Never has a British broadsheet so openly served the agenda of Middle Eastern extremism. The Guardian must be commended for its transparency -- readers can no longer doubt its affinity for Hamas. Al-Jazeera, Qatar's equivalent of the BBC World Service, appointed the newspaper as its western gatekeeper for a cache of leaked Palestinian Authority documents. The self-appointed guardian of Palestinian truth has maximized its opportunity to pledge allegiance to the hard-line, national fantasies which have crippled the Palestinian cause for decades.
The Palestinian Authority is under attack. Middle Eastern extremists and western armchair revolutionaries are lambasting the PA leadership for, even in private, budging an inch towards the concessions needed to achieve peace. For one newspaper, the Palestinian leadership is not Palestinian enough.
From his London salon one senior columnist bemoaned the "decay of what in Yasser Arafat's heyday was an authentic national liberation movement." For him, it seems, Palestinian authenticity can only be achieved through the massacre of athletes at the Munich Olympics, the hijacking of planes or the suicide bombing of civilians in shopping malls and pizza parlors. In his eyes, negotiations are an affront to the romanticized fetishism of "resistance."
Mahmoud Abbas admonished such an outlook in a speech in 2006, but which is just as apt today. "They are sitting in comfortable places and have not got the dust of this homeland on their shoes," said the Palestinian president. "They give orders from afar, and reject offers from afar. Give orders to yourselves! Talk about yourselves. The people here will make the decisions."
The Guardian's first post-leak editorial described the concessions supposedly offered by Palestinian negotiators as "craven." Readers might struggle to notice a substantive difference between the paper's editorial line and the opinion piece by a Hamas spokesman splashed across its pages two days later. In fact, the newspaper's criticism of the Palestinian negotiators was so severe it risked out-Hamasing Hamas.
Sections of the western media have long failed to expose damaging myths about the Middle East. It transpires that the failure is willful, rather than naive. WikiLeaks already blew apart the false logic that places Israel and the Palestinians at the heart of every conflict in the Middle East. Arab governments have sleepless nights over Iran, as it pursues nuclear weapons and meddles in their affairs. The ups and downs of the Palestinian cause are less likely to keep them up at night.
Throughout the region, tensions are erupting without the slightest connection to Israeli-Palestinian relations. The eyes of the world are now firmly fixed on the unrest in Egypt, which erupted after revolution swept Tunisia. Yemen is disintegrating. In Lebanon an Arab state has fallen into the hands of a non-Arab power and is now officially, not just practically, under the control of an Iranian proxy. Hezbollah has successfully deposed Saad Hariri, whose own father was murdered in all likelihood by the Shia militia, Syria or a combination of the two. Its puppet is now the prime minister. It reads like the plot of a gangster movie. Certain commentators must be swooning at the "authenticity" of it all.
Blaming Israel comes naturally in this region. When a shark attacked a tourist in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh, the local Egyptian governor suggested that Mossad were using sharks to harm Egyptian tourism. The Saudi police recently arrested an itinerant vulture as an Israeli spy. We fear that in interrogation, the bird sang. But even the most vivid imaginations would struggle to blame Israel for recent upsurges in regional instability.
Hamas and its Iranian backers hope the unrest will spread to the West Bank. A media axis between Doha and London seems determined to grant their wish. As David Landau, a commentator way on the left of the Israeli spectrum put it, the Guardian and Al-Jazeera "intended to poison the Palestinians against their leaders." Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, is in the firing line of the poison dart. He confided to the BBC that he fears for his life.
The leaks have made it less likely the Palestinians will loosen their current strategy of blocking talks. PA negotiators already needed to sell concessions to the Palestinian street. We didn't realize they also needed to sell them to Fleet Street.
Yet the leaks reveal that the negotiations taking place were more serious and productive than many realized. The commentators today attacking the Palestinian leadership dismissed the negotiations following Annapolis as a glorified photo opportunity. What is forgotten is how far Israel is prepared to go. They choose to overlook Ehud Olmert's final offer, the most "crystallized and detailed" ever offered by an Israeli prime minister.
The Hamas Charter states that, "Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors." The most destructive aspect of the Guardian's assault on the peace process is to concur, and suggest that in 19 years, negotiations have achieved nothing. The perfect resolution eludes us but progress has been made. Boosted by Israeli security concessions on access and movement, economic growth in the West Bank tops 8 per cent. In the last three years the PA has built 1,700 community development programs, 120 schools, three hospitals and 50 health clinics. Someone, it seems, might have finally concluded that building the infrastructure of a Palestinian state is more productive that attempting to destroy the State of Israel. Anyone with a sincere interest in peace must encourage further progress, and that can only be achieved at the negotiating table.
Ian Katz: Israeli Ambassador's Dishonest Attacks on the Guardian Miss the Point
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The supporters of the Guardian bring their usual machinery of hatred and sneering to bear on your comments but their stance is countered in advance by the Guardian's Assistant Editor's own admission that all governments of Israel are the natural targets of the Guardian. Israel therefore will never in a thousand years get a fair press from the Guardian no matter how much the truth of the matter may be in its favour, no matter how moral it may be, no matter how much higher Israel's standards may be than its enemies (which include the Guardian by its own admission) the Guardian will, like a gate on a spring, mindlessly jump to the attack and vilify Israel.
Lacking the freedom of flexibility the criticism of Israel by the Guardian remains negative and can only vary in depth of nastiness and negativity.
The Guardian seems to be have some problems recently with Goldstone's declarations that Israel does not target civilians. (Who would have thought). It has had article after article over the past year based on Goldstone's errant declarations and they have all been demolished now
I can imagine that the Guardian editing managers are racking their brains over how to spin and mis-represent this awful development which once again, makes a laughing stock of The Guardians oft repeated claims to be 'fair and balanced' (Don't laugh)..
His Excellency the Israeli Ambassador to the United Kingdom informs the public that the leading newspaper in the United Kingdom — one of the four or five most respected in the world — “ openly serves the agenda of Middle Eastern extremism ” and “ readers can no longer doubt its affinity for Hamas ”.
Sorry but not even close
The Guardian is good for wrapping fish or fish and chips but not much more ....
Here are the leading newspapers in the UK
http://www.mediauk.com/article/32696/the-most-popular-newspapers-in-the-uk
1. The Sun (7.8m)
2. The Daily Mail (4.8m)
3. The Daily Mirror (3.5m)
4. Metro (3.5m)
5. The Daily Telegraph (1.8m)
6. The Times (1.8m)
7. Daily Express (1.6m)
8. Daily Star (1.4m)
9. The Guardian (1.2m)
10. London Lite (1.1m)
The fact that you think that has something to do with circulation numbers, thus making The Sun the “ leading ” newspaper, indicates that you are shockingly ignorant.
Saeb Erekat basically admitting the point of their refusal to negotiate is not about settlement freeze (as George Mitchell tells him again and again but you talked without a freeze with everyone else until now).
The main reason is to try and get rid of Bibi and place Kadima in charge of Israel.
For some reason the Palestinians are sure that Bibi is dead politically without neogtiations with the Palestinians.
Saeb Erekat
"We're also in touch with Israelis and Jewish groups – not [just] J street or just the Labour party. We don’t see Netanyahu as the end of the world – the Lieberman/Netanyahu cabinet. If we go for negotiations with them we will kill the others."
"We cannot have resumption of negotiations with this government. We will punish Netanyahu. He can’t survive without a process with us. We won’t give him leverage of taking us for a ride and continuing settlements while we negotiate"
"Don’t listen to him [Netanyahu]. He’s dead, if he has no engagement with us."
Mitchell you mean politically?
SE yes
http://www.ajtransparency.com/en/document/4899
http://www.ajtransparency.com/en/document/4905
"Some in the west fondly refer to Hamas as the elected representatives of the Palestinians. While Hamas won the Palestinian council elections in 2006, it was not a mandate to violently overthrow the Palestinian Authority. Nor does it justify terror against Israel. Hamas's concept of democracy fits that of all democratically elected dictatorships – "one man, one vote … once"."
Read http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/20/israel-hamas-peace-talks-gaza
The “big concession” made by PA negotiators was accepting to swap 1.9% of West Bank for territory “of identical size & value” from within Israel. In other words, the "huge concession" was accepting 98.1%+1.9% instead of 100%!
Jazeera & Guardian also claim PA negotiators conceded the “right of return”. That’s a blatant lie. In fact, NOTHING in the “papers” so far published shows PA negotiators conceding ANYTHING to Israelis on the “return” front. All the “papers” show is minutes of an INTERNAL Palestinian discussion, in which Abbas expressed his belief that it'd be unrealistic to expect Israel to “take back 5 million refugees, or even 1 million”. How's an off-the-record internal discussion “a concession to Israel”??
What the “papers” do show clearly (but Jazeera/Guardian prefer to exclude from their comments!) is the extent of Israeli concessions: the Olmert proposal rejected by Abbas ( www.guardian.co.uk/world/palestine-papers-documents/4736 ) offered Palestinians 93.2% of West Bank+5.5% swap land from Israel (all contiguous!)+West Bank-Gaza “corridor”.
... after a massive recession caused by the Israel restrictions in the first place. It's so ridiculous when people sell this as an economic boom. This is merely an economy which had been crippled by severe external restrictions snapping back into normal when the restrictions are removed. No, actually this is stil too generous. It is not snapping back into normal, it is making baby steps towards a normal development. Since Oslo, net growth of the WB per capita GDP has been ~1.5% annually. This is no boom, this is an overall stagnation spanning almost two decades.
Of course, the Palestinian leadership talks about booms, too. Boom at the Sbarro. Boom at the Dolphinarium. Boom at the Netanya seder. And all of that happened after Arafat rejected the final offer of the Wye accords.
What the Palestinian Papers suggest isn't that the Palestinian brass have been getting used and abused by the talks, but rather than the leadership hasn't been upfront with its people who have been living lies for far too long.
Way to go, Mr. Ambassador - great combination of smoke and mirrors - Don Draper would tip his hat in respect for your ability to bend reality into an unrecognizable form.
Keep dreaming and deflecting. Apparently, that's going to help.
Once a newspaper has documents like that, it is their responsibility as journalists to publish them. They can't think about whether the documents will help the PA or hurt the PA - they are not in the business of promoting PA's well-being.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/palestine-papers-documents
Why do you suppose that is?