July 24, 2011, 7:58pm | Jewish Daily Forward | J.J. Goldberg The Norway massacre has touched off a nasty war of words on the Israeli Internet over the meaning of the event and its implications for Israel. And I do mean nasty: Judging by the comments sections on the main Hebrew websites, the main questions [...]
Category Archives: Comment
Why I blew the whistle about Palestine | Ziyad Clot
Israel’s attack on Gaza and the disastrous ‘peace talks’ compelled me to leak what I knew
In Palestine, the time has come for national reconciliation. On the eve of the 63rd commemoration of the Nakba – the uprooting of Palestinians that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948 – this is a long-awaited and hopeful moment. Earlier this year the release by al-Jazeera and the Guardian of 1,600 documents related to the so-called peace process caused deep consternation among Palestinians and in the Arab world. Covering more than 10 years of talks (from 1999 to 2010) between Israel and the PLO, the Palestine papers illustrated the tragic consequences of an inequitable and destructive political process which had been based on the assumption that the Palestinians could in effect negotiate their rights and achieve self-determination while enduring the hardship of the Israeli occupation.
My name has been circulated as one of the possible sources of these leaks. I would like to clarify here the extent of my involvement in these revelations and explain my motives. I have always acted in the best interest of the Palestinian people, in its entirety, and to the full extent of my capacity.
My own experience with the “peace process” started in Ramallah, in January 2008, after I was recruited as an adviser for the negotiation support unit (NSU) of the PLO, specifically in charge of the Palestinian refugee file. That was a few weeks after a goal had been set at the Annapolis conference: the creation of the Palestinian state by the end of 2008. Only 11 months into my job, in November of that year, I resigned. By December 2008, instead of the establishment of a state in Palestine, I witnessed on TV the killing of more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli army.
My strong motives for leaving my position with the NSU and my assessment of the “peace process” were clearly detailed to Palestinian negotiators in my resignation letter dated of 9th November 2008.
The “peace negotiations” were a deceptive farce whereby biased terms were unilaterally imposed by Israel and systematically endorsed by the US and EU. Far from enabling a negotiated and fair end to the conflict, the pursuit of the Oslo process deepened Israeli segregationist policies and justified the tightening of the security control imposed on the Palestinian population, as well as its geographical fragmentation. Far from preserving the land on which to build a state, it has tolerated the intensification of the colonisation of the Palestinian territory. Far from maintaining a national cohesion, the process I participated in, albeit briefly, was instrumental in creating and aggravating divisions among Palestinians. In its most recent developments, it became a cruel enterprise from which the Palestinians of Gaza have suffered the most. Last but not least, these negotiations excluded for the most part the great majority of the Palestinian people: the seven million Palestinian refugees. My experience over those 11 months in Ramallah confirmed that the PLO, given its structure, was not in a position to represent all Palestinian rights and interests.
Tragically, the Palestinians were left uninformed of the fate of their individual and collective rights in the negotiations, and their divided political leaderships were not held accountable for their decisions or inaction. After I resigned, I believed I had a duty to inform the public.
Shortly after the Gaza war I started to write about my experience in Ramallah. In my 2010 book, Il n’y aura pas d’Etat Palestinien (There will be no Palestinian State), I concluded: “The peace process is a spectacle, a farce, played to the detriment of Palestinian reconciliation, at the cost of the bloodshed in Gaza.” In full conscience, and acting independently, I later agreed to share some information with al-Jazeera specifically with regard to the fate of Palestinian refugee rights in the 2008 talks. Other sources did the same, although I am unaware of their identity. Taking these tragic developments of the “peace process” to a wider Arab and western audience was justified because it was in the public interest of the Palestinian people. I had – and still have – no doubt that I had a moral, legal and political obligation to proceed accordingly.
Today, I am relieved that this first-hand information is available to Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory, in Israel and in exile. In a way, Palestinian rights are back in their holders’ possession and the people are now in a position to make enlightened decisions about the future of their struggle. I am also glad that international stakeholders to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can access these documents. The world can no longer overlook that while Palestinians’ strong commitment to peace is genuine, the fruitless pursuit of a “peace process” framed according to the exclusive conditions of the occupying power leads to compromises which would be unacceptable in any other region of the globe.
Finally, I feel reassured that the people of Palestine overwhelmingly realise that the reconciliation between all their constituents must be the first step towards national liberation. The Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinians living in exile have a common future. The path to Palestinian self-determination will require the participation of all in a renewed political platform.
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Why I blew the whistle about Palestine | Ziyad Clot
Israel’s attack on Gaza and the disastrous ‘peace talks’ compelled me to leak what I knew
In Palestine, the time has come for national reconciliation. On the eve of the 63rd commemoration of the Nakba – the uprooting of Palestinians that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948 – this is a long-awaited and hopeful moment. Earlier this year the release by al-Jazeera and the Guardian of 1,600 documents related to the so-called peace process caused deep consternation among Palestinians and in the Arab world. Covering more than 10 years of talks (from 1999 to 2010) between Israel and the PLO, the Palestine papers illustrated the tragic consequences of an inequitable and destructive political process which had been based on the assumption that the Palestinians could in effect negotiate their rights and achieve self-determination while enduring the hardship of the Israeli occupation.
My name has been circulated as one of the possible sources of these leaks. I would like to clarify here the extent of my involvement in these revelations and explain my motives. I have always acted in the best interest of the Palestinian people, in its entirety, and to the full extent of my capacity.
My own experience with the “peace process” started in Ramallah, in January 2008, after I was recruited as an adviser for the negotiation support unit (NSU) of the PLO, specifically in charge of the Palestinian refugee file. That was a few weeks after a goal had been set at the Annapolis conference: the creation of the Palestinian state by the end of 2008. Only 11 months into my job, in November of that year, I resigned. By December 2008, instead of the establishment of a state in Palestine, I witnessed on TV the killing of more than 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli army.
My strong motives for leaving my position with the NSU and my assessment of the “peace process” were clearly detailed to Palestinian negotiators in my resignation letter dated of 9th November 2008.
The “peace negotiations” were a deceptive farce whereby biased terms were unilaterally imposed by Israel and systematically endorsed by the US and EU. Far from enabling a negotiated and fair end to the conflict, the pursuit of the Oslo process deepened Israeli segregationist policies and justified the tightening of the security control imposed on the Palestinian population, as well as its geographical fragmentation. Far from preserving the land on which to build a state, it has tolerated the intensification of the colonisation of the Palestinian territory. Far from maintaining a national cohesion, the process I participated in, albeit briefly, was instrumental in creating and aggravating divisions among Palestinians. In its most recent developments, it became a cruel enterprise from which the Palestinians of Gaza have suffered the most. Last but not least, these negotiations excluded for the most part the great majority of the Palestinian people: the seven million Palestinian refugees. My experience over those 11 months in Ramallah confirmed that the PLO, given its structure, was not in a position to represent all Palestinian rights and interests.
Tragically, the Palestinians were left uninformed of the fate of their individual and collective rights in the negotiations, and their divided political leaderships were not held accountable for their decisions or inaction. After I resigned, I believed I had a duty to inform the public.
Shortly after the Gaza war I started to write about my experience in Ramallah. In my 2010 book, Il n’y aura pas d’Etat Palestinien (There will be no Palestinian State), I concluded: “The peace process is a spectacle, a farce, played to the detriment of Palestinian reconciliation, at the cost of the bloodshed in Gaza.” In full conscience, and acting independently, I later agreed to share some information with al-Jazeera specifically with regard to the fate of Palestinian refugee rights in the 2008 talks. Other sources did the same, although I am unaware of their identity. Taking these tragic developments of the “peace process” to a wider Arab and western audience was justified because it was in the public interest of the Palestinian people. I had – and still have – no doubt that I had a moral, legal and political obligation to proceed accordingly.
Today, I am relieved that this first-hand information is available to Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory, in Israel and in exile. In a way, Palestinian rights are back in their holders’ possession and the people are now in a position to make enlightened decisions about the future of their struggle. I am also glad that international stakeholders to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can access these documents. The world can no longer overlook that while Palestinians’ strong commitment to peace is genuine, the fruitless pursuit of a “peace process” framed according to the exclusive conditions of the occupying power leads to compromises which would be unacceptable in any other region of the globe.
Finally, I feel reassured that the people of Palestine overwhelmingly realise that the reconciliation between all their constituents must be the first step towards national liberation. The Palestinians from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinians in Israel and the Palestinians living in exile have a common future. The path to Palestinian self-determination will require the participation of all in a renewed political platform.
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Al-Jazeera is helping to break the silence | Wadah Khanfar
In an era of transparency, the Middle East’s fate can no longer be decided behind closed doors
It is almost a century since the state borders that today divide the Middle East were drawn up. The shape of the region was negotiated behind closed doors and imposed by colonial powers without consulting its people. The impact of those deals still haunts the region and, many would argue, plays a central role in its instability.
Some of the states that emerged from the carve-up later championed independence and social development, while others adopted a conservative stance. But almost without exception they maintained a monopoly on information and communication, underpinned by control and censorship of the media. For many years dissent, criticism or even limited exposure of what was going on behind closed doors was crushed with the argument that “it is not the right time” and “we are in a development and liberation battle”. Such dissent and transparency would, the powers-that-be insisted, only “weaken unity and undermine the national interest”.
That case is still being made by governments across the Middle East and their international backers, as the region has erupted in demands for change. But their control of information – along with the wider western monopoly of international communication – has already been broken.
Over the past 15 years free media in the Middle East have gradually succeeded in breaking the official grip and started to reflect the frustrations and ambitions of the people of the region directly. Al-Jazeera was the first regional media network to break the freedom of information taboo. That came at a heavy price, including continuous conflicts with many regimes; the regular closure of our bureaux from Bahrain to Morocco; the arrest, torture and even killing of our journalists; and the sponsorship of smears and hostile rumours to corrode our credibility. The latest attempt to silence us took place last week when we were taken off air by the Egyptian government-owned satellite Nilsat.
That breaking of the information blockade by satellite TV has been hugely strengthened by the spread of new technologies. Even while states have tried to use them to enforce control, unexpected new opportunities have emerged: through the internet, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the youth of the region – as elsewhere in the world – have found a common voice. Mobile-phone cameras and amateur videos allow the world to see what is beyond the reach of professional TV cameras. With a simple memory stick, it has become possible to have massive leaks of information about what is being done in secret in the name of the people.
But, crucially, it is the increasingly powerful alliance between free mainstream media and new media – pioneered by al-Jazeera in the Middle East – that is today leading to the exponential spread of information to and from the region. Through intrepid social networking, images of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have gone from local villages to our global audience of more than 200 million. We were not only first, we were everywhere: deploying well ahead of the tipping points that everyone recognised.
We were with the crowds when they demonstrated outside the Tunis’s interior ministry – a potent symbol of torture and repression, as in most Arab countries. And we have broadcast live from Cairo’s Tahrir Square day and night for the last 12 days, despite all attempts to switch off our cameras and arrest our reporters.
This new alliance has given a transformative impetus to the media’s most important role: to make information available to those who should be the source of all power in the region, the people of the Middle East themselves. Once people have access to information, they can decide their own fate and, we believe, make better choices than others have made for them – hopefully ones that will lead to a more peaceful and democratic future.
The role we are now playing is no different from that of the best media in developed countries: extracting information from the powerful to pass it to the ultimate source of power – the people. However, the free media is under continual attack in the region for supposedly “betraying national interests”, or for the timing of our reports, or accused of harbouring hidden agendas of “destabilisation”. In reality, those who make such charges merely expose their determination to keep their own people in the dark about the reality affecting their own lives, unable to correct or adjust – or even accept their fate on the basis of collective will, rather than the decisions of the few.
In the past couple of weeks, the same stock charges were levelled against us by the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank. The attack was made as a result of our broadcast and publication of the Palestine papers, an unprecedented leak of confidential Palestinian negotiations records and internal documents. The papers – which we shared with the Guardian in recognition of the importance of the material and the belief that no outlet should have a monopoly of such a sensitive story – were provided by sources who believed the PA had lost its way. Al-Jazeera’s new transparency unit will now, we hope, be the recipient of many more such leaks from across the region and beyond.
The Middle East is without doubt passing through a period of historic transformation. Al-Jazeera and other free media are not the cause of the wave of uprisings and unrest sweeping the region. The reasons are profound and go far beyond the role of the media. But we are one important factor giving people across the region the means to take control of their own lives. What is certain is that the fate of the Middle East can no longer be decided behind closed doors.
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Al-Jazeera is helping to break the silence | Wadah Khanfar
In an era of transparency, the Middle East’s fate can no longer be decided behind closed doors
It is almost a century since the state borders that today divide the Middle East were drawn up. The shape of the region was negotiated behind closed doors and imposed by colonial powers without consulting its people. The impact of those deals still haunts the region and, many would argue, plays a central role in its instability.
Some of the states that emerged from the carve-up later championed independence and social development, while others adopted a conservative stance. But almost without exception they maintained a monopoly on information and communication, underpinned by control and censorship of the media. For many years dissent, criticism or even limited exposure of what was going on behind closed doors was crushed with the argument that “it is not the right time” and “we are in a development and liberation battle”. Such dissent and transparency would, the powers-that-be insisted, only “weaken unity and undermine the national interest”.
That case is still being made by governments across the Middle East and their international backers, as the region has erupted in demands for change. But their control of information – along with the wider western monopoly of international communication – has already been broken.
Over the past 15 years free media in the Middle East have gradually succeeded in breaking the official grip and started to reflect the frustrations and ambitions of the people of the region directly. Al-Jazeera was the first regional media network to break the freedom of information taboo. That came at a heavy price, including continuous conflicts with many regimes; the regular closure of our bureaux from Bahrain to Morocco; the arrest, torture and even killing of our journalists; and the sponsorship of smears and hostile rumours to corrode our credibility. The latest attempt to silence us took place last week when we were taken off air by the Egyptian government-owned satellite Nilsat.
That breaking of the information blockade by satellite TV has been hugely strengthened by the spread of new technologies. Even while states have tried to use them to enforce control, unexpected new opportunities have emerged: through the internet, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, the youth of the region – as elsewhere in the world – have found a common voice. Mobile-phone cameras and amateur videos allow the world to see what is beyond the reach of professional TV cameras. With a simple memory stick, it has become possible to have massive leaks of information about what is being done in secret in the name of the people.
But, crucially, it is the increasingly powerful alliance between free mainstream media and new media – pioneered by al-Jazeera in the Middle East – that is today leading to the exponential spread of information to and from the region. Through intrepid social networking, images of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have gone from local villages to our global audience of more than 200 million. We were not only first, we were everywhere: deploying well ahead of the tipping points that everyone recognised.
We were with the crowds when they demonstrated outside the Tunis’s interior ministry – a potent symbol of torture and repression, as in most Arab countries. And we have broadcast live from Cairo’s Tahrir Square day and night for the last 12 days, despite all attempts to switch off our cameras and arrest our reporters.
This new alliance has given a transformative impetus to the media’s most important role: to make information available to those who should be the source of all power in the region, the people of the Middle East themselves. Once people have access to information, they can decide their own fate and, we believe, make better choices than others have made for them – hopefully ones that will lead to a more peaceful and democratic future.
The role we are now playing is no different from that of the best media in developed countries: extracting information from the powerful to pass it to the ultimate source of power – the people. However, the free media is under continual attack in the region for supposedly “betraying national interests”, or for the timing of our reports, or accused of harbouring hidden agendas of “destabilisation”. In reality, those who make such charges merely expose their determination to keep their own people in the dark about the reality affecting their own lives, unable to correct or adjust – or even accept their fate on the basis of collective will, rather than the decisions of the few.
In the past couple of weeks, the same stock charges were levelled against us by the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank. The attack was made as a result of our broadcast and publication of the Palestine papers, an unprecedented leak of confidential Palestinian negotiations records and internal documents. The papers – which we shared with the Guardian in recognition of the importance of the material and the belief that no outlet should have a monopoly of such a sensitive story – were provided by sources who believed the PA had lost its way. Al-Jazeera’s new transparency unit will now, we hope, be the recipient of many more such leaks from across the region and beyond.
The Middle East is without doubt passing through a period of historic transformation. Al-Jazeera and other free media are not the cause of the wave of uprisings and unrest sweeping the region. The reasons are profound and go far beyond the role of the media. But we are one important factor giving people across the region the means to take control of their own lives. What is certain is that the fate of the Middle East can no longer be decided behind closed doors.
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Palestinian negotiators must not take key decisions on our behalf | Haneen Zoabi
We Palestinians in Israel will not stand for our rights being given away by so-called representatives
Had the offer made by “representatives” of the Palestinian people to Israel during peace negotiations – revealed this week in the Palestine papers – been accepted, the resulting agreement would have been in conflict with international law. It would also have had a profound impact on all Palestinians: not only those under occupation or refugees in the diaspora, but also Palestinians like myself – the 1.2 million of us who make up 18% of the population of Israel.
First, giving up the refugees’ right of return – as was apparently accepted by the Palestinian negotiators – would mean giving up the demand for the reunification of Palestinian families divided by the nakba, our expulsion from Israel in 1948. At this time some Palestinians remained in Israel, while others were displaced. Israel has since refused to allow hundreds of divided families to be reunited.
Furthermore, Israel currently prevents one Palestinian from marrying another from Gaza, the West Bank, Syria or Lebanon and remaining within the borders of Israel, on the pretext of preventing the right of return. So I, for example, can marry a British citizen and live in Nazareth but cannot do the same with a Palestinian who does not hold Israeli nationality.
Second, the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state – which was also apparently accepted by the negotiator Saeb Erekat – would delegitimise the citizenship of Palestinians in Israel. In practice, Israel has acted as a Jewish state since its founding, and undermined the rights of Palestinian citizens for more than 60 years, with chronic, institutionalised discrimination. International recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would give this discrimination a legal and ethical justification. Arab Israeli citizenship would become conditional, and the inferior status of Palestinian citizens and residents as non-Jews, and thus by definition excluded outsiders, would become entrenched. Indeed, it would call into question their very future in such a state, their homeland.
Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state by concerned international parties would serve to legitimise the series of racist laws and bills currently before the Knesset, and would turn the legal, political struggle of the Palestinian national minority into an illegal and illegitimate struggle – a move that would be fatal to democracy. It would become far easier to criminalise any party, individual or action that sought the establishment of genuine democracy and equality. Ultimately, it would effectively block the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. Israel should be a democratic state, not an ethnic state.
Third, we reject the proposed exchange of populations between Israel and the West Bank, championed, among others, by Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. This proposal has increasingly pervaded Israel’s political culture. According to a recent poll, 53% of the Jewish Israeli public believes that the state is entitled to encourage Palestinian citizens to emigrate. Making our citizenship a subject of negotiations would send out the clear and dangerous message that it is temporary, and open to question. As with residents of the occupied Palestinian territory – whose temporary legal status has become permanent, after 43 years of Israeli occupation – making Palestinian citizenship in Israel temporary totally ignores the basic fact that we are indigenous people living in our homeland, not an immigrant minority.
Moreover, raising this question now carries particular dangers, given the politics of hatred and persecution towards the Palestinian minority. When a letter was published by a group of publicly funded rabbis calling on Israeli Jews not to rent flats and houses to Palestinians, the Israeli political leadership took no practical action against them. A further poll found that 46% of the Jewish public would not want to live next to Arabs.
It has been clearly established by the international community that any decisions that have a direct impact on the future status of a national minority must be taken after full consultation, and with their consent – including through a referendum. We therefore reject any proposal that would involve other parties taking such decisions on our behalf.
We, as Palestinian people living inside Israel and on the basis of our historic right and international law, have full right of veto – not only on matters that affect our lives, such as the return of the refugees, the Jewish identity of the state and population exchange, but also on all matters affecting and infringing the rights of the Palestinian people.
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Europe’s failure on Middle East peace | Alastair Crook
Attempts to reconcile policy contradictions have prevented the EU from mounting an alternative foreign policy to that of the US
Many have questioned why the European Union failed to provide an independent view to that of the United States on Middle East policy during the last decade. It is not a simple question to answer. Partly, the EU failed to assert its voice because, at the beginning of the decade, it was scrambling to contain the impact of inflating US hubris, fuelled by the defeat of Saddam Hussein. Partly, it was also a simple reflection of most European politicians’ dependency on Washington. But the release of the Palestine Papers provides another answer.
They show how Tony Blair in particular had so undercut the political space that there was effectively no room for it. In a secret policy switch in 2003, he tied the UK and EU security policy into a major American counter-insurgency (Coin) “surge” in Palestine.
It was an initiative that would bear a heavy political cost for the EU in 2006, and for years to come, when Hamas won parliamentary elections by a large majority. The EU’s claims for democracy have rung hollow ever since. Blair’s “surge” also left the EU exposed as hypocrites: on a political level, for example, the EU might talk about its policy of fostering reconciliation between Palestinian factions, but at the security plane, and in other ways, it was pursuing the polar opposite objectives.
In 2003, US efforts to marginalise Yasser Arafat by leeching away his presidential powers into the embrace of the prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, collapsed. Arafat dismissed Abbas as PM. This was a blow to the US policy which – even then – was focused on creating a “de-Fatah-ised” Palestinian Authority. George Bush complained to Blair bitterly about Abbas’s dismissal: the Europeans still were “dancing around Arafat” – leaving the US to “do the heavy lifting” with the Israelis. Europeans were not pulling their weight in the “war on terror”, Bush concluded.
Blair’s Coin surge was his response to Bush. The Palestine Papers reveal “a security drive” with the objective of
“degrading the capabilities of the rejectionists: Hamas, PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad], and the al-Aqsa Brigades – through the disruption of their leaderships’ communications and command and control capabilities, the detention of key middle-ranking officers, and the confiscation of their arsenals and financial resources held within the occupied territories. US and – informally – UK monitors would report both to Israel and to the Quartet. We could also explore the temporary internment of leading Hamas and PIJ figures.”
The papers also show how the project ballooned: a huge investment in training and infrastructure of the security services, building prisons to accommodate the possible introduction of internment for Hamas members, the establishment of the Dayton military battalions to confront Hamas, the planning to depose Hamas in Gaza, the targeted assassination of Hamas leaders. Even the international Quartet was engaged to work with Arab states’ intelligence services in order to disrupt Hamas’s sources of financing.
The “surge” sucked in everything: aid, economic assistance, institution-building – all were reoriented towards the counter-insurgency project. Ultimately, the Palestinian state-building project, and the Coin surge, were to become one.
Against this counter-insurgency background it is not surprising that Hamas’s victory in the 2006 polls only prompted a further increase in European “off-balance sheet” assistance to the EU/US-made security sector. At a political level the Europeans were attempting to keep an independent voice, the Palestine Papers show, when EU envoy Marc Otte spoke with Saeb Erekat two months after the Hamas election.
Otte: EU has to deal with the reality of a Hamas-led government … In this respect, EU position is different from the US.
Erekat: How is this position different?
Otte: US wants to see a Hamas government fail. The EU will encourage Hamas to change and will try to make things work as much as possible.
Inevitably, the EU’s actions spoke louder than Otte’s words. The EU had endorsed the Quartet conditions for engagement with Hamas – conditions that the UN representative at the time told the UN secretary general were hurdles raised precisely in order to prevent Hamas from meeting them, rather than as guidelines intended to open the path for diplomatic solutions. Soon after, British and American intelligence services were preparing a “soft” coup to remove Hamas from power in Gaza.
EU standing in the region has suffered from the contradiction of maintaining one line in public, while its security policies were facing in another direction entirely. Thus, we have the EU “talking the talk” of reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas while “walking the walk” of disruption, detention, seizing finances, and destroying the capabilities of one of the two factions.
Thus we have EU “talking the talk” of aid for Palestinians, while “walking the walk” of tying that aid to the objectives of the US security project; we have the EU “talking the talk” of Palestinian state-building, while Palestinian institutions are dispersed to external control; we have the EU “talking the talk” of democracy, while it colludes with a system of government exercised through unaccountable decree, and parliament is prevented from exercising any function.
This catalogue of attempts to reconcile an internal policy contradiction has pre-empted the EU from mounting any effective foreign policy alternative to that of the US on the “peace process”, and has eaten away its standing in the region. The legacy of Blair’s 2003 surge has been a highly costly one, as the Palestine Papers well illustrate.
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Week in review podcast: Leaks, sexism, and the end of meritocracy
Jonathan Freedland is joined in the studio this week by religious affairs correspondent Riazat Butt, Guardian leader writer Anne Perkins, and Tim Samuels, presenter of Men’s Hour on BBC Radio Five Live.
With another ream of secret documents thrust into the public domain, we begin by discussing what the Palestine Papers tell us about diplomacy in a WikiLeaks world. (Be sure to listen to our Focus podcast about the reaction in Middle East to the publishing of these documents.)
Also in this week’s show, David Schneider gives us his analysis of the Andy Gray and Richard Keys sexism row. The pair were on-mic but off-air – so was this another example of this new WikiLeaks world, where nothing is off the record?
Finally, we examine how class and privilege has crept back into British politics and ask – much as Andrew Neil did this week – has meritocracy had its day?
Only authentic leaders can deliver a Middle East peace | Seumas Milne
This week’s leaks have exposed the dangerous folly of US and British attempts to control and divide the Palestinians
It’s a tragedy for the Palestinian people that at a time when their cause is the focus of greater global popular support than ever in their history, their own political movements to win their rights are in such debilitating disarray. That has been one of the clearest messages from the cache of leaked documents al-Jazeera and the Guardian have published over the past few days. It’s not just the scale of one-sided concessions – from refugees to illegal settlements – offered by Palestinian negotiators and banked for free by their Israeli counterparts. The constant refrain of ingratiating desperation is in some ways more shocking. While Israel’s Tzipi Livni rejects the offer to hand over vast chunks of Jerusalem as insufficient – adding “but I really appreciate it” – and Condi Rice muses over resettling Palestinian refugees in South America, the chief PLO negotiator, Saeb Erekat, is reduced to begging for a “figleaf”.
It’s a study in the decay of what in Yasser Arafat’s heyday was an authentic national liberation movement. Try to imagine the Vietnamese negotiators speaking in such a way at the Paris peace talks in the 70s – or the Algerian FLN in the 60s – and it’s obvious how far the West Bank Palestinian leadership has drifted from its national moorings.
However well the basic contours were known, it’s scarcely surprising many Palestinians are still stunned to discover exactly what is being said and done in their name. Erekat writes in the Guardian that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”, and any deal would be put to a referendum. But as we know from the Palestine papers, he himself made clear in private that such a vote would exclude most Palestinians, particularly refugees. And as he told US officials last year, the same package offered three years ago is “still there”, waiting to be picked up.
But simply to point the finger at Palestinian leaders is to miss the point. What has been highlighted by the documents is not a picture of genuine negotiation and necessary compromise, but of a gross imbalance of power that can’t deliver peace, let alone justice. What’s more, it’s one where the western powers repeatedly intervene to tilt the scales still further against the victims of the conflict.
What has become clearer from the confidential records is that the talk of “partners for peace” is a fantasy. A far more mainstream Israeli leadership than is now in power was not even close to accepting an offer that would anyway have been almost certainly rejected by Palestinians if they had been consulted.
And why would Israeli negotiators do anything else when their rejection was backed to the hilt by the US government? Reading the transcripts of the talks, they often seem to be simply going through the motions.
It is the story of 20 years of failed peace negotiations that became a charade, a way to maintain the status quo rather than deliver the promised two-state solution, and that have now evidently run into the sand. Inevitably, the vacuum they have left behind can only increase the threat of renewed war.
This is the same peace process that produced the breakdown of authentic leadership and the dysfunctional structures of the Palestinian Authority, which underlie the sorry saga disclosed in the leaked documents.
The PA was designed in the 1993 Oslo agreement to be a temporary administration for a five-year transition to statehood. Eighteen years later it has become an open-ended authoritarian quasi state, operating as an outsourced security arm of the Israeli occupation it was meant to replace, funded and effectively controlled by the US, Britain and other western governments.
Its leader’s electoral mandate ran out two years ago, and the authority has become increasingly repressive, imprisoning and torturing both civilian and military activists from its rival, Hamas, which won the last Palestinian elections.
With the large bulk of its income coming from the US and the European Union, the PA’s leaders are now far more accountable to their funders than to their own people. And, as the records of private dealings between US and PA officials show, it is the American government and its allies that now effectively pick the Palestinians’ leaders.
The new administration expected to see “the same Palestinian faces” in charge if the cash was to keep flowing, PA officials were told after Obama’s election: Mahmoud Abbas and, more importantly, the Americans’ point man, Salam Fayyad.
And despite some less strident rhetoric, the US and British governments have continued to promote the division between Fatah and Hamas, in effect blocking reconciliation while pouring resources and training into the PA security machine’s campaign against the Palestinian Islamist movement.
As we also now know, British intelligence and government officials have been at the heart of the western effort to turn the PA into an Iraqi-style counter-insurgency operation against Hamas and other groups that continue to maintain the option of armed resistance to occupation. Shielded from political accountability at home, how exactly does British covert support for detention without trial of Palestinians by other Palestinians promote the cause of peace and security in the Middle East, or anywhere else? In reality, it simply makes the chances of a representative Palestinian leadership that could actually deliver peace with justice even less likely.
The message from the revolutionary events in Tunisia and the spread of unrest elsewhere in the Arab world should be clear enough. Western support for dictatorial pro-western regimes across the region for fear of who their people might elect if given the chance isn’t just wrong – it’s no longer working, and risks provoking the very backlash it’s aimed to forestall.
That applies even more strongly to the Palestinian territories, under military occupation for the past 44 years. Unless those governments that bolster Israeli rejectionism and PA clientalism shift ground, the result will be to fuel and spread the conflict.
For Palestinians, the priority has to be to start to change that lopsided balance of power. That will require a more representative and united national leadership, as the story told by the Palestine papers has rammed home – which means at the very least a democratic overhaul of Palestinian institutions, such as the PLO. In the wake of what has now emerged, pressure for change is bound to grow. Anyone who cares for the Palestinian cause must hope it succeeds.
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The Palestine papers are a distraction from the real issue | Saeb Erekat
We made no backroom deals, and negotiated in good faith. But Palestine had no partner for peace
The release of Palestinian documents by al-Jazeera reveals nothing new about the nature and content of negotiations. Rather, it constitutes an unambiguous slander campaign aimed at the Palestinian leadership at a time when we seek to take new measures in defence of the Palestinian cause.
We have been accused of making great concessions to Israel behind the back of the Palestinian people. Such allegations are groundless. For the past 19 years the Palestinian leadership has engaged in hard-fought but meaningful negotiations with Israel with the aim of achieving a permanent agreement based on two states on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as our capital and a just solution to the refugee issue based on international law and the United Nations Resolution 194. These red lines have guided and shaped our discussions with Israel and at present with our American interlocutors.
In the course of these negotiations, we have explored a wide range of ideas with the purpose of reaching an understanding of mutual interests leading to an agreed-upon settlement. Yet all of our positions have been grounded in the principles of international law with respect to the rights of the Palestinian people, without exception.
A careful and complete reading of the documents at hand – which goes beyond the sensationalised headlines and spin – will reveal this to be true. First and foremost, it is essential to understand that no agreement has ever been reached between the parties on any of the permanent status issues. This reality, by its very definition, renders it impossible that either party has conceded anything.
Of equal and closely related importance is the most fundamental premise that has been the basis of our negotiations with Israel: namely, that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. Accordingly, it is impossible to look at any negotiation map, proffered land swap, or any other issue in isolation without understanding the overall offer then on the table. Any such attempt places an issue squarely out of context. It is at best a misguided exercise, and one that is assured of misrepresenting the facts in any given portion of what have been lengthy, detailed and highly-charged negotiations.
Furthermore, we have always made clear that any solution agreed upon at the negotiating table must hold up to a Palestinian national referendum. In other words, no agreement will be concluded without the approval of the Palestinian people.
Therefore, there are no secrets or back door dealings. We shoulder a huge responsibility with far-reaching implications, and we have spent years trying to reach agreed terms that honour our rights and dignity and that, therefore, will meet the approval of our people.
What should be taken from these documents is that Palestinian negotiators have consistently come to the table in complete seriousness and in good faith, and that we have only been met by rejection at the other end. Conventional wisdom, supported by the press, has allowed Israel to promote the idea that it has always lacked a partner at our end. If it has not been before, it should now be painfully obvious that the very opposite is true. It is Palestinians who have lacked, and who continue to lack, a serious partner for peace.
Ultimately the world must not be distracted from what has been the only constant throughout this process. Israel continues to occupy the land of Palestine, to colonise it relentlessly, and to deny the most fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, in particular our refugees. These are the issues that demand attention and that must be addressed without further delay.
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