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The Palestinian Authority gets leaked.
It looks like the corrupt and now totally two-faced Palestinian Authority is the latest victim of the leaking of confidential diplomatic documents – and alongside them, the Israeli negotiating team have been shown to be totally uninterested in responding to any of the PA’s sell off of the Palestinian family silver constructively.
Al Jazeera and the Guardian have obtained and published a raft of documents detailing the negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian Authority representatives in peace talks over the past decade. These documents for once and all demolish the myth that over the past ten years Israel has not had a “partner for peace”, and the Palestinians have not been interested in negotiating a settlement.
Israel's proposed annexation of Palestinian Territory
The reality is after 10 years of targeted assassinations, massacres, demolition of homes, aerial bombardment and murder after the start of the second Intifada the negotiating position of the Palestinian Authority has massively weakened compared to it’s position in 2000. The most blatant (and scandalous) example of this is the exposure of the size and scale of the sell out the PA was prepared to make on the issue of Jerusalem.
To give a brief background, Jerusalem was originally designated as an international city in the UN partition plan of Palestine outlined in 1947. After the Israeli state declared Independence, it was able to secure not just it’s own borders allocated in the partition plan, but was able to seize additional territory (78% of historic Palestine) including the western half of Jerusalem. The eastern half of Jerusalem was annexed (along with the West Bank) by Jordan. The West Bank – including all of Jerusalem – was then seized by Israel alongside the Golan Heights and the Sinai in the 1967 war. Jerusalem was then “united” – in practice annexed – under Israeli rule.
Jerusalem is one of the major sticking points in the conflict. While other illegal settlements have been on the table for transferring to Palestinian rule, Israel’s official stance is that Jerusalem is the “eternal, undivided capital of Israel”.
Put simply, they aren’t willing to give up any of it because of the religious and symbolic importance of the capital. For example one part of Jerusalem the Israelis annexed after the 1967 war was the Haram Al Sharif, the Dome of the Rock. This is the third holiest site in Islam but is also where the Western Wall is situated, which is a sacred site for Jews.
While Muslims call this site the Haram Al Sharif, Jews refer to it as the Temple Mount – as they believe the Second Temple in Jerusalem used to be situated exactly where the Dome of the Rock stands today. Some Christian Evangelicals support extreme Zionist nutters in calling for the Dome of the Rock to be destroyed and a new Temple to be made on its ruins, so as to accelerate the second coming of Christ. The Dome of the Rock has been the site of the start of the Second Intifada, after Ariel Sharon – then Israeli Prime Minister and war criminal – visited the site as a way of showing Israeli control over it.
So you can see that Jerusalem is a pretty important point of dispute between Israelis and Palestinians. However, it is not disputed in the international community or international law. Every other country in the world (except the US) recognises that East Jerusalem is not a part of Israel, and recently the EU declared East Jerusalem should be treated as occupied Palestinian territory. International law considers all Israeli building in East Jerusalem as illegal settlements with no legitimacy.
Despite the unequivocal position on Jerusalem in international law, shared by almost every country on earth, the documents leaked show the PA was willing to surrender almost all of the major settlement blocks in occupied East Jerusalem to permanent Israeli control. These settlements have surrounded Jerusalem like a ring, deliberately designed to make it almost impossible for the Palestinians to have East Jerusalem as the capital of their state.
This is the biggest concession the Palestinians have ever made in the history of the conflict over Jerusalem. The Palestinian negotiator even said they were building the biggest “Yerushalayim in history” for the Israelis, using the Hebrew word for Jerusalem to butter them up even more.
Not only did they surrender all these major settlement blocks, they also said they were willing to be “creative” on the issue of sovereignty at Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount putting it under the control of an “international committee”. This is despite the clear recognition a majority of countries have made that all of occupied East Jerusalem – including the Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount – is occupied Palestinian territory which only the Palestinians can have legal sovereignty over. The PA position means that Israel gets to continue it’s control over this site while discussions on it are kicked into the long grass.
As well as conceding territory to Israel on the occupied West Bank, the PA was also prepared to drop the right of return for Palestinians who were ethnically cleansed from Israel in 1948 and their descendants. Israel opposes this because it doesn’t want Palestinians returning and undermining the state’s Jewish majority. The PA was prepared to accept the return of only 10,000 Palestinians who had been expelled from Israel in 1948 – a drop in the ocean of millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants who have lived in refugee camps for decades.
Also the PA was prepared to accept that their state would be largely demilitarized, with no real capacity to defend itself – i.e. no air force, navy or sophisticated army. The only thing the Israelis were prepared to accept was a well armed police force, so that the Palestinian state would be able to repress any forces who opposed its sell out to Israel.
Despite these concessions the Israelis knocked back the Palestinians proposals. Nothing was offered in return for the Palestinian Authority’s wholesale surrender of East Jerusalem. As one of the negotiators put it, “The biggest Yerushalaim in Jewish history, symbolic number of refugees return, demilitarized state… what more can I give?”
The Israeli’s demanded even more that the PA’s massive concessions; they proposed that Israel would annex approximately 7% of occupied Palestinian territory, which would encompass all the major settlements taking in 88% of illegal settlers living in the West Bank. This would be on top of controlling the important religious sites in East Jerusalem, no return of refugees and keeping a Palestinian state toothless.
The Israeli side also proposed that the new Palestinian state should absorb some of the Israeli Arab population that live in Israel, as part of a land swap. This proposal was made without consulting Israeli Arabs and shows Israel regards them as second class citizens who shouldn’t be living in their state – in line with the views of Israel’s far right foreign minister Avigdor Liberman.
Britain is also implicated in these leaked documents – one shows that MI6 was willing to fund and assist the PA in conducting repression against rejectionist Palestinians. These PA security forces have already been implicated in numerous cases of torture of their own people, who they suspect of being Hamas members.
These leaked documents show that Israel’s refusal to sign a peace deal with the Palestinians had nothing to do with security, Palestinian stubbornness or avoiding a demographic timebomb from refugees returning. It was all about demanding that they get their cake and eat it; almost all the major Jerusalem settlements, all the major West Bank settlements, complete demilitarization, no right of return and control of the religious sites being their price. It’s a price too high even for the PA, and is unlikely to ever be accepted by any Palestinian leader not directly installed by Israel.
The leak of these documents has been extremely damaging to the PA for obvious reasons. They have been saying one thing in public about issues like Jerusalem, and another at the negotiating table, but the Israelis argue they are unscathed by the leak of these documents. In one sense this is true; the Israelis have publicly said the same things as they have said in private – that they won’t tolerate return of refugees or division of Jerusalem.
But to Israel’s supporters internationally, the leak of these documents is a disaster. Never again can they say that Palestinians aren’t willing to negotiate a settlement, that they are intransigent or that they “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”. These documents show the Palestinians were willing to negotiate and compromise on virtually everything, but were continually rejected. It is unlikely Israel will ever get a deal as good as this presented to them.
The details of the negotiations that have been leaked have all been conducted with the Fatah led Palestinian Authority, and Israeli Governments since 2000 – governments led by either the Likud or the Kadima party.
Likud has historically been the party committed to keeping all of Palestinian Territory under Israeli control. Its charter opposes the creation of any kind of Palestinian state in the West Bank. When some of the leaders of Likud – including the war criminal Ariel Sharon – saw that this position was not tenable, they founded a new party called Kadima.
This new party is no different from Likud in wanting to keep all of Jerusalem and control of the settlement blocks, but did want to give the Palestinians a half-arsed state in the West Bank which Israel would still be dominant over but wouldn’t have to directly occupy. This would mean Israel wouldn’t have to worry about Palestinians one day forcing a binational state, or pay for the occupation, and deal with their status as an international pariah.
This position – of giving the Palestinians a quasi-state – is now the most “moderate” that exists in Israeli politics; and even they are now in opposition. The Government in power today is led by Likud, and is even more intransigent than Kadima – one of the Palestinian negotiators said Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t even answer his calls.
You might think it’s pretty bizarre that Israel won’t negotiate and seal the deal on an agreement that’s fantastic for them. It would allow them to keep all their crown jewels in East Jerusalem, secure Israel as a Jewish state, and of course surely any Israeli Government that signed a peace deal with the Palestinians would be feted with international praise?
The reality is that the Israeli political establishment doesn’t feel any need to negotiate a peace with the Palestinians. As it stands they already have the settlements, control of Jerusalem etc – there is no pressure upon them to make peace so they don’t feel obliged to.
This wasn’t true in the past. In 1987 the first Intifada forced the Israelis to start negotiating with the PLO, allegedly to end the conflict but in reality to make them police the Palestinian people and give them limited autonomy in return. Today the Israeli political establishment isn’t threatened by an Intifada or Hamas attacks on Israel which are limited to sporadic rocket fire from the Gaza strip.
That’s why it’s vital for Socialists and others who support the Palestinians to increase the pressure on Israel in the west – by arguing for boycott, divestment and sanctions. Israel will only start to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian Territories when the price to pay becomes too much, when Israel can’t sell its goods abroad, when it can’t buy arms from the west, when its politicians fear arrest warrants every time they go abroad. Waiting for Israel to act reasonably at the negotiation table is never going to happen – BDS is a peaceful way to defend Palestinian national and civil rights, and when you consider the alternative pressure on Israel is suicide bombers on buses and pizza parlours, it’s the most humane one as well.
Why are the only two options for putting pressure on Israel BDS and suicide bombings? What about building a united working-class social movement of Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian-Arab workers to fight for a democratic internationalist settlement to the conflict that respects the right of both peoples? Since when did socialists ever propose external pressures (boycotts, sanctions etc.) as primary focuses for forcing change, rather than class struggle? And before anyone cites apartheid South Africa, the international boycott carried on for four decades with little impact; what actually brought the system down was black workers’ militancy. Which rather proves my point.
I fully support your point Danny Boy, but having lived there for over 2 years I would say there are fewer places in the world where the working classes of two opposing sides could organise to unite. It pains me to be so negative, but massive swathes of the Israeli working class are among the most right wing (and obviously Zionist) and aggressively intolerant groups of proletarians in the world. There are growing numbers of conscientious objectors (but still only a tiny wee percentage), but every single Israeli man and woman has to do military service from the age of 18 to 21, and then 6 weeks a year from then on. Boycotting is about as useful a tactic as you’ll get, given the circumstances.
Sounds to me like you’ve given up on the revolutionary potential of the Israeli working class (fitting user-name). Yes – currently chauvinism and even racism are very strong amongst Israeli workers. But it’s not as if reactionary ideas (about all sorts of issues) aren’t prevalent amongst workers all over the place. For example, a lot of British workers have pretty backwards ideas about immigration; does that mean they’ve can’t effect change?
If you just see class struggle as an incidental tactic and the working class as a stage army then it makes sense to abandon working-class politics if the working class in a given country/region is politically backwards. But if you understand socialism as working-class self-emancipation then there are no short-cuts (boycotts, movements led by other class forces, whatever). We should support every radical spark within Israeli society; you never know which one might catch fire.
And anyway… maybe things aren’t as bleak as you make out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/16/thousands-israelis-rally-rights-organisations