The Palestine Papers are back

The head of Al Jazeera's Transparency Unit lets Haaretz in on the findings his new book will reveal about the key negotiators of the Mideast Peace Process.

"After creating a storm in January, the Palestinian Papers are back. In his latest book, Al Jazeera TV's Clayton Swisher releases the collection of leaked papers that document the peace-negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority between 1999 and 2010. The January release of the papers caused a media storm with details of past negotiations, including information showing that the Palestinians had previously agreed to serious concessions, such as secret compromises over core issues like Jerusalem and refugees. Swisher heads the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit, which operates in a similar style to WikiLeaks by inviting people to submit revealing documents. When he got his hands on the Palestine Papers he convinced his bosses to support him – together with a team of several other reporters – to embark on a research project that involved translating, analyzing and providing the context for the leaked documents.....

“If the Arab public was offered today a free and fair vote to either make peace with Israel or unite as Arabs and commit to fully liberating all of historic Palestine, I am confident they would chose the latter,” Swisher continues. “It is Western-backed puppet governments that ensure what security Israelis experience today. But as we see, the sands are constantly shifting," he (Swisher) said.....

"The American peace processors (both Democrat and Republican) believe that Arabs are foolish, and that there only needs to be a fiction of a peace process in order for them to not 'hate us.' What they don't realize is that the masses see right through it," says Swisher.....

He has learned that the best advocates for Al Jazeera's brand of journalism are the people themselves. "In a part of the world where political representation is almost non-existent, we dare to put the human being at the center of our stories rather than the autocratic governments or their minions. For those reasons, we are often reviled by governments and applauded by the masses,” he said......"