Palestinian Concessions in Leaked Memos May Show Narrower Peace Talk Gap
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat
Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat. Photographer: Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images
Classified documents leaked by al- Jazeera signal that Israeli and Palestinian peace positions may have been closer than previously perceived.
Al-Jazeera television said it had been given access to thousands of pages of memos and e-mails of private meetings that show Palestinian negotiators were prepared to give up claims to parts of east Jerusalem and swap some Jewish settlements in the West Bank for territory within Israel in 2008 talks. Al-Jazeera didn’t say how it obtained the documents, which covered the period from 1999 to 2010.
Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian negotiator, alleged that the papers were leaked by someone who wanted to embarrass his team. “The idea was to show that, yes, we sold out and got nothing in return,” Shaath said today in an interview with Israel Radio.
The most recent peace negotiations broke down in September after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to extend a 10-month partial construction freeze in West Bank settlements. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has refused to negotiate as long as the building continues.
“Yesterday, the general attitude was that gaps are too big for the Americans to bridge,” said Yossi Beilin, the former deputy Israeli foreign minister who helped negotiate the 1993 Oslo Accords. “Today, people might say that if these are the gaps, why won’t someone try to bridge them?”
U.S. Efforts
The leak may be motivation for the U.S. to step up efforts to get negotiations resumed, said Beilin, who now heads the business consulting company Beilink. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Jan. 10 called on Israelis and Palestinians to “act now” and make peace. U.S. envoys Dennis Ross and David Hale, who is the deputy to Middle East peace talks mediator George Mitchell, met with the sides last week in the region.
According to al-Jazeera, the Palestinians in 2009 discussed handing over Haram al-Sharif, Islam’s third holiest site, to international control. The compound is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, the location of the ancient temple destroyed by the Romans and the holiest site in Judaism.
The area lies in east Jerusalem, sought by Palestinians as the capital of a state. Israel captured the area in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it in a move never internationally recognized.
According to the documents, Palestinian negotiators were willing to allow Israel to keep most of the neighborhoods it has built in east Jerusalem and exchange some settlements near Bethlehem for other territory.
‘End of Israel’
In documents posted by Al Jazeera yesterday, Abbas was quoted as saying “it is illogical to ask Israel to absorb 5 million or indeed 1 million” refugees. “That would be the end of Israel.”
Hamas, the Islamic militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, criticized the reported concessions.
“The secret documents are a historic catastrophe against the rights of the Palestinian people,” Fawzi Barhoom, Hamas spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. Hamas ousted Palestinian Authority troops to seize control of Gaza in 2007, ending a unity government that was agreed after Hamas won parliamentary elections the previous year.
The leaked documents may be “agenda driven” and selectively edited “to cast the negotiators, particularly the Palestinian negotiators, in a harsh light,” David Makovsky, head of the project on the Middle East peace process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in an e-mail.
‘More Flexible’
At the same time, “it certainly seems to make the Palestinian team seem more flexible than Israel,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political scientist at Gaza City’s al-Azhar University.
Tzipi Livni, head of the opposition Kadima party and top Israeli negotiator during the 2008 talks, said: “Today it is clear that the process did not fail, only it didn’t run its course.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that while administration officials have seen news reports about the documents he had no comment on their significance.
“These are purported documents from another entity,” he said at a briefing. “I can’t speak to their veracity.”
‘Part of Gamesmanship’
“Most of the information is not new and some of the reporting misrepresents as ‘official positions’ comments that are clearly made in humor or sarcasm or as part of the gamesmanship and posturing that is typical in the negotiating room,” said Makovsky, co-author with Ross of “Myths, Illusions, and Peace,” a book on efforts to resolve the Middle East conflict.
The al-Jazeera leaks were the first of a four-part series that will be broadcast through Jan. 26. The publication is the work of the channel’s new “transparency unit,” which follows the mission pioneered by WikiLeaks to release secret documents.
Former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview with the Australian published in November 2009 that Abbas rejected the far-reaching peace plan he offered a year earlier.
“I told him he’d never get anything like this again from an Israeli leader for 50 years,” Olmert said.
Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev declined to comment on the documents. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said they illustrate that there’s no way at this time for Israel to reach a comprehensive peace treaty with the Palestinians. Netanyahu has distanced himself from some of Lieberman’s positions.
To contact the reporters on this story: Jonathan Ferziger in Tel Aviv at jferziger@bloomberg.net; Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Andrew J. Barden at barden@bloomberg.
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