Palileaks: Is Obama The Biggest Victim Of The #PalestinePapers?

I like this bit from Noah Pollak's Palestine Papers: 99 Percent Hype, 1 Percent News

But the biggest loser in the Palestine Papers is someone who was not even on the scene at the time. That is President Obama, who chose to make Israeli settlements the centerpiece of the peace process. The papers show that one of the only areas on which the sides had come close to an agreement was the acceptability of land swaps as a solution to the settlements controversy. Today, at Obama’s behest, the Palestinians insist on a complete settlement freeze before they’ll even talk — including in areas that just two years ago they had agreed were already de facto Israeli.


Thus did Obama turn back the clock on one of the only points of relative consensus and progress between the two sides. The opener to this Jerusalem Post story captures the absurdity of the situation:

With the Palestinian Authority making an international incident over every plan to build in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem beyond the Green Line, a cache of some 1,600 documents—mostly form [sic] the Palestinian Negotiating Unit—shows that in 2008 the PA was willing to recognize eventual Israeli control over all those neighborhoods, with the exception of Har Homa.

This is actually unfair to the Palestinians. They didn’t make construction in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem an “international incident.” That was Obama, who has criticized construction in these neighborhoods repeatedly. There is not much news in the Palestine Papers to anyone familiar with the Annapolis-era negotiations. But they do provide another example of how badly the Obama administration has handled the peace process.

This is the same message we get from the Wikileaks revelations--Obama's Mideast policy is badly misguided. From Wikileaks we learned that in fact--contrary to what the Obama administration would have us believe--the Arab world recognizes the threat of Iran as taking precedence over the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and as being the greater threat to Middle East stability.

BTW, what do you think is better name for these documents: "The Palestine Papers" or 'Palileaks'--as per Meryl Yourish and Muqata?

Technorati Tag: Palestine Papers and Palileaks.