# PALESTINE /// The Palestine Papers revealed on Al Jazeera and The Guardian

Al Jazeera and The Guardian have revealed the contents of about 1700 diplomatic correspondence and meetings’ minutes between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli Government between 1999 and 2010.
The main revelations (so far) have been coming from negotiations organized in the second part of 2009 in which the Palestinian Authority proposed incredible concessions to the Israeli, especially in terms of territory as Palestinians would had conceded the quasi-totality of East Jerusalem (which is supposed to be the capital city of the Palestinian State) and the area on which the horrible settlement of Gilo has been built on near Bethlehem.

I don’t want to sum-up too much the content of those negotiations as Al-Jazeera does it perfectly, but rather their legitimacy. As I wrote in October, the very notion of negotiation does not make any sense. The Palestinian Authority does not own a single card in those negotiation as the Israeli and its army can enforce any territorial annexation they want. Each new Israeli settlement built in the West Bank influence the weight scale of a simulacrum of negotiations. The only thing that can save Palestinians from an ethnic-exile is justice. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and of East Jerusalem is fundamentally illegal in the frame of International Law and the International Community should unanimously condemn this colonial policy. Justice is not a matter of negotiation but a matter of application.

People who are to blame in this press revelation is not so much the Americans who are accomplices of Israel in its illegality (see Condoleeza Rice’s patronizing “dialogue” with the Palestinian emissaries), nor even the Israeli and Tzipi Livni who was the foreign affairs minister at this time and who declared “I am a lawyer… But I am against law – international law in particular. Law in general“, but really the Palestinian Authority which is ready years after years to renounce to always more territory, rights and dignity. Palestinian resistance does not consist in obtaining a good bargain from the Israelis but rather to continue to exist on this land even if it means that they have to confront to the extreme difficulty of life that is imposed to them. To exist, and also not to fall into fatalism which is easy for the first, second and third generations of Palestinians who did not know anything else than the Israeli occupation since 1967.