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Thread: The Palestine Papers

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    Council Member bourbon's Avatar
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    Default The Palestine Papers

    Secret papers reveal slow death of Middle East peace, by Seumas Milne and Ian Black. guardian.co.uk, 23 January 2011.
    The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel's annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.

    A cache of thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more than a decade of negotiations with Israel and the US has been obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared exclusively with the Guardian. The papers provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process, which is now regarded as all but dead.

    The documents – many of which will be published by the Guardian over the coming days – also reveal:

    • The scale of confidential concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators, including on the highly sensitive issue of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.

    • How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state.

    • The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.

    • The central role of British intelligence in drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories.

    • How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel's 2008-9 war in Gaza.

    As well as the annexation of all East Jerusalem settlements except Har Homa, the Palestine papers show PLO leaders privately suggested swapping part of the flashpoint East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah for land elsewhere.

    Most controversially, they also proposed a joint committee to take over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City – the neuralgic issue that helped sink the Camp David talks in 2000 after Yasser Arafat refused to concede sovereignty around the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.

    The offers were made in 2008-9, in the wake of George Bush's Annapolis conference, and were privately hailed by the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, as giving Israel "the biggest Yerushalayim [the Hebrew name for Jerusalem] in history" in order to resolve the world's most intractable conflict. Israeli leaders, backed by the US government, said the offers were inadequate.
    Huge sections on this at The Guardian and al-Jazeera.

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    Council Member bourbon's Avatar
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    From two former agency Middle East hands:

    Palestine papers reveal risks for peace, by Robert Grenier. guardian.co.uk, 24 January 2011.
    The Phony Peace Process, by Philip Giraldi. The American Conservative Blog, January 24th, 2011.

    I will let someone else find pro-Israel perspectives to post for balance; because frankly I am too sick of their BS to read it right now.

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