Leaked documents from years of Middle East peace talks reveal a rarely seen human side of high-level diplomacy, showing Israeli and Palestinian negotiators joking, teasing, losing their tempers and even sympathizing with one another on thorny issues that have divided them for decades.
Released on the Web site of al-Jazeera TV this week, the documents also disclose that the sides made significant progress on the conflict’s toughest disputes before the talks broke down around the time of Israel’s war in Hamas-ruled Gaza in early 2009.
An al-Jazeera TV special on the documents focused on segments it says show Palestinian negotiators made major concessions, which prompted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to accuse the station of distorting facts to undermine his Palestinian Authority.
However, read in bulk, the documents give a blow-by-blow of hard-nosed bargaining while offering glimpses of the deeply personal interactions between negotiators.
During one argument over Israel’s insistence that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni receives a phone call from her son, recently drafted into the army.
The minutes read: “She reiterates the importance of making peace for precisely that reason, although it may be too late for her son already.”
In another meeting, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat tells the US secretary of state that Israeli home demolitions make Palestinians doubt Israeli motives — even in his own family.
“My wife asks me what the hell we are doing here,” Erekat says.
Talk on tough issues was often lightened with jokes during the negotiations.
Palestinian negotiator Ahmed Qureia joked that he wanted the sides to focus on West Bank infrastructure so the future Palestinian state would come “furnished.” At another point, he told Livni he would vote for her if he were Israeli.
Present and past negotiators from both sides said the intensity of peace talks drew negotiators together despite their arguments.
“If you put Israelis and Palestinians at one table, in no time they find a common language,” said Ron Pundak, an Israeli who helped arrange the back channel contacts that led to the first interim peace deals in the mid-1990s. “They are swimming in the same mud. They know they are dependent on each other.”
Sometimes the jokes in the memos are darker, playing off the sides’ deepest fears of each other.
Livni suggested the two sides plan a release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, held by Hamas in Gaza since 2006, around some event.
“You mean like kidnapping an Israeli?” Qureia asked.
“You know, when you are smiling you ask the most difficult questions,” Livni responded.
The documents are mostly notes from meetings between Nov. 2007 and Dec. 2008.
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