The Palestine Papers

DOHA -- The Palestine Papers being published this week by Jazeera Television and the Guardian provide important but many, often problematic, insights into several key aspects of the long-running Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to achieve a comprehensive, permanent peace agreement. Reading through the entire archive of over 1600 documents -- as I have had a chance to do at Jazeera Television in Doha this week -- provides a useful overview of, and insights into, the three principal actors in the process: the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government, and American officials.

This unprecedented access to what was said and exchanged in hundreds of Israeli-Palestinian and Palestinian-American negotiating sessions clarifies why the current peace process has not achieved any substantive and lasting breakthrough for nearly 19 years (since the Oslo process of 1993). The papers provide important insights into the positions that both sides took, offers they made, concessions they granted, trial balloons they floated, proposals they rejected, and principles that guided them -- along with the American mediators’ positions on the critical core issues -- which they listed as “land, borders, security, settlements, water, Jerusalem and refugees.” Based on my reading through the entire collection of documents, the following are my initial conclusions on the key lessons to be drawn from this material.

The documents indicate that the Israelis are obsessed with three dimensions of their own statehood and peoplehood that translate into negotiating demands that are probably impossible to achieve in this world, but perhaps could be done through Divine intervention. These are:

• the absolute “Jewish” nature of the Israeli state that the Palestinians must accept, which has insurmountably negative implications for Palestinian citizens of Israel and millions of Palestinian refugees;
• a demand for absolute, a priori and eternal “security” for Jews in Israel and any that may remain in existing settlements within the jurisdiction of a future Palestinian state; and,
• an unyielding refusal to acknowledge any responsibility for any dimension of the refugeehood of the Palestinians in 1947-48.

Israel acknowledges Palestinian “aspirations” and “dreams”, but not “rights”; it is willing to acknowledge the “suffering” of the refugees and their right to self-determination in the West Bank and Gaza only, but not their rights to return to their homes -- only a “claim” to return that could be resolved by allowing a maximum of 10,000 Palestinians to return to their original lands and homes on a humanitarian basis.

The Palestinians consistently reject these absolute Israeli demands. Having no serious negotiating power to soften any of them, they outline reasonable negotiating principles -- the 1967 borders as starting points for talks, land swaps with Israel on a 1:1 ratio, the illegality of Israeli settlements, the refugees’ right of return, and others. But then they steadily offer concessions that seem to dilute or even deny those principles, such as giving Israel control over formerly Arab parts of Jerusalem that seems to offer Israel almost everything it wants there without securing matching concessions in return. The Palestinian negotiators make some statements that are already being interpreted as gross betrayals of the Palestinian refugees’ rights to options on return, compensation, restitution and other means of reversing their refugeehood.

The main problem here is the recurring ambiguity that makes it sound like the Palestinian refugees’ right of return is “a card” to be played during the talks in order to bargain on other issues, or that the refugees would not be allowed to voice their views on any agreed settlement through a referendum. The Palestinian leadership should immediately clarify in public to its own people what it has been saying in private to Israeli and American officials. The Palestinian negotiators also seem to be as concerned with fighting Hamas and Islamists as they are with confronting Israel on securing Palestinian national rights.

The Americans come across in the texts as lightweight mediators who are unable or unwilling to defy Israeli positions on key issues such as major settlements like Maale Adumim, the percentage of swapped land, the “Jewishness” of Israel and the impossibility of Palestinian refugee return, and a total settlements freeze. The Obama administration also refuses to acknowledge the Bush administration’s commitment, via Condoleezza Rice, to base the negotiations on the 1967 borders. Washington often comes across as a messenger for the Israeli government and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States, rather than an impartial mediator. It seems to work on the basis that domestic politics in Israel and the United States will define how this conflict is resolved, rather than any references to the dictates of international rule of law, basic ethics and justice, or simple human decency.

One gets the impression from the documents that the Israelis are not really serious about negotiating a comprehensive peace that is anywhere close to the international consensus on the final shape of such a peace. The Palestinians are serious about a negotiated two-state agreement but are unable to muster the diplomatic muscle needed to budge the Israelis. And the United States understands the strategic importance of achieving a negotiated permanent peace agreement, but lacks the ability or the political will to move any of the key players.