Many
on the Palestinian streets will recoil to read not just the concessions
offered by their representatives - starting with the yielding of those
parts of East Jerusalem settled by Israeli Jews - but the language in
which those concessions were made.
To hear their chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, tell the Israelis that the Palestinians are ready to concede "the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history" - even using the Hebrew word for the city - will strike many as an act of humiliation.
Referring
to Ariel Sharon as a "friend" will offend those Palestinians who still
revile the former prime minister as the "Butcher of Beirut" for his role
in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Telling Tzipi Livni, Israel's
then foreign minister, on the eve of national elections "I would vote
for you" will strike many Palestinians as grovelling of a shameful kind.
It
is this tone which will stick in the throat just as much as the
substantive concessions on land or, as the Guardian will reveal in
coming days, the intimate level of secret co-operation with Israeli
security forces or readiness of Palestinian negotiators to give way on
the highly charged question of the right of return for Palestinian
refugees.
Of course it should be said that this cache of papers is
not exhaustive and may have been leaked selectively; other documents
might provide a rather different impression. Nevertheless, these texts
will do enormous damage to the standing of the Palestinian Authority and
to the Fatah party that leads it. Erekat himself may never recover his
credibility.
But something even more profound is at stake: these
documents could discredit among Palestinians the very notion of
negotiation with Israel and the two-state solution that underpins it.
And
yet there might also be an unexpected boost here for the Palestinian
cause. Surely international opinion will see concrete proof of how far
the Palestinians have been willing to go, ready to move up to and beyond
their "red lines", conceding ground that would once have been
unthinkable - none more so than on Jerusalem.
In the blame game that has long attended Middle East diplomacy, this could see a shift in the Palestinians' favour.
The effect of these papers on Israel will be the reverse.
They
will cause little trouble inside the country. There are no exposes of
hypocrisy or double talk; on the contrary, the Israelis' statements
inside the negotiating room echo what they have consistently said
outside it. Livni in particular - now leader of the Israeli opposition -
will be heartened that no words are recorded here to suggest she was
ever a soft touch.
Still, in the eyes of world opinion that very
consistency will look much less admirable. These papers show that the
Israelis were intransigent in public - and intransigent in private.
What's
more, the documents blow apart what has been a staple of Israeli public
diplomacy: the claim that there is no Palestinian partner. That theme, a
refrain of Israeli spokesmen on and off for years, is undone by
transcripts which show that there is not only a Palestinian partner but
one more accommodating than will surely ever appear again.
Where
does this leave the peace process itself? The pessimistic view is that
what little life remained in it has now been punched out. On the
Palestinian side these revelations are bound to strengthen Hamas, who
have long rejected Fatah's strategy of negotiation, arguing that armed
resistance is the only way to secure Palestinian statehood. Hamas will
now be able to claim that diplomacy not only fails to bring results, it
brings national humiliation.
But the despair will not be confined
to the Palestinians. Others may well conclude that if a two-state
solution is not possible even under these circumstances - when the
Palestinians go as far as they can but still fail, in Livni's words, to
"meet our demands" - then it can never be achieved. This is the view
that sees Israelis and Palestinians as two acrobats who, even when they
bend over backwards, just cannot touch: the Palestinian maximum always
falls short of the Israeli minimum.
The optimistic view will hope
these papers act as a wake-up call, jolting the US - exposed here as far
from the even-handed, honest broker it claims to be - into pressing
reset on its Middle East effort, beginning with a determination to exert
proper pressure on Israel, pushing it to budge.
It goes without
saying that in any wager between optimists and pessimists in the Middle
East, the smart money is usually on the latter.
