Dubai, January 24: Al Jazeera over the next few days will make “much more shocking” revelations about negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel as well as other regional players, according to a producer working closely on the Palestine Papers.
Laila Al Arian told Gulf News that the revelations that the Palestinian Authority was planning on giving the Israel the biggest “Yerushalayim” in history proves that there is a serious lack of transparency when it comes to the Palestinian Authority’s dealings.
Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat called the report “a pack of lies.”
In an interview on Al Jazeera television Sunday, he said, “We have not gone back on our position. If we had given ground on the refugees and made such concessions, why hasn’t Israel agreed to sign a peace accord?” He accused Israel of leaking the documents in a bid to embarrass Palestinians.
Al Arian confirmed to Gulf News the documents were fully authenticated over a period of several months.
“I think that when people don’t like the message they shoot the messenger,” she said in reaction to Erekat’s comments. While Al Arian could not comment on how the documents were obtained, she said noted that the process of preparing the documents for publication were “extremely labour intensive”.
“We had to sift through 1600 documents finding the most powerful elements – it was very labor intensive process and authenticating the documents to make sure everything was in context,” she explained.
The Palestinian Authority has long suffered a credibility crisis as leader Mahmoud Abbas hasn’t been legally representing the Palestinian people for quite some time.
Al Arian says it remains unclear whether this would be the final straw for the complete collapse of the PA, but may force the conversation into the limelight on who should really be representing the Palestinian people.
“Al Jazeera did not publish the report to embarrass the Palestinian Authority, but to ensure that the Palestinian people are protected and get the rights they deserve,” she said. While she could not comment on the reports in the next few days, she said readers will be shocked on the tones of the discussions.
“You really see the dynamics between the occupier and the occupier – the complete humiliation.”
Reaction to the report has gone viral on social networking websites. Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, wrote on Twitter: “I think today may be remembered as the day the two-state solution died #palestinepapers.”
Global Voices tracks some of the other initial reaction on Twitter. Former PLO representative, Karma Nabulsi writes in The Guardian that the leak “destroys the final traces of credibility of the peace process”.
Diana Buttu, a former colleague of Saeb Erekat called for his resignation.
The Guardian says no one comes out of them well. It is hard to tell who appears worst: the Palestinian leaders, who are weak, craven and eager to shower their counterparts with compliments; the Israelis, who are polite in word but contemptuous in deed; or the Americans, whose neutrality consists of bullying the weak and holding the hand of the strong.
Seumas Milne and Ian Black, who have done most of the reporting on the papers, sum up what they reveal: “The overall impression that emerges from the documents, which stretch from 1999 to 2010, is of the weakness and growing desperation of PA leaders as failure to reach agreement or even halt all settlement temporarily undermines their credibility in relation to their Hamas rivals; the papers also reveal the unyielding confidence of Israeli negotiators and the often dismissive attitude of US politicians towards Palestinian representatives”.
A preview of what’s to come in the next few days:
-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.
The papers were leaked to the TV network Al Jazeera which shared them with The Guardian.
-Agencies