The Palestine Papers 7: PA nullifying Israeli war crimes in Gaza: PA defers Goldstone's Report

PA complicitly attempts to defer release of Goldstone's Report of Israel's assault on Gaza

Palestinian Authority leaders co-operated with US officials in a bid to postpone the reference of the Goldstone report into war crimes in Gaza to the UN security council, leaked papers reveal. The PA, who have denied they made the decision under US pressure, later reversed their decision.

The postponement of the report into Israel's 2008 assault on Gaza triggered heavy criticism of the PA leadership, at one time threatening Abbas's position. But at a meeting on 21 October 2009, three weeks after the Goldstone scandal erupted, US national security adviser Jim Jones told the Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat: "Thank you for what you did a couple of weeks ago [on Goldstone]; it was very courageous".

On the day the reference of the report was delayed, US officials presented Palestinian negotiators with a "non paper" [a proposal that is off the record in diplomatic terms] committing the PA to "help promote a positive atmosphere conducive to negotiations ... [and] refrain from pursuing or supporting any initiative directly or indirectly in international legal forums that would undermine that atmosphere".

Erekat's response was to tell Mitchell: "On going to the UN we will always co-ordinate with you."

The papers also reveal new evidence of contact between Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, the Palestinian president, and Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli defence ministry official and senior negotiator, before the the launch of Israel's assault in late 2008.

Abbas issued a forceful denial late last year when US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks were quoted as reporting that in June 2009 Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, told a US congressional delegation that Israel "had consulted with Egypt and Fatah prior to Operation Cast Lead, asking if they were willing to assume control of Gaza once Israel defeated Hamas." Barak continued: "Not surprisingly...Israel received negative answers from both."

The Palestine Papers also record how Gilad and Tzipi Livni, then Israeli foreign minister, had spoken to Palestinian negotiators of the likelihood of a fullscale confrontation over Gaza. "We are on a collision course with Hamas," Gilad warned them. "You need to be prepared.. Sooner or later they [Hamas] will be taken care of."

At a meeting, Senator Mitchell presented Erekat with a document containing language that, if agreed to, would nullify one of the PA’s few weapons – the chance to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes in Gaza at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The U.S. language stated:

“The PA will help to promote a positive atmosphere conducive to negotiations; in particular during negotiations it will refrain from pursuing or supporting any initiative directly or indirectly in international legal forums that would undermine that atmosphere.”

Erekat, Abbas and the Palestinian Authority accepted the language and simultaneously agreed to call for a deferral of the UNHRC vote. Unsurprisingly, this decision was met by outrage, as Palestinians and Arab nations condemned the PA leadership for kowtowing yet again to American and Israeli pressure.

Israel leaked the PA’s support for the resolution deferral on the day before the UNHRC vote was to take place. Erekat, undoubtedly caught off-guard, was outspoken in his complaints weeks later to the U.S. on what he perceived as unfair Israeli tactics. In a meeting with U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones on October 21, 2009, Erekat revealed:

“Then came Goldstone and all hell broke loose. You know the first public response to the Goldstone thing came from Lieberman, who said Abu Mazen agreed to postpone the vote because the Israelis threatened to release the “tapes” showing him coordinating the attack on Gaza with Israel. Then there was the report that he did it for Wataniya, which they said is owned by his two sons.”

Jones, however, was quick to assure Erekat that the PA’s efforts would not go unnoticed. “And thank you for what you did a couple weeks ago,” Jones told Erekat. “It was very courageous.”

That same day, Erekat also met with Mitchell, and wasted no time in asking for the U.S. to deliver on its previous promises.

Erekat: When can you give me something, a document or a package, so I can take it to [Abu Mazen], so we can study it in good faith?

Mitchell: Much of what I read is not controversial...

For the United States, and unfortunately for the PA, it was simply business as usual.

The Palestine Papers 5: PA left without even a figleaf

Rice to PA: "Bad things happen to people all around the world all the time."

The overwhelming impression that emerges from the confidential records of a decade of Middle East peace talks is of the weakness and desperation of Palestinian leaders, the unyielding correctness of Israeli negotiators and the often contemptuous attitude towards the Palestinian side shown by US politicians and officials. It is a picture that graphically illustrates the gradual breakdown of a process now widely believed to have reached a dead end.

The documents reveal Palestinian Authority leaders often tipping over into making ingratiating appeals to their Israeli counterparts, as well as US leaders. "I would vote for you," the then senior Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qureia (also known as Abu Ala), told Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, during talks at the King David hotel in Jerusalem in June 2008, as she was preparing for elections in her Kadima party. "Given the choice", Livni shot back, "you don't have much of a dilemma."

Qureia's comment echoed earlier private remarks by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), to Ariel Sharon in a June 2005 meeting at the then Israeli prime minister's residence which would have caused outrage if they had been made known at the time. Having listened to Sharon berate him for failing to crack down on the "terrorist infrastructure" of Hamas and Islamic jihad, Abbas was recorded as noting "with pleasure the fact that Sharon considered him a friend, and the fact that he too considered Sharon a friend", adding that "every bullet that is aimed in the direction of Israel is a bullet aimed at the Palestinians as well".

In March 2008, the documents show that Qureia greeted the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, with the words: "You bring back life to the region when you come."

But as the 2007-08 Annapolis negotiations led nowhere and the government of Binyamin Netanyahu successfully resisted US pressure to halt settlement building in the occupied territories during 2009-10, Palestinian negotiators are shown adopting an increasingly injured and despairing tone with US officials, as they seek to demonstrate the scale of concessions they have made to no avail.

In an emotional – and apparently humiliating – outburst to Barack Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, in Washington in October 2009, the senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat complained that the Ramallah-based Palestinian leadership wasn't even being offered a "figleaf".

He said: "Nineteen years of promises and you haven't made up your minds what you want to do with us ... We delivered on our road map obligations. Even Yuval Diskin [director of Israel's internal security service, Shabak] raises his hat on security. But no, they can't even give a six-month freeze to give me a figleaf."

All the US government was interested in, Erekat went on, was "PR, quick news, and we're cost free", ending up with the appeal: "What good am I if I'm the joke of my wife, if I'm so weak?"

A few months later, in January 2010, Erekat returned to a similar theme with the US state department official David Hale, saying he was offering Israel "the biggest Yerushalayim in Jewish history" (using the Hebrew name for Jerusalem), a "symbolic number of refugees' return, demilitarised state ... What more can I give?"

But as became clear even under the earlier, less hardline Israeli government of Ehud Olmert, the scale of concessions offered by Erekat and other Palestinian Authority negotiators – far beyond what the majority of the Palestinian public would be likely to accept – was insufficient for Israeli leaders.

During the most intensive recent negotiations, before and after George Bush's Annapolis conference, the documents show the Israelis conducting themselves in a businesslike manner. In an attempt to show her good faith, Livni is recorded confirming what Palestinians have always accused Israeli governments of doing: creating facts on the ground to prevent the possibility of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

At a west Jerusalem meeting in November 2007, she told Qureia that she believed Palestinians saw settlement building as meaning "Israel takes more land [so] that the Palestinian state will be impossible"; that "the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we'll say that is impossible, we already have the land and we cannot create the state". She conceded that it had been "the policy of the government for a really long time".

But when Palestinian leaders balked at the prospect of an entirely demilitarised state, Livni made clear where the negotiating power lay. In May 2008, Erekat asked Livni: "Short of your jet fighters in my sky and your army on my territory, can I choose where I secure external defence?"

"No," Livni replied. "In order to create your state you have to agree in advance with Israel – you choose not to have the right of choice afterwards."

By the following year, Erekat appeared to have accepted that choice. "The Palestinians know they will have a country with limitations," he told Mitchell. "They won't have an army, air force or navy." A string of other major concessions had been made, but the issues were no further forward. "They need decisions," Erekat pleaded.

Increasingly, PA leaders resorted to warning US officials that if they failed to deliver an agreement with Israel, the door would be opened to Hamas and Iran. In October 2009, Erekat told Mitchell: "In no time you will have Aziz Dweik as your partner," referring to the Hamas speaker of the Palestinian parliament, who constitutionally assumes the role of Palestinian president when the job is vacant.

PA leaders repeatedly threatened to abandon attempts to negotiate a two-state solution in favour of a one-state option. At the same meeting, Erekat declared that if the settlement of the West Bank continued, "we will announce the one state and the struggle for equality in the state of Israel".

But the documents show US officials unmoved by such claims. Why were the Palestinians "always in a chapter of a Greek tragedy", secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, asked at a meeting with Erekat in Washington in the autumn of 2009.

Her predecessor, Rice, had been even more dismissive. In July 2008 during talks with Palestinian leaders over compensation for refugees who fled or were forced from their homes when Israel was established in 1948, she said: "Bad things happen to people all around the world all the time."

If the Palestinians kept insisting that Israel could not keep the large settlements of Ma'ale Adumim (near Jerusalem) and Ariel (in the heart of the West Bank), Rice told them: "You won't have a state". No Israeli leader could accept a deal "without including them in an Israeli state".

As to the most neuralgic issue – Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem – she declared: "If we wait until you decide sovereignty ... your children's children will not have an agreement."

The Palestine Papers - PA killing our own people

The Palestine Papers starkly revealed by Al Jazeera shows the Palestinian Authority under Mahmud Abbas as amil, as jasus for the Israelis, quislings, collaborators and spies in the service of the colonising Zionist State. What is more shocking is that among Palestinians suffering in occupation, PA treachery and connivance is well known. These documents only confirm the depths of brutal corruption of Abu Mazen's cabal and the Quartet's inhuman experiment in maintaining systematic apartheid by deceit and betrayal. Below are excerpts: -

The al-Madhoun Assassination

Documents include handwritten notes of 2005 exchange between PA and Israel on plan to kill Palestinian fighter in Gaza, By David Poort, January 25, 2011 "Al- Jazeera" - -

Al-Madhoun (born 1973) was a leading figure within the Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade, a movement aligned to Fatah, which at that stage still held power in Gaza. In a joint committee meeting on fugitives in mid-2005 in Tel Aviv between Shaul Mofaz, the then-Israeli defence minister, and Nasser Youssef, the PA minister of interior, the PA was asked to kill al-Madhoun.

Mofaz: “[…] Hassan Madhoun, we know his address and Rasheed Abu Shabak [chief of the Preventative Security Organisation in Gaza] knows that. Why don't you kill him? Hamas fired [Qassam rockets] because of the elections and this is a challenge to you and a warning to Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president].”

Youssef: “We gave instructions to Rasheed [Abu Shabak] and will see.”

Mofaz: “Since we spoke, he has been planning an operation, and that's four weeks ago, and we know that he wants to strike Qarni or Erez [another border crossing between Gaza and Israel]. He is not Hamas and you can kill him.”

Youssef: “We work, the country is not easy, our capabilities are limited, and you haven't offered anything.”

Mofaz: “I understand that nothing has been accomplished in the [Gaza] Strip.”

Less then a month after this meeting, on November 1, 2005, al-Madhoun was killed in his car by a missile fired from an Israeli Apache helicopter over the skies of Gaza. The attack also killed a wanted Hamas activist and wounded three other people.

The very next day, Mofaz, who by that time was in Washington said, "We want to deal with President Abbas," after meeting with Condoleezza Rice, the then-US Secretary of State, before going to the White House to confer with Stephen Hadley, the then-national security adviser.

"We are waiting to see how the Palestinian Authority will deal with terrorist groups," the Israeli minister said.

Saeb Erekat, the PA’s chief negotiator acknowledged the cost of gaining US approval and Israeli trust, in a meeting on September 17, 2009 with David Hale, the deputy US Middle East envoy.

Erekat: "We have had to kill Palestinians to establish one authority, one gun and the rule of law. We continue to perform our obligations. We have invested time and effort and killed our own people to maintain order and the rule of law."

“Al Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade is part of the Fatah movement and they agreed to be part of the current security apparatus, even though this was not my position when I was a prime minister. I wanted the Brigade to remain as it was to confront Hamas,” Qurei told Livni.

“[…] reaching an agreement is a matter of survival for us. It’s the way to defeat Hamas,” Erekat told Marc Otte, the EU negotiator, in June 2008.

Earlier that year, on January 22, Qurei told Livni; “We’ll defeat Hamas if we reach an agreement, and this will be our response to their claim that gaining back our land can be achieved through resistance only.”