The exposure by al-Jazeera and London’s Guardian newspaper of a huge cache of documents detailing Palestinian accounts of a decade of peace negotiations with Israel could deal a lethal blow to U.S. efforts to get a credible process back on track, according to experts.
By demonstrating how much the Palestine Authority (PA) was willing to give up in exchange for an independent state, the 1,600-some documents, whose disclosure began Sunday and will reportedly continue through Wednesday, are likely to further undermine in its people’s eyes the already badly weakened regime headed by its president, Mahmoud Abbas.
“It is likely to deal a death blow to an American-led peace process already on life support, and hasten the end of the Palestinian Authority created by the 1993 Oslo accords,” wrote Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Washington office of the Institute for Palestinian Studies, in the Financial Times Monday.
Indeed, two Jewish-American peace groups Monday greeted the release of the papers as new evidence that, contrary to Israel’s long-standing claim, the Palestinians have been ready to make pace.
