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.
