East Jerusalem has been a major sticking point in the peace process Palestinian officials have accused al-Jazeera network of distortion, after it leaked documents purporting to show offers of major concessions to Israel.
President Mahmoud Abbas said the leaks had deliberately confused Palestinian and Israeli positions in talks.
The documents suggest the Palestinians agreed to Israel keeping large parts of illegally occupied East Jerusalem - an offer Israel apparently rejected.
The BBC has been unable to verify the documents independently.
Al-Jazeera says it has 16,076 confidential records of meetings, e-mails, communications between Palestinian, Israeli and US leaders, covering the years 2000-2010.
The Palestinians are reported to have proposed an international committee to take over Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem, and limiting the number of returning refugees to 100,000 over 10 years.
The papers are believed to have leaked from the Palestinian side.
Mr Abbas, who is due to hold talks on the Middle East peace process on Monday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, said peace talks had been carried out openly, and his fellow Arab leaders were aware of their contents.
“Start Quote
End Quote Mahmoud Abbas Palestinian Authority PresidentWhat is intended is a mix-up - I have seen them yesterday present things as Palestinian but they were Israeli... this is therefore intentional”
"What is intended is a mix-up. I have seen them yesterday present things as Palestinian but they were Israeli... this is therefore intentional," he said in Cairo, in remarks quoted by Reuters news agency.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, Yasser Abed Rabbo, refused to be drawn on whether the documents were authentic or not.
"Today al-Jazeera has published what it says are documents it obtained from the PLO's negotiations directorate," he said.
"We are not going to discuss the authenticity or lack of authenticity of these documents."
BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen says the Palestinians' reaction is testimony to the potential damage the contents of the leaked documents could do to Mr Abbas and his team.
The Palestinian Authority will now have to convince Palestinians that it has acted in their best interests, he says, especially as many will be see the contents of the documents as another humiliation.
A spokesman for the Hamas militant movement, which controls the Gaza Strip and rivals Mr Abbas's Fatah movement, said the documents revealed the "ugly face of the authority, and the level of its co-operation with the occupation".
They show "the level of the Fatah authority's [sic] involvement in attempts to liquidate the Palestinian cause, particularly on the issue of Jerusalem and refugees, and its involvement against the resistance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip", Sami Abu Zuhri said, in remarks quoted by AFP news agency.
Current peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have been suspended for months, ostensibly over Israel's refusal to stop building Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land.
'Biggest Jerusalem'Among the leaked papers, the alleged offers relating to East Jerusalem are the most controversial, as the issue has been a huge stumbling block in Mid-East talks and both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital.
Analysis
A key question is who gains from the leak? There isn't much here that will shock anyone with private knowledge of the peace process. But the average Palestinian may feel betrayed because their leadership has been telling them a different story.
The Americans don't gain much. The Israelis look churlish for turning down major concessions.
These documents haven't been found in a wastepaper bin. So the most likely source is a Palestinian rival who wants to damage the leadership of President Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr Abbas has not been directly quoted in these documents so far, and being at arms length may allow him to distance himself from the fallout.
Israel has occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 1967, establishing close to 500,000 Jews in more than 100 settlements.
According to al-Jazeera, in May 2008 Ahmed Qurei, the lead Palestinian negotiator at the time, proposed that Israel annex all Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem except Har Homa (Jabal Abu Ghneim), in a bid to reach a final deal.
"This is the first time in history that we make such a proposition," he reportedly said, pointing out that this was a bigger concession than that made at Camp David talks in 2000.
"We are offering you the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history," negotiator Saeb Erekat was quoted as saying, using the Hebrew word for Jerusalem.
Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) leaders also privately suggested swapping part of the flashpoint East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah for land elsewhere, according to the leaks.
In addition, Palestinian negotiators are said to have proposed an international committee to take over Jerusalem's Temple Mount, which houses the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque - Islam's third holiest site.
And they were reported to be willing to discuss limiting the number of Palestinian refugees returning to 100,000 over 10 years.
The leaks also purport to show that Palestinian leaders had been "privately tipped off" about Israel's 2008-2009 war in Gaza, a claim Mr Abbas has denied in the past.
US 'bias?'These highly sensitive issues have previously been non-negotiable.
The Israelis apparently rejected the concessions.
But without confirming the veracity of the reports, Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had also made concessions which were rejected by the Palestinians.
"He put an offer on the table which called for splitting Jerusalem, he put an offer on the table with territorial swaps which gave, practically, the Palestinians 100% of all territory, and they nevertheless refused him," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"That's what Prime Minister Olmert has said publicly and that's what's published today in one of these purported documents."
Also the reportedly curt dismissals by some US politicians of Palestinian pleas do not fit with the message of even-handedness that President Barack Obama tried to put across in his 2009 Cairo speech, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Washington.
The Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Manuel Hassassian, said that if confirmed, the documents would show that "major concessions" had been offered.
"But I think we need to see this in context," he told the BBC World Service's World Today programme.
"What was Israel willing to give in return to these concessions? Nobody talks about the other side."
No comments:
Post a Comment