Tony Karon in Time:
An unspoken truth held to be self-evident by many in the Middle East is that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is dead. If so, the trove of more than 1,600 secret Palestinian documents whose release by the Qatar-based al-Jazeera news organization and Britain's Guardian newspaper began on Sunday could be its postmortem. The documents, allegedly leaked from within the Palestinian negotiating infrastructure and not part of the WikiLeaks Cablegate dump, detail an increasingly desperate yet futile effort by Palestinian negotiators to tempt Israel into a deal by conceding more and more ground, while pleading in vain with U.S. officials for help. And in the longer term, they could even prove politically fatal to chief Palestinian negotiator Saeeb Erekat and his boss, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Erekat on Sunday dismissed the documents as “a bunch of lies,” but al-Jazeera and the Guardian insist their veracity was carefully established from multiple sources within the Palestinian bureaucracy. More are to be rolled out in the coming days.
More here.
