The Death of the Mideast Peace Process

The leak of the "Palestine Papers" may spell the end of negotiations, and the beginning of serious trouble in the Middle East.

“It’s time to think about the nature of the next Arab-Israeli war,” the Toronto Star’s Gwynne Dyer declares. Al Jazeera’s publication this week of 1,600 leaked documents related to Mideast peace negotiations show that Israel rejected huge concessions offered by the Palestinians, concessions large enough “to make the [Palestinian] negotiators reviled in almost every Palestinian home.” Dyer predicts that the moderate Palestinian Authority may not survive the leaks and militants will be empowered, leading to a fresh wave of terror strikes followed by “Israeli punishment attacks in which a hundred Palestinians or Lebanese die for every Israeli.” Dyer’s grim forecast: “despair, of course.”

The leaks’ allegations of “sweeping Palestinian concessions appear to discredit a standard element of Israeli public diplomacy — that there is no Palestinian peace partner,” writes Peter Goodspeed in the National Post. This is a massive understatement. The leaks seem to show there was not only a partner, but a supplicant, willing to relinquish long-held Palestinian demands to control East Jerusalem and guarantee the right of return to 3 million refugees. Goodspeed echoes Dyer’s pessimistic assessment, predicting that radicalism and violence will likely increase as Palestinians conclude that “if such sweeping concessions were rejected by Israel, there is no longer any point in trying to negotiate a two-state solution.” A likely outcome is “the collapse of the Palestinian Authority and the death of the peace process.”

An alternative reading is that the leaks don’t so much point to the end of the peace process, but reveal that there may not have been one for the past ten years. It’s not a negotiation when one side offers to concede everything that could be reasonably expected and the other side rejects it outright. What we’ve been witnessing may have all just been political theatre to benefit the politicians involved. Above all, what the leaks seem to indicate is how feeble the Palestinian leadership is in relation to Israel, which is militarily and economically far superior and has the unconditional support of the world’s only superpower. With such an apparently huge imbalance, what do Palestinians have to offer Israel?