Israel Matzav

Palileaks prove nothing

Some of you may recall that the very first story I did, and many others did, on Palileaks included a link to an article by al-Guardian's Jonathan Freedland in which this 'journalist' immediately concluded that the 'Palestinians' wanted to make peace and that the big, bad Israelis had spurned them.

Benny Morris rips Freedland some new body parts.

Had he exercised memory, or looked, indeed, at his newspaper's own archive, he might have discovered that the astonishing Palestinian "concessions"—mainly, that the bulk of the new Israeli neighborhoods in north, east, and south Jerusalem, built on or across the 1967 lines, were already "conceded" to the Israelis in the Clinton "parameters"—President Bill Clinton's peace proposals—of December 2000, which the Palestinians to this day maintain were substantially accepted by the previous Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. Clinton had laid down the principle, in dividing Jerusalem, of Jewish neighborhoods to go to Israel and Arab areas to come under Arab sovereignty.

Similarly, Arafat had already agreed that the Jewish Quarter and the Western ("Wailing") Wall (and perhaps also the Armenian Quarter) in Jerusalem's Old City should be under Israerli sovereignty, with the Palestinians getting the Muslim and Christian quarters. Nothing new here either.

But Arafat in 2000-2001 had balked at two things—and neither, as far as I know, have been conceded by the current heads of the Palestinian Authority-PLO: sole Palestinian sovereignty over the southeastern corner of the Old City, the Temple Mount\Haram ash Sharif; and the Palestinian refugees' "Right of Return," meaning that the Palestinians still alive from the 1948 War's exodus and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren must be allowed to return to the areas of pre-1967 Israel.

...

Let Wikileaks or Al Jazeera (or Freedland) find and publish the document showing that the Palestinian leadership has accepted the Clinton formula for solving the refugeee problem—i.e., settlement in place, in the Arab countries, in the future West Bank-Gaza Palestinian state, across the oceans in Canada, or wherever—and conveyed that acceptance to Israel, formally, officially and definitively, as well as the agreement for recognizing Israel as the Jewish state, and peace between Israel and the Palestinians would be achievable in short order.

Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

Labels: al-Guardian, Benny Morris, Jonathan Freedland, Palileaks, Politics, World Politics

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:44 AM