fatah leadership in Ramallah as “moderate”. That’s meant to be a compliment. It doesn’t seem to have done them any good.