Breaking News. Al Jazeera and Alan Rusbridger-Assange of the UK’s leading liberal arm of the Goebbels Reich Ministry of propaganda have Wikileaked thousands of protocol documents, which appear to show that the Palestinians have offered to concede even more than absolutely everything to the swaggering intransigent illegal Israelis.
The Guardian is quoted as saying ”This selfless Palestinian generosity demonstrates the weakness of their leadership and has nothing to do with making Israel appear intransigent, swaggering and illegitimate.”
Loveable rogue and chief negotiator of what appears to be the Middle East ‘peace process,’ Saeb Erekat says: “It’s a pack of lies.”
Warning: The above is facetious. Read a sensible analysis on CiFWatch.
“Standing in stark contrast to the Guardian’s Palestine Papers narrative – of Israeli intransigence and Palestinian weakness and humiliation – their own documents corroborate the widely reported Israeli offer, during the 2008 negotiations, which Mahmoud Abbas rejected: a contiguous Palestinian state representing roughly 94% of the West Bank with land swaps (part of Israel which would become part of the new Palestinian state) making up for the remaining 6%. The offer also included a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem.”
Morning Jeremy.
Morning John.
Have you read all the leaked documents Jeremy.
Don’t be silly John I had a good nights sleep so have only glanced at one or two but that will not stop me telling you all about it as if I had studied them deeply. Poor Palestinians ….. nasty Israels …
A summary from Today this morning.
Alternative scenario: Palestinians realised all along that they weren’t going to get away with making their outrageous demands for too much longer. The Guardian spins this as “major Palestinian concessions” Jeremy Bowen uses the word “swaggering,” John Humphrys uses the word “intransigent,” Wyre Davies reminds us [of the flotilla inquiry] “They would say that, wouldn’t they” and Bob’s yer Uncle.
More breaking news on the TV.
Jon Donnison has lost his earpiece. He’s about to reveal that Britain was complicit in a plan to destroy Hamas. Most people might think: Black balaclavas, green headbands, Russian KPV 14.5mm machine-guns. Instead the BBC picture shows a paradise of glorious green silken flags fluttering in a heavenly breeze. But communications are down. Jon Donnison can only utter that he was sitting with Palestinian friends when the unbelievable news (and contact with us) broke. We’ll have to wait.
I’m also waiting for Mark Regev’s and the odious Richard Falk’s interviews to appear on the Today website so I can link.
At Last.
Take this Richard Falk!
Victory for Decency: Ban Ki-moon ‘condemns’ U.N. Palestine expert for denying 9/11 terror attacks
The Palestinians can offer anyting they want – they know that they cannot deliver any of the promises they make. The hard headed truth is that the people in control of the violence will never stop until Israel is gone, whatever peace is agreed.
This has to be the most hilariously illustrative Wikileak of them all so far… and one very much again in favour of Israel (and truth generally).
What we have is the holy, morally perfect Palestinians again saying one thing in English, and the exact opposite in Arabic. To credulous English speakers (aka the stinking BBC) they say: we’ll give up everything – Jerusalem, RoR, settlements) for peace, knowing that these are all undeliverable to their people. But in Arabic they give the true message of their intent: we will give away nothing, and recover all our land and throw the stinking joos into the sea (with a few holy virgin orgies and a sea of bloodshed on the way).
Israel, of course, knows how they think (and understands Arabic as well as they do) and prepares for the usual round of terror and death by consolidating its hold on the disputed territories.
But the mendacious BBC tries to have it both ways. It says: look how much the perfect Arabs were prepared to give away, and look how nasty, grasping and aggressive the Israelis really are in rejecting this wonderfully generous offer! But then the PA deny this and calling the disclosures a pack of lies.
The PA?! say the stinking Beeboids. Who can trust that pack of corrupt liars? You think Arabs are capable of telling the truth?! Of course they aren’t.
Precisely so. If they aren’t, as the stinking hypocrites at the BBC now allege, WHY SHOULD ISRAEL TRUST THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE????
Hilarious. You simply could not make it up!
Robin Shepherd goes to town on this.
Game over. No way back. An entire edifice of anti-Israeli demonisation definitively consigned to the scrap heap, never to be recycled again. This is the uncompromising message that comes out of yesterday’s revelations on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. To the horror of a European political intelligentsia which has been steadfast to the point of fanatical in its opposition to Israeli “settlements” in east Jerusalem, the Palestinian leadership itself, we now know, has long accepted that the vast majority of Israeli settlements can be considered legitimate and would become part of Israel under any reasonable peace agreement.
This is utterly devastating since it simultaneously shows that everyone from the British Foreign Office and the BBC to the European Commission and the continent’s passionately anti-Israeli NGO community have been adopting a position which was significantly more uncompromising on “settlements” than the Palestinian leadership itself, and also that that same Palestinian leadership had accepted that the so called 1967 “borders” — the gold standard for practically every anti-Israeli polemic around — are irrelevant to the prospects of a lasting peace.
……………………………………………
Tragicomically, it just won’t wash. Privately and morally, senior Palestinians can see that there is nothing illegitimate or even especially problematic about most of the “settlements”, (as reasonable observers of the MidEast have been saying for years). This we know from the leaks themselves. But publicly and politically they cannot sell such concessions to their own people. This we know because they are currently trying to distance themselves from the leaks, and because they educate their own people in an implacable rejectionism which extends to the “moderate” Palestinian authority glorifying suicide bombers and other terrorists by naming streets and squares after them.
Logically and reasonably, the Israeli response is to see such “concessions” for what they are: well intentioned in so far as they go, but impossible to implement in practice. Quite apart from the question of Hamas-run Gaza, the Palestinians have been playing the same old game of saying one thing to one audience and something else to another. They are not a credible partner for peace, and the Israelis do not look remotely “churlish” for understanding this.
It will be interesting to see how this whole affair now plays out. But never again can the anti-Israel community play the settlement card and at the same time retain a single ounce of credibility.
Do read it all.
So let me get this right according to the left,leaks from the West good, but leaks from the East bad.
On hearing this news my immediate reaction was that the so-called major concessions the BBC is announcing with a kind of morbid fascination every ten minutes amounted to no more than concessions already agreed in earlier negotiations, but which were stupidly scrapped when President Obama restarted the peace process.
The reason they had been agreed in the first place was of course that the majority* of the settlements that have been portrayed as illegitimate and ‘the only obstacle to peace’ were no such thing. They are neither illegal nor the only obstacle to peace.
The BBC /Guardian/ leftist fixation with this fallacious illegal settlement theory was obviously borne out of useful-idiot zeal, the kind of bullying fanaticism that traps both protagonists and followers into the same intransigence. Naturally their exposure wouldn’t go down well, and the Guardian/BBC would inevitably spin it the way they have.
The first BBC reports even said erroneously that the Palestinians were prepared to give everything away for ‘nothing in return’. Why did they say such a thing, when it was completely untrue?
A BBC anchorwoman called the concessions “shocking.” Shocking concessions. Why did this BBC anchorwoman find them shocking?
For some reason the BBC and the Guardian have become obsessed. They have an irrational phobia about Israel. Israelophobia one could call it, had Islamophobia not given phobias a bad name.
Robin Shepherd has written a fabulous summary, but I have to question whether anything really will be consigned to the scrap heap.
The BBC has been allowed to get away with half truths and spin on this topic for decades. The public have already been bullied into hating Israel, and their sympathy for the Palestinians far exceeds that of many of the Arab citizens who use the Palestinians as a peg on which to hang their own grievances and demands. I understand many actively dislike their Palestinian brothers.
What is it that prevents the BBC from letting anyone with a pro Israel attitude have equal air time, or enough time to put their case without being insulted? Why do they feel it’s alright to consult only people from the Arab world, and then so respectfully? What is going on?
Are there unfathomable hidden pressures here? We’re told that Al-Jazeera is the plaything of the Qatari Royal family. We’re told that the Saudis have financial interests in the BBC’s move to Salford.
We see with our own eyes the BBC’s unsubtle attempts to foist Islam themed programming upon us day and night. There are over two million Muslims in the UK, no doubt Lord Ahmed could summon up a few thousand of them to protest at Broadcasting House if the BBC doesn’t toe the line. Is that what’s behind all this?
Is the government in on it? Please, if anyone out there knows the answer, let me know.
majority* a few illegal ones have sprung up as acts of defiance. (without the approval of many Israelis, although many might have good reason to say ‘what the hell.’)
Further to Robin Shepherd’s optimistic view of the possible outcome of this story, Barry Rubin has a different take on the veracity (and the results) of the leaks.
‘What’s going to happen is that the PA will generally let the world believe that it really wanted peace but Israel said “no.” At the same time, the PA will tell Palestinians and the Arab world that it never made any such offer. This is a clue that they would never have dared to make such an offer.”
Channel four is even worse than the BBC I’m afraid. Their news has interpreted the story in the same way as the BBC. According to Lindsay Hilsum the Israelis are intransigent, and the Palestinians are realistic and flexible. “This looks like the end of the peace process” they decide. Simples.
“Martin Indyk former US Ambassador to Israel and an adviser to the State Department’s Middle East envoy, told Channel 4 News that the papers showed that a deal was there to be done.”
Whatever he told ‘em, they didn’t listen. Jon Snow virtually ignored everything he said. What a travesty.
They’re also saying that Obama has decided to take a hard line with the Israelis because they wouldn’t obey his request to extend the freeze on settlement building. Now he intends to vote for an upcoming UN resolution which will declare all settlement building illegal. Normally the US would have vetoed such resolutions, but Obama is rattled, so he’ll vote in favour, for spite. That’ll teach ‘em.
Sounds like children fighting in the playground, not men of substance and sophistication negotiating a long term strategy for peace.
Perhaps it’s just the reporting that makes it sound so childish. Can this be proper reporting, or is it dumbed down for us morons?