The Guardian’s Spin on the Palestine Papers

If I may highlight one more thing regarding Noah Pollak’s excellent take-down of the “Palestine Papers” that the Guardian and Al Jazeera leaked to the public over the weekend, the Guardian editorial yesterday threw its weight behind Hamas in full.

Not much news there clearly, considering that the Guardian never made a mystery of its political sympathies: just to offer a few picks, it regularly hosts well-known Islamists, Hamas’s unofficial spokesman in London, a vast assortment of one-staters such as Karma Nabulsi, and former British Communist Party member  Seumas Milne. And so to have dumped thousands of documents in the public domain that it deems so embarrassing to the Palestinian Authority as to make its leaders and negotiators lose any credibility they might still have suggests a certain agenda.

And it bears remembering that the Guardian is not new to this type of rhetoric, having been for the last decade a dedicated host of some of the most hostile columns against Israel, the patron of prominent Israeli anti-Zionist scholars and revisionist historians, the platform for left-wing opposition to the war in Iraq, anti-Bush activism, anti-globalization rhetoric, pleas against capitalism, and the occasional trivialization of Stalinism.

The Palestine Papers are less a scoop and more a tool to advance one of the above agendas. For the Guardian, they are evidence that “The Palestinian Authority may continue as an employer but, as of today, its legitimacy as negotiators will have all but ended on the Palestinian street.”

This prescription follows:

    America must drop its veto on Palestinian unity talks and take up Hamas’s offer of a one-year ceasefire; a negotiating team that represents all major Palestinian factions must be formed; and Israel has to accept that a state created on 1967 borders, not around them, is the minimum price of an end to the conflict.

This in order to save a two-state solution that, for the Guardian, may already be dead anyway after its leaks have discredited the current Palestinian leadership.

The leak will generate an enormous amount of traffic on the Guardian website for the weeks ahead (good for ad buys); it may corner some European leaders into a panic as they see the PA bend over backward to deny it ever made any such concession, to avoid the loss of face the leaks may have caused it; it may ignite some debate inside Israel, not only about the quality of Israel’s leadership during the leaked negotiations, as Noah noted, but also about the existence of a Palestinian partner, whether that partner can deliver, and so on.

Regardless, the Guardian spin says more about its worldview and the views of its audience than it says about the peace process. To assume that the way forward is to have the U.S. pressure Israel, open up to Hamas, and declare the pre-1967 cease-fire line as the international boundary is not just an old and tired fantasy — it is a sure way to make the two-state solution even more moribund than at present.

If that is what the Guardian wished to achieve by leaking the papers, it may comfortably say “mission accomplished” in tomorrow’s editorial.