Report: Palestinians agreed to give up most of East Jerusalem

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blogPalestine papers: live updates

• Papers reveal MI6 drew up plan for a crackdown on Hamas
• PLO wanted to do more to prevent Gaza smuggling
• Full coverage of the Palestine papers

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The Palestine papers Photograph: guardian.co.uk 11.18am: Palestinian writer Laila El-Haddad reports on the reaction in Gaza and the West Bank. Her friend and fellow blogger, Lina al-Sharif, told her "This shouldn't just be an expose of the PA, but also of Israel. And the US was witnessing all this and calling itself 'an honest broker'! This is just yet another hit to the already dead peace process."But others still hadn't heard about the leaks, El-Haddad writes:

In a bitter irony, and a stark reminder of the conditions many Palestinians in Gaza continue to live under, some cousins and friends there were not yet even aware of the revelations when I spoke with them, because they had no electricity.
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10.53am: PLO adviser Diana Butto says the papers show how desperate the negotiators were for a settlement. In a Skype interview with the Institute of Palestinian Studies, she says she was been surprised by the reaction to the leaks. She had expected more Palestinian anger, but instead many Palestinians have just "shrugged their shoulders", while some have blamed Qatar. In the long term she hopes Saeb Erekat is held to account. To watch the video in full turn off the auto-refresh button at the top of the page
10.36am: Hamas claims about British involvement in the torture have been confirmed by the leaks, Osama Hamdan told al-Jazeera.In an interview with the network, the Hamas spokesman said.

We have clear and solid evidence that the Palestinian Authority was using torture in a systematic way against Hamas members and supporters. On some occasions some of our members were killed under torture. We have evidence that some officers, mainly from the CIA and some British officers, were present when at least one Hamas member was killed under torture. Those papers and those leaks make clear that what Hamas was talking about is fact, it is not imagination.
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10.00am: Hamas has pledged to seize back the initiative after the "betrayal" by the Palestinian authority.Writing in the Guardian, Osama Hamdan, head of Hamas' international relations department, said:

Our suspicion that the Palestinian Authority all along knew about and even conspired in the Israeli war on Gaza in late 2008 has now been confirmed by the documented testimony of both Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.
As an immediate response to these revelations, we in Hamas have begun a series of communications and meetings with Palestinian factions and prominent personalities to discuss practical measures. It is our responsibility to regain the initiative in order to protect our cause and isolate those who have betrayed it.
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9.47am: The Jerusalem Post is dismayed by the Palestinian reaction to the leaks.

Instead of at least being appreciated by their own people as savvy negotiators constructively working toward the achievement of Palestinian political sovereignty and self-determination, Abbas, Saeb Erekat, Ahmed Qurei and others involved in 2008 talks with former foreign minister Tzipi Livni and former prime minister Ehud Olmert have been castigated by the Palestinian street as traitors..
This aspect of the PaliLeaks fallout is, in part, the price Abbas is paying for his own and his leadership's insistence on saying one thing in public and something else altogether behind closed doors...
The capacity to make peace depends on perceptions and preferences. What the revelatory PaliLeaks actually seem to be revealing most acutely, and dismally, is the extent to which the Palestinian people have yet to be prepared for such a change.
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9.25am:Ha'aretz has more on that Abbas rally in Ramallah yesterday.

Supporters burned posters of the Emir of Qatar, who an Abbas aide said had approved al-Jazeera's broadcast of leaked Middle East negotiation documents. They also burned Israeli flags with al-Jazeera's name sprayed inside the Star of David.
"We will go to Jerusalem, a million martyrs strong," the crowd of over 3,000 chanted, in a rousing endorsement for Abbas using a slogan not heard since the days of his predecessor, Yasser Arafat.
"The Palestinian principles ... have not and will not change and the first of them is that East Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Palestine," Abbas said yesterday.
He accused al-Jazeera of using "fake" documents to convict Abbas' Palestinian Authority of cowardice and duplicity in confidential talks with Israel over concessions it would make for a peace treaty and a Palestinian state.
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9.12am: Al-Jazeera's Barnaby Phillips explains MI6's apparent plan to detain members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in this video. To watch the video in full turn off the auto-refresh button at the top of the page

8.38am: The Brazilian based cartoonist Carlos Latuff depicts Mahmoud Abbas as a Jewish settler.Yesterday Abbas dismissed the leaks as "soap operas". According to AP he told supporters at a carefully orchestrated rally in the West Bank that he won't compromise on Palestinian rights.
The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz asked the Guardian's Middle Editor Ian Black whether the paper wanted to end Abbas' career by publishing the leaks. Ian replied:

I think that from the moment we saw the documents, we thought that they provide a very important insight on the Israel-Palestinian peace process. I think Mahmoud Abbas was in a difficult position long before the documents saw the light of day, as anyone who follows the story closely knows.
The documents are a symptom of the malaise affecting the peace process and you don't need a PhD on the subject to work out the likely provenance of the documents. They reflect a deep unhappiness in Palestinian circles with the Palestinian Authority that has failed to deliver anything approaching an independent and viable Palestinian state after 20 years of negotiations. The documents themselves provide a very vivid look on the talks.
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7.43am: Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, continues to protest against the publication of the papers.He told Reuters that al-Jazeera was engaged in "vicious smear campaign" that has put his life in danger.
Here's an extract of some of his comments:

Photograph: AFP/Getty Images "What al-Jazeera people are doing is asking Palestinians to shoot me, physically. That's what they are doing. They are saying: 'You are guilty and thus you should be executed'.
"Speaking for me and my family, they are inciting against our lives...
"Somebody wants to push this region towards chaos...These documents are being taken out of context.
"We don't have something called 'official Israeli-Palestinian minutes'. We don't. When you sit with people and take notes with people, that's not positions. I can't stand guard on anybody's lips.
"In every single negotiating session I attended, the slogan (was) 'nothing is agreed until everything is agreed', and so far nothing has been agreed."
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The papers have been variously described as fake, quoted out of context, and damaging. In response, the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland gives a stout defence of their publication.

Of course publication will have political consequences, even awkward ones. But that cannot be for journalists and editors to decide: their job is to find out what is happening and report it, as best they can. The consequences are for others to manage. It has to be that way, otherwise newspapers would never publish anything: somebody in power would always be there to argue that it was best to hold off, that now was not the time. And the public would remain in the dark.
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Here's a summary of the what the latest leaked documents reveal:
• British intelligence helped the Palestinian Authority draw up a secret plan for a wide-ranging crackdown on the Islamist movement Hamas. The plan asked for the internment of leaders and activists, the closure of radio stations and the replacement of imams in mosques.
• Israel asked the Palestinian Authority to kill the al-Aqsa commander Hassan al-Madhoun. In the event, Madhoun died at the hands of Israeli forces in retaliation for a suicide bombing. But the papers reveal that behind the killing lay an extensive clandestine collaboration between the Israel's army and secret service and the PA.
• PLO urged Israel and Egypt to do more to prevent Gaza smuggling. Erekat complained to US envoy George Mitchell in 2009 that not enough was being done to seal off tunnels from Egypt into the Gaza Strip. He said the tunnels were undermining the siege of the Hamas-controlled territory.
You can follow all of yesterday's reaction on Tuesday's live blog. For more see our Palestine papers pages. You can see al-Jazeera's coverage here.

 

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