Laila El-Haddad reports for the Guardian on how the Palestine Papers are being received in Gaza. She quotes some of the bloggers we have featured here on the site:
In Gaza, which has been blockaded with western backing and regional complicity since democratic elections five years ago, friends and family tell me the response is a mixture of anger, suspicion and uncertainty about the future. Fellow blogger Mohammed Suliman told me via Facebook that he found the revelations, chief among them that Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority offered to concede almost all of East Jerusalem, “shocking but not unpredictable”, referring to them as a “tragicomedy”. “I just can’t understand who on earth nominated this man to speak for the Palestinians? When he says, ‘WE’ who the hell are we? Working 20 years in the field never gives him the right to give up on one metre of the land, to divide, bargain and sell.”
The willingness to give up more than 10% of the West Bank and large portions of East Jerusalem, from where his family originally hails, is the most painfully startling part, he added.
The papers also confirm the intransigence of Israel in the face of the most compromising of Palestinians positions. Lina al-Sharif, a friend and author of the blog “360 Km2 of Chaos“, told me she was irritated by the western media focus on Palestinian desperation and incompetency, rather than Israeli and American intransigence. “This shouldn’t just be an exposé of the PA, but also of Israel. And the US was witnessing all this and calling itself ‘an honest broker’! This is just yet another hit to the already dead peace process.”
El-Haddad adds:
In a bitter irony, and a stark reminder of the conditions many Palestinians in Gaza continue to live under, some cousins and friends there were not yet even aware of the revelations when I spoke with them, because they had no electricity.
“This might make you laugh or cry – or maybe both – but some people didn’t hear about these documents yet because of the continuous power cuts in the Gaza Strip,” my cousin told me.
Gaza continues to suffer from extended power outages since Israel bombed the only power plant there in the summer of 2006.
