The Palestine Papers being published this week by Al-Jazeera TV and The Guardian newspaper provide many important and, 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 1,600 documents, however, as I had a chance to do at the Al-Jazeera offices in Doha, Qatar, 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 the Israelis and Palestinians took, offers they made, concessions they granted, trial balloons they floated, proposals they rejected, and principles that guided them. And all this along with American mediators’ positions on critical core issues – which they listed as “land, borders, security, settlements, water, Jerusalem and refugees.” Based on my reading through the documents, here are my initial conclusions on the key lessons to be drawn.
The documents underline that the Israelis are obsessed with three dimensions of their own statehood and people-hood that translate into negotiating demands that are probably impossible to achieve, unless they benefit from divine intervention. These are the absolute “Jewish” nature of the Israeli state that Palestinians must accept, which has insurmountably negative implications for the Palestinian citizens of Israel and millions of Palestinian refugees; a demand for absolute, a priori and eternal “security” for Jews in Israel and those who may remain in existing settlements within the jurisdiction of a future Palestinian state; and, an unyielding refusal to acknowledge any responsibility for the refugee status of the Palestinians who were displaced in 1947-1948.
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.
According to the documents, 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. However, 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, which seems to offer Israel almost everything it wants in those areas without securing matching concessions in return. The Palestinian negotiators make some statements that are being interpreted as gross betrayals of the Palestinian refugees’ rights of return, compensation, restitution and other means of reversing their refugee status.
The main problem is the recurring ambiguity that makes it sound like the refugees’ right of return is “a card” to be played during the talks; or that the refugees would not be allowed to voice their views on any settlement through a referendum. The Palestinian leadership should immediately and publicly clarify to its own people what it has been saying in private to Israeli and American officials. 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. They are unable or unwilling to defy Israeli positions on key issues, such as major settlements like Maale Adumim, the percentage of swapped land, Israel’s “Jewishness,” the impossibility of a return of refugees, and a total settlements freeze. The Obama administration also refuses to acknowledge the Bush administration’s commitment, via Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to base negotiations on the 1967 borders. Washington often seems a messenger of Israel’s government and the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., rather than an impartial mediator. It seems that domestic Israeli and American politics will define how the conflict is resolved, rather than international 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 comes anywhere close to the international consensus on this issue. 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 U.S. 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.
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