The dysfunctional myth machine

THE overwhelming impression that emerges from the confidential records of a decade of Middle East peace talks is of the weakness and desperation of Palestinian leaders, the unyielding stance of Israeli negotiators and the often contemptuous attitude towards the Palestinian side shown by US politicians and officials.

In a June 2005 meeting at then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's residence, having listened to Sharon berate him for failing to crack down on the ''terrorist infrastructure'' of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was recorded as noting ''with pleasure the fact that Sharon considered him a friend, and the fact that he too considered Sharon a friend''.

But as the 2007-08 Annapolis negotiations led nowhere and the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu successfully resisted US pressure to halt settlement building in the occupied territories during 2009-10, Palestinian negotiators adopted an increasingly despairing tone.

In an outburst to Barack US President Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, in October 2009, senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat complained that: ''19 years of promises and you haven't made up your minds what you want to do with us … We delivered on our road map obligations. But no, they can't even give a six-month freeze to give me a figleaf.''

A few months later, in January 2010, Erekat told US State Department official David Hale that he was offering Israel ''the biggest Yerushalayim [Jerusalem] in Jewish history'', a ''symbolic number of refugees' return, demilitarised state … What more can I give?''

But as became clear even under the earlier, less hardline Israeli government of Ehud Olmert, the concessions offered by Erekat and other Palestinian negotiators - far beyond what most of the Palestinian public would be likely to accept - were insufficient for Israel.

Olmert's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, is recorded confirming what Palestinians have always accused Israeli governments of doing: creating facts on the ground to prevent the possibility of a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

At a west Jerusalem meeting in November 2007, she told the then senior Palestinian negotiator, Ahmed Qureia, that she believed Palestinians saw that ''the Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we'll say that is impossible, we already have the land and we cannot create the state''. She conceded that had been ''the policy of the government for a really long time''.

But when Palestinian leaders baulked at the prospect of an entirely demilitarised state, Livni made clear where the negotiating power lay.

In May 2008, Erekat asked Livni: ''Short of your jet fighters in my sky and your army on my territory, can I choose where I secure external defence?''

''No,'' Livni replied. ''In order to create your state you have to agree in advance with Israel - you choose not to have the right of choice afterwards.''

Increasingly, Palestinian Authority leaders resorted to warning US officials that if they failed to deliver an agreement with Israel, the door would be opened to Hamas and Iran.

PA leaders also repeatedly threatened to abandon attempts to negotiate a two-state solution in favour of a one-state option. Erekat declared that if the settlement of the occupied West Bank continued, ''we will announce the one state and the struggle for equality in the state of Israel''.

But the documents show US officials unmoved by such claims. Why were the Palestinians ''always in a chapter of a Greek tragedy'', US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asked at a meeting with Erekat in Washington in the autumn of 2009.

Her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, had been even more dismissive. In July 2008, during talks with Palestinian leaders over compensation for refugees who fled or were forced from their homes when Israel was established in 1948, she said: ''Bad things happen to people all around the world all the time.''