Whatever we may think of the new journalistic trend of scoop by information-dump, the leaking of hundreds of documents from negotiations between the Palestinian and Israeli negotiators is an extraordinary event. We are all better informed as a result.
The Palestine Papers will make little difference to the UK's high-level diplomatic strategy in the Middle East. The leaks coincided with Avigdor Lieberman's visit to Britain and it was business as usual. The UK government's line on Israeli settlements was already hardening long before the Al Jazeera-Guardian revelations. But that is not to say that the leaks can be dismissed as a storm in a tea cup. As one senior Foreign Office official said this week: "This only serves to heighten a situation of tension".
The Foreign Office line on the papers is relatively straightforward: on the face of it they show that the Palestinians offered significant concessions and the Israelis can no longer argue that they do not have a partner for peace.
But the hard realities have not changed. Prominent Palestinian academic Hussein Agha and commentator Robert Malley put this well in a recent article for the New York Review of Books, published before the leak of the papers: “Whether Israelis wish for a resolution is not the central issue; one can assume they do and still question why they would want to take risks and provoke deep internal rifts when there is no apparent urgency to do so. The principal question for Israelis is no longer how to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians. It is why and at what cost.”
There has been no end of hysterical commentary that these leaks mark the end of the two-state solution or the betrayal of the Palestinian people by its leaders. This kind of pernicious rhetoric feeds into an already poisonous debate about Israel in the UK.
The nexus between Al Jazeera and the Guardian is already regarded as the heart of the movement to delegitimise Israel
Friends of Israel could be forgiven for being suspicious of the provenance of these leaks. The Al-Jazeera-Guardian nexus is already regarded by many as at the heart of the de-legitimisation movement. The Guardian editorial on the first day of the leaks fuelled the suspicion that the leaks were part of a targeted attack on the Palestinian Authority and Israel. BICOM reported that the papers are “widely being interpreted as an attack on the moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. Mahmoud Abbas’s bitter rival within Fatah, Mohammad Dahlan, has already been fingered as a possible source of the leaks.
Eyebrows have been raised by the fact that Seumas Milne, an outspoken opponent of Israel and cheerleader for the Palestinian cause, has been so prominent in the Guardian’s coverage.
And yet the real focus of hostility in the coverage, however, has been reserved for the Palestinian negotiators. As the pro-Israel media monitoring organisation, Just Journalism, has remarked: “The disapproval on the part of the Guardian is clearly directed not at the Israelis for turning down this apparent offer, but at the Palestinians for making the offer in the first place.”
This narrative of treachery and betrayal has already fed into the bitter sectarianism of activists on the ground in the UK. The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign has already issued a statement condemning the Palestinian Authority as “collaborators”.
Thus far, the leaks have led to a hardening of positions and contributed to a general atmosphere of despair. However, there is another way of looking at it. The Palestine Papers show that a two-state solution really was on the table. Those in this country who still believe in the possibility of peace in the Middle East could choose to see this as a starting point, rather than the end of all hope.
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