Scoop Link: The Palestine Papers Day 3

Wednesday, 26 January 2011, 11:12 am
Press Release: Scoop Link

Top PA negotiator offers to allow Israel to re-occupy the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) had pleaded with the Israeli government to re-occupy the Philadelphi corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border, in order to tighten the siege on Hamas-run Gaza, The Palestine Papers show.

Israel seized control of the Philadelphi corridor after the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979 and evacuated the narrow route in September 2005 as part of Israel's unilateral Gaza Disengagement plan.

Israel used the 14km-long corridor as a buffer zone - controlled and patrolled by Israeli forces - to prevent the movement of illegal materials and people between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007 the Philadelphi route has been controlled by Hamas. After the Israeli-Egyptian siege on Gaza was put in place in June that year, a massive smuggling industry developed through the tunnels that were dug under the Philadelphi corridor in and near the border town of Rafah.
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Israeli negotiators demanded to keep Israeli troops in the West Bank and to maintain control of Palestinian airspace

In a striking exchange from May 2008, Tzipi Livni, the then-Israeli foreign minister, tells Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat that he will have to accept an Israeli military presence in the West Bank. His objection is met with one of Livni’s more memorable dismissals:

Erekat: Do I have a choice of who to place on my territory?

Livni: No.

Erekat: I have a conceptual framework – short of your jet fighters in my sky and your army on my territory, can I choose where I secure external defence?

Livni: No. In order to create your state you have to agree in advance with Israel – you choose not to have the right of choice afterwards. These are the basic pillars.

Israeli politicians have hardly been shy about demanding a demilitarised Palestinian state. “We cannot be expected to agree to a Palestinian state without ensuring that it is demilitarised,” Binyamin Netanyahu, the current prime minister, said in his foreign policy address at Bar-Ilan University in June 2009.
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Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad wondered whether Quartet envoy's initiatives were too small to be helpful.

When Tony Blair was appointed the Quartet’s Middle East envoy in 2007, he was tasked with encouraging donors to contribute to the Palestinian Authority, and with “help[ing] the Palestinians as they build the institutions and economy of a viable state.”

The Palestine Papers show that he’s done just that: Blair’s work in the West Bank and Gaza focused on state-building, rather than pushing the parties towards a solution on core issues. He worked with the Palestinians on sewage projects in the West Bank, and with the Israelis on relaxing movement restrictions on farm workers in the Jordan Valley.

At times – given the scope of the conflict – his projects seem quite small, an observation made at one point by Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad, who warned that Blair’s state-building efforts would amount to little without a more substantive change in Israeli policy.
“The weight of his office”
Blair’s earliest work includes a series of “quick impact projects” outlined in a November 2007 report. There is an agricultural park in Jericho; a sewage plant in northern Gaza; and a housing development project across the West Bank.
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Mark Perry explains what The Palestine Papers reveal about Gen. Keith Dayton's training mission in the West Bank.

The Palestine Papers provide unprecedented access into the internal workings of the U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process. But the leaked documents and meetings also touch on other key issues surrounding U.S. intervention in the conflict – including dozens of documents on Palestinian security issues. At the heart of these is the work of the Office of the U.S. Security Coordinator (USSC), what many refer to as “The Dayton Mission,” – a designation derived from the USSC’s chief, Lt. General Keith Dayton, who retired last October. Among other things they confirm – from Dayton’s own mouth – that Palestinian Authority forces supported by the United States engaged in torture.

Background
The establishment of the USSC – its mandate and purpose -- is fraught with misunderstandings. The first is that U.S. military officers are training Palestinian security personnel. That’s not true. Palestinian security personnel were initially trained by American contractors (in this case, Dyncorp) – the same kind of contractors who have given the U.S such problems in Iraq. Later, these private contractors were joined by trainers provided by the Jordanian Public Security Directorate. While the facilities for the training (located outside of Amman) are provided by the United States, the Palestinian trainees were (and are) equipped by the Egyptians.
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Alistair Crooke: Blair's "counterinsurgency surge"

The US president should write that the US "must withdraw from direct and active involvement in this process."

The newly-revealed Palestine Papers provide us with an intimate, authoritative and fairly comprehensive record of the last ten years of the peace process, of which the administration of US President Barack Obama has provided but the most recent chapter. President Obama himself, not being an expert in this area, probably has an imperfect grasp of this history, though his own recent hard experience in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking has probably taught him much. I also know well that the most senior government officials, forced to deal with the daily onslaught of events, have little time or opportunity for genuine strategic thinking, the proliferation of so-called Strategic Policy Reviews notwithstanding.

But let us suppose that President Obama, equipped by his aides with a carefully-chosen selection of documents drawn from The Palestine Papers, devoted an entire weekend at Camp David to peruse them. Being both highly intelligent and perceptive, what insights might he gain, and what conclusions might he draw concerning future US policy?

Let us also suppose that the president, having fully grasped the record of the last ten years, decided that he must strike out in an entirely new direction, and must explain in as honest and sincere a manner as possible his reasons for doing so. Such communication from this president is not unprecedented. Forced during his election campaign to explain the apparent contradiction between his professed views and those of a pastor to whom he was personally connected and often turned for advice, Mr. Obama spoke eloquently and movingly about race relations in America. More recently, confronted with a violent attack on a US politician deemed by some to be the result of hostile political rhetoric, the president has spoken insightfully about the need for greater public comity, in a way which has appealed even to his sharpest detractors.

Former British prime minister's support for Palestinian security forces contributed to decline of EU's influence.

Many have questioned why the European Union failed to provide an independent view to that of the United States on Middle East policy during the last decade. It is not a simple question to answer. Partly the EU failed to assert its voice because, at the beginning of the decade, it was scrambling to contain the impact of inflating US hubris, fuelled by the defeat of Saddam Hussein. Partly it was also a simple reflection of most European politicians’ dependency on Washington. But the release of The Palestine Papers provides another answer.

They show how Tony Blair in particular had so undercut the political space, that there was effectively no room for it. In a secret policy switch in 2003, he tied the UK and EU security policy into a major American counter-insurgency (COIN) ‘surge’ in Palestine.

It was an initiative that would bear a heavy political cost for the EU in 2006, and for years to come, when Hamas won parliamentary elections by a large majority. The EU’s claims for democracy have rung hollow ever since. Blair’s ‘surge’ also left the EU exposed as hypocrites: On a political level, for example, the EU might talk about its policy of fostering reconciliation between Palestinian factions, but at the security plane, and in other ways, the EU was pursuing the polar opposite objectives.

In 2003, US efforts to marginalize President Arafat by leeching away his presidential powers into the embrace of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, collapsed. Arafat dismissed Abbas as PM. This was a blow to the US policy which – even then – was focused on creating a ‘de-Fatah-ised’ Palestinian Authority. Bush complained to Blair bitterly about Abbas’ dismissal: the Europeans still were ‘dancing around Arafat’ – leaving the US to ‘do the heavy lifting’ with the Israelis. Europeans were not pulling their weight in the ‘war on terror’, Bush concluded.
Related
PA questions Tony Blair's role
MI6 offered to detain Hamas figures

Palestinian officials were often more concerned with applying pressure to Hamas than easing the crisis in Gaza.
Senior Palestinian Authority officials expressed frustration that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip were able to evade the tight Israeli siege of the territory by breaching the border wall and through tunnels to Egypt. One, Ahmed Qureia, even suggested to then Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in 2008 that Israel reoccupy the Gaza-Egypt border area to keep Gaza sealed and to help "defeat" Hamas.

These revelations appear in hitherto secret minutes of meetings involving Palestinian, Israeli and American officials leaked to Al Jazeera as part of The Palestine Papers.

Gaza, home to 1.5 million Palestinians, half of them children, has been under a tight Israeli siege since Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections in January 2006. After the elections, the administration of US president George W. Bush orchestrated an international aid cut-off to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and began to support militias loyal to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction in the Gaza Strip which it hoped would challenge and defeat Hamas.

But in June 2007, Hamas ousted the US-supported militias and took full control of the interior of the Gaza Strip. Israel, along with Egypt, retaliated by tightening the blockade. Basic goods became scarce in the destitute territory, and people, including patients needing medical care, were often prevented from traveling or faced lengthy delays.

Related
Erekat: "I can't stand Hamas"
Qurei to Israel: "Occupy the crossing"

ENDS

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