Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, left, and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the East Room of the White House on Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2010. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
(CNSNews.com) – A Palestinian Authority plan to push for a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity was dramatically upstaged Sunday by the embarrassing leak of secret P.A. negotiating records.
The documents, to be released over a four-day period by al-Jazeera and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, reveal P.A. positions on such key issues as the future of Jerusalem and refugees that differ significantly from the stances that it takes publicly.
They show, for instance, that P.A. negotiators agreed in 2008 to drop demands for most of the Jewish neighborhoods built in and around Jerusalem since Israel captured the area from Jordanian control in the 1967 Six Day War.
The P.A. – supported by the Arab and Islamic worlds as well as many other governments – has long demanded at least “eastern Jerusalem” as the capital of its envisaged future independent state, a position reiterated by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas as recently as last week.
In one of the leaked documents, P.A. negotiator Saeb Erekat during a 2009 meeting with U.S. officials expressed a willingness for “creative” ways to resolve arguably the most explosive issue in the entire conflict – the future of the small area in Jerusalem’s Old City that as the location of the biblical Temples is the holiest site in Judaism but is also home to Islam’s third most-revered mosque.
No P.A. leader
An aerial view of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City shows the Dome of the Rock mosque and the Western (“Wailing”) Wall. The Al-Aqsa mosque, the third most revered site in Islam, is not visible. (AP Photo)
has ever before even hinted at any compromise over the Temple Mount, which Muslims call Haram Al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary).
Former P.A. leader Yasser Arafat’s refusal to do so reportedly was a key factor in the collapse of the 2000 Clinton administration-mediated negotiations in Camp David. It had been proposed at those talks that the area remain under Israeli sovereignty, but with the P.A. enjoying “custodianship” over it – a significant concession by Israel, considering the centrality of the site to the Jewish faith.
The records which al-Jazeera and the Guardian are calling “The Palestine Papers” also show that P.A. negotiators agreed to a 2008 proposal by then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that would limit to several thousand the number of Palestinian refugees and offspring who would be allowed to return to Israel (as opposed to an independent Palestinian state).
Other issues revealed by the leaked papers on which the P.A. conceded positions at odds with those it takes in public included an agreement to recognize Israel specifically as a Jewish state.
The documents also revealed that the Israeli government informed P.A. leaders in advance of the planned military operation it launched against Hamas – the political rival to Abbas’ Fatah movement – in the Gaza Strip in December 2008.
P.A. officials challenged the veracity of the documents, suggesting that some had been fabricated. Abbas, who is visiting Egypt, told newspaper editors in Cairo that that P.A. hides nothing from “our brothers, the Arabs,” according to the official P.A. news agency, Wafa.
In a report citing the “slow death of [the] Middle East peace process,” the Guardian said the P.A. concessions revealed in the leaked documents “will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.” An editorial in the paper said that “as of today, its legitimacy as negotiators will have all but ended on the Palestinian street.”
The fallout from the “Palestine Papers” will be mixed: the P.A. will likely earn the wrath of many Palestinians and other Arabs but may win greater sympathy and support outside the region.
The leak could in fact prove more damaging to the Israeli cause than to the Palestinian one: What will be viewed favorably by many Israelis and supporters of Israel as steadfastness on the part of Israeli leaders will be condemned in other quarters as intransigence and inflexibility.
Security Council push
The document leak comes at a time when the P.A. is seeking strong U.N. Security Council support for a resolution declaring Israeli settlements in disputed territories illegal and demanding a halt to their construction.
The U.S. warned last week that the move would “complicate” peace efforts but officials have yet to indicate whether the U.S. will veto the resolution, which was introduced last week and is expected to come to a vote in the coming weeks.
The P.A. initiative is the first step in a strategy that entails bringing a second resolution, probably in the fall, seeking Security Council endorsement of Palestinian statehood.
The current resolution reportedly has the support of 14 of the council’s 15 members.
Last week a group of former diplomats and officials from Democratic and Republican administrations urged President Obama not to veto the resolution, warning that doing so would undermine American “credibility and interests.”
Earlier, a bipartisan group of 17 U.S. senators signed a letter pressing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to veto the measure, which they argued “will not move the two sides closer to a two-state solution, but rather damage the fragile trust between them.”
The issue poses a test for the Obama administration, which has painted itself as more U.N.-friendly than its predecessor and has yet to exercise the veto right the U.S. enjoys as a permanent member of the Security Council.
The Bush administration cast 10 Security Council vetoes between 2001 and 2006, in all cases but one dealing with the Israeli-Arab conflict (the remaining one, in 2002, related to concerns that U.S. peacekeepers in the Balkans could fall foul of the International Criminal Court).
Every president since President Nixon used the U.S. veto at least once to block Security Council resolutions relating to the Middle East. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/leaked-negotiation-papers-undermine-pale#
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