[S.T.D.]

From news article:
On Tuesday 22 February, Middle East Monitor (MEMO) will be hosting a panel discussion on the Palestine papers, the leaked negotiating papers that were jointly published last month by Al-Jazeera and The Guardian. The event will include Seumas Milne, associate editor of The Guardian, alongside a variety of speakers. According to MEMO, the papers ‘revealed shocking disclosures which have serious implications for the region.’ The event will ‘bring together a distinguished panel of experts’ to ‘explain what the papers revealed’ and to ‘discuss their impact on the ground and on future negotiations.’

The conference is likely to promote the view that the ‘shocking disclosures’ were the concessions offered by the Palestinian negotiators, since MEMO is a pro-Hamas organisation that rejects the notion of Palestinian concessions for peace, while supporting irredentist maximalist claims against Israel. It is run by Dr Daud Abdullah, a known Hamas sympathiser who famously signed the Istanbul Declaration in 2009, which called on Muslims to attack the British Navy if it tried to prevent arms being smuggled into Gaza:‘…The obligation of the Islamic Nation to regard the sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the smuggling of arms to Gaza, as a declaration of war, a new occupation, sinful aggression, and a clear violation of the sovereignty of the Nation. This must be rejected and fought by all means and ways.’Dr Abdullah has never recanted his support for the document or the conference.
Similarly, MEMO recently published an ‘exclusive’ article by Dr Azzam Tamimi, a Hamas spokesperson and suicide bombing advocate, in which he argues that if the Gaza-based Islamist group accepted Israel’s right to exist and denounced violence, it would represent a ‘capitulation’:‘Indeed, it looks as if “reconciliation” [between Hamas and Fatah] is nothing but a trap aimed at subjugating Hamas. The price of lifting the siege on Gaza and ending the sanctions against Hamas is too high to accept; it would amount to capitulation. As things stand today, Hamas and Fatah share very little in common. Fatah was transformed by the Oslo Accords from a national liberation movement into an agency of collaborators serving Israel.



Reconciliation is intended to do the same thing to Hamas, but Hamas has, so far, resisted well. Should it deviate, God forbid, the Palestinian people will have no choice but to produce a new movement that is loyal to the Palestinian dream of a free and independent state, which the Fatah leadership has, since Oslo, sought to kill.’The argument that Fatah (and by extension the Palestinian Authority) are ‘collaborators serving Israel’ was echoed in The Guardian’s editorial line on the Palestine papers, which condemned Palestinian negotiators as ‘craven’ and ‘weak’, and called for Hamas to be brought into the negotiating process. The newspaper also offered a platform to a representative from the group to threaten ‘practical measures’ in response to PA ‘treason’.


Seumas Milne, who, alongside the Middle East editor Ian Black, was responsible for the presentation of the negotiating documents in The Guardian, also explicitly endorsed this perspective, arguing that Palestinian concessions represented the ‘decay of what in Yasser Arafat’s heyday was an authentic national liberation movement’.