The Palestine Papers

“Are you serious about the two-state solution?” Abbas asked, according to Erekat. “If you are, I cannot comprehend that you would allow a single settlement housing unit to be built in the West Bank… you have the choice. You can take the cost free road, applying double standards, which would shoot me and other moderates in the head and make this Bin Laden’s region. Or say we are not against Israel but against Israel’s actions. If you cannot make Israel stop settlements and resume permanent status negotiations, who can?”
 This is an excerpt of the Palestine Papers, obtained by Al jazeera  in which the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas

 told President Obama in June 2009 that peace could never proceed without a complete freeze of Israeli settlements.

Obama ignored this and accepted Israel's "concession" to suspend any new construction in the West Bank. This didn't last long.

The papers have also sparked mass outrage, revealing that PA negotiators were willing to exclude over 6 million Palestinian refugees from their homeland. In addition, Tzipi Livni, Israel's former foreign minister, proposed annexing several Arab villages to a future Palestinian state, which would force thousands of Israeli Arabs to choose between their citizenship and their land.

According to the Israeli Defence Forces Civil Administration, close to 500,000 Israelis now occupy settlements deemed illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Golan Heights. In November last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to build a further 1,300 homes in East Jerusalem. Earlier this month, the European Union expressed concern that the ever expanding force field of security and infrastructure required to support the burgeoning settler population would further splinter the occupied territory. In a statement to the Consuls General, the EU stated that settlements impinged on the lives of Palestinians and resulted in an inequitable education policy, difficulty in accessing health care and the inadequate provision of resources and investment.