Leaked "Palestine Papers" Underscore Weakness of Palestinian Authority,
Rejectionism of Israel and U.S.
Interviw with Rashid Khalidi:
Democracy Now!: January 24, 2011
AMY GOODMAN: Newly released documents show Palestinian negotiators secretly
agreed to give up large tracts of West Bank land in peace talks with the
Israeli government.
The disclosure is among many contained in what's being called the "Palestine
Papers"-thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more
than a decade of negotiations with Israel. It's being described as the
biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East
conflict. The more than 1,700 files cover a period from 1999 to 2010. They
were obtained by the TV news network Al Jazeera, which began publishing
details of the documents on Sunday.
Among the leaked papers, the offers relating to East Jerusalem are the most
controversial. Minutes from a 2008 meeting indicate Palestinian negotiators
offered to allow Israel's annexation of all but one of the settlements built
illegally in occupied East Jerusalem, without receiving any concessions in
return.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat is quoted as saying, "We are
offering you the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history," using the Hebrew
word for Jerusalem. But Israel apparently rejected the offer. Then-Israeli
foreign minister Tzipi Livni told the Palestinians, quote, "We do not like
this suggestion because it does not meet our demands, and probably it was
not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it."
Al Jazeera says forthcoming documents will reveal new details about
compromises the Palestinian Authority was prepared to make on refugees and
the right of return, as well as on the PA's security cooperation with Israel
and its correspondence on the U.N. inquiry into the late-2008 attack on the
Gaza Strip.
Palestinian Authority officials have challenged the documents' veracity.
Chief negotiator Saeb Erekat called their contents, quote, "a pack of lies."
For more, I'm joined from the Democracy Now! studios in New York by Rashid
Khalidi. He is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia
University, the Department of History, and the author of several books,
including Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle
East and Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Professor Khalidi. Can you respond to this trove
of documents that Al Jazeera [inaudible]-
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, this was the first of what is supposed to be four days
of revelations of documents by Al Jazeera and by the British paper The
Guardian. The concentration in the first group seems to have been on
Jerusalem. And the revelations are quite striking. The most important, I
think, is the degree to which not only Palestinian negotiators were
forthcoming, but the degree to which the Israelis were unwilling to accept
concessions. It seriously casts into doubt the idea that Israel would accept
anything but complete capitulation by the Palestinians to absolutely
everything they're demanding on every front. We've heard about Jerusalem.
There is presumably more to come.
But another thing that comes out very strikingly from these documents is the
degree to which the United States is twisting the arm of the Palestinians,
the degree to which American diplomats, whether Hillary Rodham Clinton or
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the previous administration, are
unsympathetic to the Palestinians and are in cahoots, in Aaron David
Miller's
words, our lawyers for Israel-it's actually worse than Miller, who was
involved in the negotiations for many years, says, from these documents.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, what about Saeb Erekat saying this is all "a pack of
lies"?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, both Al Jazeera and The Guardian have claimed that
they have very carefully investigated the provenance of these documents. I
think time will tell. We have-I have no way of knowing. I think none of us
have any way of knowing exactly where they come from. We are told that many
of them come from the negotiation support unit. Watching Al Jazeera last
night, it was clear to me that they look like they come from within the
Palestinian negotiating team, in terms of letterhead and so forth. Whether
there could be forgeries among them, nobody knows.
But many of these things, I think, fit the outlines of what we all knew,
partly because people on the Israeli side, on the Palestinian side and the
American side have said a great deal about the negotiations, from 1999
certainly through 2008, and the broad lines of these major concessions made
by the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, the broad lines of the
intransigence of Israel in simply refusing to accept concessions, or rather,
banking concessions and then saying, "Well, now we want more. It's not
enough for you to give up every single settlement in Jerusalem except one;
we want all of them. It's not enough for you to say that you would make
concessions inside the Old City of Jerusalem; we want more, as far as the
Haram-al-Sharif is concerned." The detail is what is the most striking. And
I seriously doubt that, in some cases, somebody went to the trouble of
forging things that showed exactly how this process took place. So, I think
that we're going to find that most of these documents probably are genuine.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Khalidi, what most struck you in these documents
about the communities that the PA was willing to give up?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, in Jerusalem, there are several issues. One is that
the United States, which claims to support the position which is undergirded
by international law, that all settlement-across the Green Line, all
settlement in occupied territories is illegal, is a violation of the Fourth
Geneva Convention, is basically pushing the Palestinians to make concessions
on that principle, arguing that you will not have a deal-I believe this was
Secretary Rice-you will not have a deal unless you give up-I think they were
talking about Ma'ale Adumim, a settlement to the east of Jerusalem, which in
fact, apparently, the Palestinians accepted to give up. The point here is,
this is Palestinian land, private property in many cases, across the Green
Line in territory illegally occupied by Israel and into which Israel has
been exporting its population, in violation, again, of the Fourth Geneva
Convention. That the United States should support a position in violation of
international law might not be terribly shocking, but to see it laid out in
this form, I think, calls into question, at the very least, not just the
good faith of the American negotiators and of the United States in this
process, but the good sense of anyone who would rely on the United States as
an interlocutor or an intermediary with Israel.
Other things that were discussed, such as the Haram-al-Sharif, might be very
shocking to people in the Arab and Muslim worlds, because it appears that
the Palestinian Authority has agreed to some kind of shared sovereignty over
one of the three most holy sites in Islam, a property that is a piece of
territory that's not just sacred but is also the property of the Islamic
Waqf in Jerusalem, and have accepted that a committee of international
actors, none of whom are particularly sympathetic to the Palestinian
side-Arabia, Britain, the United States and so forth, Egypt and so
forth-should somehow have control over this most holy site in all of
Palestine to Muslims. This is pretty shocking.
AMY GOODMAN: And the other report that we have just heard, the Israeli
government being cleared in the attack on the Mavi Marmara, the Gaza aid
flotilla, last May 31st, Professor Khalidi?
RASHID KHALIDI: Well, I mean, this is entirely expected. An Israeli
government-appointed commission, rather than an international commission, a
dependent commission appointed by the government, rather than independent of
the Israeli government, has come to a conclusion white-washing the
government that appointed it. I don't see why anybody should be surprised.
It essentially hewed to exactly the lines of the Israeli propaganda
offensive that was launched the very day that this ship was attacked, which
argued that the blockade of essential supplies from Gaza, which is a
violation of international humanitarian law, is legal, that everything that
the Israeli forces that attacked this ship did, including killing nine
Turkish, including one Turkish American, citizens was legal. Essentially,
this thing was written, or could have been written, insofar as what we've
seen so far of it, by the same people who are in charge of Israeli spin
management. It's taken them a number of months to produce it, but the
Israeli government spokesmen could easily have written this. Almost every
key argument in this commission report was put forward by the Israeli
government spokesmen at the outset of this affair.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Khalidi, I want to thank you for being with us.
Professor Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at
Columbia University.
RASHID KHALIDI: My pleasure.
AMY GOODMAN: He's written a number of books, including Sowing Crisis:
American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East and Iron Cage: The
Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. He is the Edward Said
Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University's Department of History.
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