The Prisoner's Document: Media Double Spin

Whilst the wrangling over Cpl Galid Shalit continues and Israel is vowing it will not negotiate the soldier's return and is instead promising further military action in Gaza, the so-called Prisoner's Document, for those reasons, isn't headline news right now.

Much has been spun and back spun about this document which seeks to unify all Palestinian factions, including Fatah and Hamas, as well as others. In essence, it's a document that pledges National Unity ("Palestinian national conciliation document"), a letter of intend as it were.

As such documents go, this one is specific and vague in equal measures, something which has led to considerable media speculation, spin and counter-spin.

Not surprisingly perhaps the first point is one of the most important ones, as it expresses the desire for independence "on all territories occupied in 1967":

1- the Palestinian people in the homeland and in the Diaspora seek to liberate their land and to achieve their right in freedom, return and independence and to exercise their right in self determination, including the right to establish their independent state with al-Quds al-Shareef as its capital on all territories occupied in 1967 and to secure the right of return for the refugees and to liberate all prisoners and detainees based on the historical right of our people on the land of the fathers and grandfathers and based on the UN Charter and the international law and international legitimacy.

Whilst some media pundits have seen this as an "implicit" recognition of Israel, the document does certainly not make any mention of recognition, implicit or explicit, leading others to speculate about the true intentions of a unified Palestinian leadership, speculation which is only that.

So, media spin galore, on both sides of the divide.

Personally I believe that a "unified" Palestinian leadership, fractioned and heterogeneous as it will be even in the face of this document, will in time be more forthright on the recognition issue. We have in history seen similar "slow u-turns", in particular with the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, which slowly started to politicise and ended up at the negotiating table and laying down its arms completely. Some of its top politicians of today, including Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, were once gun-toting Irish Republican revolutionaries.

There is in my view little reason to believe that a Palestinian united leadership will not go down the same road, given a chance and some incentives. But whilst Israel has the right to defend itself against acts of war like the capture of Gilad Shalit, its disproportional, even hysterical response to this incident, including the arrest of 64 Palestinian MPs and the bombing of the Palestinian PM's office, is unlikely to make the leadership amenable to concessions regarding the recognition issue.

Do we need to remind ourselves of the fact that UN Resolution 446 (March 22, 1979) represents the most flagrant violation by Israel?

(The Council) Determines that the policy and practices of Israel in establishing settlements in the Palestinian and Arab territories occupied since 1967 have no legal validity and constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East; Calls once more upon Israel, as the occupying power, to abide scrupulously by the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, to rescind it’s previous measures and to desist from taking any action which would result in changing the legal status and geographical nature and materially affecting the demographic composition of the Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, and in particular, not to transfer parts of its own civilian population into the occupied Arab territories.

Do we need to remind ourselves that even the Israeli Government initially showed little appetite for allowing settlements in the West Bank Occupied Territory? That these settlements would not have been possible without the 1967 six-day war?

Full text of the Prisoner's Document here.