The Palestine Papers

The Guardian newspaper and Al Jazeera have got their hands on almost 1700 leaked documents, secret accounts of ten years of talks between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators.
The two media outlets plan to release all 1700 over the course of this week but already the first days findings show what most suspected all along, and now has been confirmed by the then foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, that Israel were 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 said during negotiations 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.'
Then the admission that 'It has been the policy of the government for a really long time.'
More revelations will come out, the other big news from today's leaks is that the Palestinians offered Israel all but one of the settlements in occupied East Jerusalem in return for land of equal size elsewhere but the Israelis, and Americans, turned it down as inadequate.
The result of the documents will be that more and more Palestinians will reach the conclusion that non-violence and negotiations have not worked, so more violence might. And who can blame them because Israel has no interest in peace, just stealing as much land as they can with the backing of the United States whose already diminishing global reputation is sure to take another beating. And rightly so.
Israel, its own reputation already in the gutter, does not make it easy for anyone to like it and hopefully a few more eyes will be opened to its atrocious tactics by the end of this week.