The Palestine Papers: The End of the Road?

Documents from the classified papers leaked to Al-Jazeera in January give the clearest account yet of what really goes on in Middle East peace talks, including revealing off-the-record remarks made by Condoleezza Rice, Tony Blair, Mahmoud Abbas, and other key players. In January 2011, Al-Jazeera television published 1,600 pages of confidential papers and memoranda from the last five years of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. This book presents complete texts of a number of the most important papers, along with an analysis that reveals a complex, tortuous, and so far unproductive Palestine-Israeli peace process, in a rare, unfiltered look at a current topic as it unfolds. Issues discussed include the Israeli illegal settlements, the Hamas rockets, the Israeli Wall, the invasion of Gaza, the rights of Palestinian refugees, and the move to define Israel as an exclusively Jewish state. For the first time it is possible to compare public utterances, such as “the settlements must go” from Palestine and “we want the Palestinians to have a viable state” from Israel and the U.S., with the very different views expressed in confidential meetings and memoranda.