Palestine Papers: The secret negotiations
The leaked documents shocked the world with the minutes of secret negotiations between the PLO and Israel in our No. 9.

Gregg Carlstrom, Al-Jazeera: 27 Dec 2011 14:50

Were the Palestine Papers "the death of the two-state solution", a "pack of lies" or a "great blessing"?
Al Jazeera's release of The Palestine Papers, a trove of more than 1,600 leaked documents detailed nearly a decade's worth of negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

The documents, which include meeting minutes and internal memos, were published in full on Al Jazeera's website.

They show the PLO offering concessions that would have been overwhelmingly rejected by the Palestinian public, and receiving nothing in return from an Israeli government that budged little on core issues.

One document, for example, revealed that the PLO was willing to concede all of the illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, with the exception of Har Homa. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said the offer would give Israel "the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history".

Others showed Tzipi Livni, Israel's then-foreign minister, proposing to "swap" Israeli Arab villages into a future Palestinian state. Such a deal would have forced tens of thousands of Arab citizens of Israel, who supposedly enjoy equal rights under the law, to choose between their citizenship and their land.

Some of the most striking exchanges involved the PLO's compromises on the status of refugees, one of the conflict's core issues; in a 2010 meeting, Erekat said the PLO offered to accept just "a symbolic number" of the six million Palestinian refugees scattered around the globe.

The PLO's reaction to the papers was initially quite hostile. Yasser Abed Rabbo called them an attack on the Palestinian leadership; Erekat called them a "pack of lies", and claimed many of the papers were fabricated.

Confronting intimidation, working for justice in Palestine
Ilan Pappe The Electronic Intifada 27 December 2011

If we had a wish list for 2012 as Palestinians and friends of Palestine, one of the top items ought to be our hope that we can translate the dramatic shift in recent years in world public opinion into political action against Israeli policies on the ground.

We know why this has not yet materialized: the political, intellectual and cultural elites of the West cower whenever they even contemplate acting according to their own consciences as well as the wishes of their societies.

This last year was particularly illuminating for me in that respect. I encountered that timidity at every station in the many trips I took for the cause I believe in. And these personal experiences were accentuated by the more general examples of how governments and institutions caved in under intimidation from Israel and pro-Zionist Jewish organizations.

A catalogue of complicity

Of course there were US President Barack Obama’s pandering appearances in front of AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, and his administration’s continued silence and inaction in face of Israel’s colonization of the West Bank, siege and killings in Gaza, ethnic cleansing of the Bedouins in the Naqab and new legislation discriminating against Palestinians in Israel.

The complicity continued with the shameful retreat of Judge Richard Goldstone from his rather tame report on the Gaza massacre — which began three years ago today. And then there was the decision of European governments, especially Greece, to disallow campaigns of human aid and solidarity from reaching Gaza by sea.

Amira Hass - Haaretz

Arab revolts - past and present
Arabs have historically revolted every decade against rulers and the west has counter-revolted most attempts.
Joseph Massad Last Modified: 18 Nov 2011 10:45

The current popular challenges to the Western-sponsored Arab dictatorships are hardly a new occurrence in modern Arab history. We have seen such uprisings against European colonialism in the region since its advent in Algeria in 1830 and in Egypt in 1882. Revolts in Syria in the 1920s against French rule and especially in Palestine from 1936 to 1939 against British colonial rule and Zionist settler-colonialism were massive by global standards. Indeed the Palestinian Revolt would inspire others in the colonised world and would remain an inspiration to Arabs for the rest of the century and beyond. Anti-colonial resistance which also opposed the colonially-installed Arab regimes continued in Jordan, in Egypt, in Bahrain, Iraq, North and South Yemen, Oman, Morocco, and Sudan. The massive anti-colonial revolt in Algeria would finally bring about independence in 1962 from French settler colonialism. The liberation of Algeria meant that one of the two European settler-colonies in the Arab world was down, and only one remained: Palestine. On the territorial colonial front, much of the Arabian Gulf remained occupied by the British until the 1960s and early 1970s, and awaited liberation.  

After the 1967 War

IAWM STATEMENT ON PALESTINE STATEHOOD BID AT THE UN - September 2011

South Africa Model Needed to End Israeli Apartheid

The media frenzy surrounding the Palestinian application for UN statehood clouds a simple fact: whichever way the vote goes, Israel wins.

Even the Palestinian Authority (PA) admits that the granting of statehood status at the UN would not change conditions on the ground. It would do nothing to address the 500,000 illegal Israeli settlers in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, nor would it dismantle the apartheid structure of the occupation. What it would do, perhaps, is increase Palestinians’ access to international legal institutions in which they can attempt to prosecute Israel for crimes.

In fact, this point is what worries Israel the most: were Palestine to become a member state it may be in a better position to legally challenge Israel. However, Israel has already been prosecuted by various organs on many occasions and found guilty, but the rulings against it have never been enforced. A case in point is the ruling by the International Court of Justice that the Apartheid wall built by Israel around the West Bank is illegal – a ruling completely ignored by Israel.

Since 1948 the US has vetoed a total of 41 resolutions at the UN General Assembly and the Security Council in defense of Israel. It is doubtful that this would change if the PA became a UN member state with observer status. Witness Obama’s appalling speech to the UN on 22 September 2011. He failed hopelessly to acknowledge the Palestinians suffering, concentrating almost exclusively on the alleged plight of Israelis. As Hanan Ashrawi noted; "I couldn't believe what I heard. It sounded as though the Palestinians were the ones occupying Israel.”

For anyone who doubted Obama’s intentions his speech totally exposes the role of the US as a biased player in the Middle East.

The final seven of the kidnapped Irish participants in the #FreedomWaves to Gaza mission will return home on flight EI163 (from London) at 3.45pm on Friday 11th November.

John Hearne, Billy Smith, Chris Andrews, Paul Murphy MEP, Felim Egan, Gerard Barron and Philip McCullough have all been illegally held by the Israeli state since Friday afternoon after being violently abducted in international waters while attempting to break the illegal siege and sailing to the blockaded Gaza Strip.

The Irish Ship To Gaza campaign is organising a welcoming committee to meet them at Terminal 2 in Dublin Airport, and asking people to gather there at around 3.30pm to be there when they come through the gates.