It’s over.  The peace process that never really was a true effort to find peace has now been exposed to have died a slow death. The two-state solution has been dealt a final blow and is, as John Cleese would say, an ex-solution.

This is the main, somewhat knee-jerk, thrust of reactions in the Middle East to the publication of the so-called Palestine Papers by Al Jazeera and the Guardian.  Most Israeli and Palestinian commentators seem to agree:  Israel never really wanted a deal (or was politically capable of it); the Americans sided with Israel, the status quo continuing to be its preferred political option; and the Palestinian leadership grew so frustrated and disinterested that they proved willing to betray the trust of the people they were supposed to represent.

As we move further away from Jerusalem though, reactions appear to be more upbeat.  The cynical views is that ‘these Palestine Papers reveal nothing that we didn’t already know’, while the optimists cheer that now that the truth is out, real action must follow.  Typically, the US State department spokesman dismissed the leaked documents as “not conducive to bringing the parties back to the  negotiating table”. William Hague, meanwhile, apparently missed the leaks altogether as he met with his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman and noted that settlement building is illegal (an argument that, given Lieberman’s political views, is probably about as futile as telling a pyromaniac that fire is bad while giving him a box of matches).

The Guardian’s editors seem to have difficulty making up their minds.  Yesterday, they appeared apologetic – suggesting that it would require Panglossian optimism to believe that the negotiations could one day be resurrected. Today, they are patting themselves on the back, claiming that by exposing “how and where this deal fell short, is not to undermine the goal. It is the only way left of rescuing it.”

Having worked for eight years as a small cog in the vast diplomatic machine that is the Middle East peace  process, I cannot help but smile at the hoopla that these leaks have caused. But in my heart of hearts, I’d have to agree with the cynics.  The Palestine Papers may provide great detail and indeed shock even some of those closely involved in the process as to the extent of the concessions Palestinian negotiators were willing to make, but in essence they don’t really tell us anything new.  There may, at some stages, have been a genuine desire for peace on all sides but it should be clear to most of us now that there has never been the political need.

One year ago now, Henry Siegman, Director of the US/Middle East project, laid out why the peace process has failed so far, and what needs to change to give a chance of success:

The reason previous peace initiatives have failed is not all that difficult to divine. In a standoff between two vastly uneven adversaries – one an established state possessing one of the world’s most powerful military forces, the patronage of the world’s greatest superpow­er, and a thriving economy; the other a stateless, power­less, occupied, and impoverished people – it should be no mystery which of the two will prevail. Given that imbalance, the possibility of a fair agreement between the mismatched adversaries is difficult to imagine without the intervention of a third party that restores a measure of balance between the two. It is a role the international community has always expected the US to assume, but one it has so far avoided.

In the absence of that necessary balance, dialogue be­tween Israelis and Palestinians about their respective founding narratives is hardly likely to bring about a political agreement. Nor, for that matter, will resumed talks between Netanyahu and Abbas on the so-called “‘67-issues.” A political agreement will become possi­ble only when the cost-benefit calculations of maintain­ing the occupation and denying Palestinians a viable state are changed decisively.

The Palestine Papers, despite today’s boasts from the Guardian, are unlikely to provide this change.  US foreign policy was unfazed by a quarter of a million leaked documents on Wikileaks, and it will more than likely survive a further sixteen hundred on Al Jazeera (some US diplomats may even applaud Secretary Rice’s ingenuity for suggesting that the Palestinian refugee issue could be resolved by transferring them to Chile and Argentina). The volume of Saeb Erakat’s denials would suggest that some change may be afoot in the upper echelons of the Palestinian side, but even a reshuffle of the Fatah leadership will not be the key to Middle East peace.

If anything, what the leaked documents have shown is that the three parties involved need the process more than its intended outcome and, like Michael Palin, will glue the process back on its perch and claim it was only pining for the fjords of Oslo.

The optimist in me though is watching the streets of Tunis, Cairo and Beirut today – because the decisive change that may force a strategic reorientation of Middle East policy may start right there.

Perhaps most worrying is the potential for friction between Israel and Turkey, countries that once enjoyed an unexpectedly good relationship (£2.5bn in bilateral trade in 2009). Turkey was the aid convoy’s main national sponsor, leading Israel’s unions to retaliate with a boycott of the country.

According to one Israeli union leader:

Turkey had been wiped off the workers unions’ travel maps. In a survey we conducted among the participants in the semi-annual union heads forum, we found that Israel’s workers’ unions have had enough of Turkey’s hostility toward Israel, which in the past had been characterized by verbal attacks by the country’s prime minister, but had now shifted to active attempts to harm Israel’s sovereignty. The tourism boycott is a weapon that will send a message to Ankara that words and deeds have consequences.

But Tel Aviv may now be the capital to discover that deeds have consequences that can go well beyond a boycott. The Turkish government is reported to be threatening to send more boats sailing towards Israel’s coast, but this time to give them a naval escort. That would put the two countries on track towards a very dangerous confrontation.

Bradley Burston, writing in Haaretz, is also worried:

Perhaps most ominously, in a stepwise, lemming-like march of folly in our relations with Ankara, a regional power of crucial importance and one which, if heeded, could have helped head off the First Gaza War, we have come dangerously close to effectively declaring a state of war with Turkey.

“This is going to be a very large incident, certainly with the Turks,” said Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the cabinet minister with the most sensitive sense of Israel’s ties with the Muslim world.

Let’s hope the Turkish government continues to pursue its grievances with Israel through the international system, rather than putting the two countries’ navies on a collision course. Otherwise this grim year could get soon get much worse – yet again.

Update: Channel 4′s Faisal Islam points to NATO’s charter, presumably with Turkey in mind.

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence…

An armed attack on one or more of the Parties is deemed to include an armed attack… on the forces, vessels, or aircraft of any of the Parties, when in or over these territories or any other area in Europe in which occupation forces of any of the Parties were stationed on the date when the Treaty entered into force or the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.

Update II: NATO will meet on Tuesday at Turkey’s request. According to an unnamed diplomat:

NATO does not really have instruments with which to deal with the follow-up from this type of affair. Turkey has not invoked article five which envisages all allies coming to the aid of a member country that is the victim of an attack.

But, given that numerous Turkish citizens appear to figure among the casualties, it is understandable that (Ankara) triggers political dialogue with its partners.

Update III: One to watch is the Irish boat – MV Rachel Corrie (yes, that Rachel Corrie) which is yet to reach Israel:

Five are onboard the Irish-owned vessel, MV Rachel Corrie, and all are safe. The ship was one day behind the main flotilla and is still on its way to Gaza.

Among the passengers on the Rachel Corrie are Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and former UN Assistant Secretary-General Denis Halliday.

Does it sail on towards a second confrontation? And if so, how will the Israelis react?

Every night, dozens of young men in Jerusalem’s Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood take to the streets and go out searching for girls.

But theirs is not a promiscuous search. In fact, the group of some 35 volunteers is looking to prevent such interaction and to stop what neighborhood residents have overwhelmingly complained is a growing problem in Pisgat Ze’ev – Arab men going out with Jewish girls.

What was once a rare occurrence, residents say, has become the norm in this north Jerusalem suburb, which shares a side of the security barrier with the Palestinian village of Anata and the scattered dwellings on the edge of Shuafat refugee camp.

“A rare occurrence?” a shopkeeper in the local mall asked sardonically this week when asked about the situation. “My friend, it’s not rare at all, this has become the reality. Pisgat Ze’ev has turned into one gigantic whorehouse, please excuse the expression.”

Residents now say that, due to Pisgat Ze’ev’s location and increasingly mixed Arab-Jewish population, the phenomenon of mixed dating has grown, with violent outbursts breaking out frequently between Arab and Jewish youth over the matter, and with growing communal anger over what many here feel is simply unacceptable.

According to the group, “our mission is not against Arabs, but it is for the protection of Jewish women, wherever they may be.”

The one exception to this has been US policy on Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Here, in contrast to their predecessors, the Obama team have taken a firm line against any settlement expansion including “natural growth.” This has created a rift between the US and Israeli governments, which Israeli PM Netanyahu and his allies are finding hard to handle domestically. The US is nonetheless sticking to its line. Hillary Clinton has been clear not only in demanding a freeze, but also in stating that “any informal and oral agreements” between the Bush administration and Israel on settlements “did not become part of the official position of the United States government.”

The new US insistence on a total settlement freeze brings the US into line with longstanding EU and UN positions, so for the first time in years we are seeing solid, unified international policy this issue. In June, the Quartet urged Israel “to freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth; to dismantle outposts erected since March 2001; and to refrain from provocative actions in East Jerusalem, including home demolition and evictions.” The European line on settlements is also being put forward in strong terms by the Swedish Presidency. Earlier this week, a senior Swedish foreign ministry official said that it was “inconceivable” for the international community to legitimize natural growth of the settler population.

So far so good: coherent international policy on an issue that constitutes a serious block to good faith negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, and creates facts on the ground that inevitably influence final status discussions.

Then the European Commission steps in. The Commission’s technical office in Jerusalem commented a few days ago that Israeli settlements were “strangling the Palestinian economy” and forcing the Palestinian Authority to rely on foreign aid – much of which is provided by the European taxpayer. The Israeli government, very predictably, reacted strongly against the EC’s statement and summoned the head of the EU delegation. And now the Commissioner herself has issued a backing-down statement: her spokeswoman told the press that the EC office in Jerusalem had not used “wording that reflects the views of the European Commission or Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner…  Of course we are concerned about the negative effect that settlement policy has on the economic life of Palestinians, however the wording chosen in that statement does take it out of context… the reality is much more complex.”

It’s not that complex. The points made by the EC office in Jerusalem have been made many times before by the World Bank (which has issued detailed reports describing the detrimental effect of road closures on the Palestinian economy) and the UN (which has demonstrated the connection between such closures and settlements). Settlements do strangle the Palestinian economy, and their growth has to stop if the two-state solution is to remain viable.

The Commissioner’s intervention is not a big deal, because the EU has not changed its policy on settlements. It is just disappointing: the US administration has overcome domestic obstacles to stick to its line on settlements; but some members of the unwieldy European family have not apparently managed to overcome timidity in the face of Israeli demarches. It is time for the EU, and the EC, to state the facts about settlements and stand firmly behind a policy which they have, in any case, advocated for years.

Drudge links to CBS which frets that that Obama was sending a ‘subliminal message’ to Israel. Apparently, “‘some Israelis…saw the incident as somewhat akin to an incident last year, when the Iraqi reporter threw a shoe at President Bush in Baghdad.” Somewhat akin! Can’t get worse than that.

Of course, it’s not Jews who have a thing about soles of shoes, it’s Arabs, but CBS has an answer for that. Apparently, “Israel feels enough a part of the Middle East after 60 years to be insulted too.” You really couldn’t make it up.

Probably not safe for work, but here’s a picture of the offending act.

(*I made the ‘feets smell’ bit up.)

Update: Note that Obama has still not got his shoes mended – compare this tatty pair he wore during his campaign…

Like Daniel, I don’t fully understand what happened, or why – but have been trying to track how the story developed. It appears that re-investigation of the attack was conducted by Patrick Martin, from the Canadian Globe and Mail. His story was headlined “account of the Israeli story doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.”

Martin interviewed eyewitnesses who told him that while “a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed.”  No shell landed in the schoolyard itself, he writes, but 43 people were killed by three shells in the street outside.

Martin’s report continues:

The teacher who was in the compound at the time of the shelling says he heard three loud blasts, one after the other, then a lot of screaming. “I ran in the direction of the screaming [inside the compound],” he said. “I could see some of the people had been injured, cut. I picked up one girl who was bleeding by her eye, and ran out on the street to get help. But when I got outside, it was crazy hell. There were bodies everywhere, people dead, injured, flesh everywhere.”

The teacher, who refused to give his name because he said UNRWA had told the staff not to talk to the news media, was adamant: “Inside [the compound] there were 12 injured, but there were no dead.”

“Three of my students were killed,” he said. “But they were all outside.”

Hazem Balousha, who runs an auto-body shop across the road from the UNRWA school, was down the street, just out of range of the shrapnel, when the three shells hit. He showed a reporter where they landed: one to the right of his shop, one to the left, and one right in front.

“There were only three,” he said. “They were all out here on the road.”

This account seems broadly consistent with the UN News Centre report that Daniel links to (and which contains Ban’s condemnation). In it John Ging is reported as saying that “some 30 people were killed and 55 others injured, five of them critically, when three artillery shells landed at the perimeter of a school, which usually serves as a girls’ preparatory school, in the Jabaliya refugee camp.”

Martin argues that the United Nations’ description of the attack was ambiguous and that UN agencies failed to correct “widespread news reports of the deaths in the school.” Israeli reports also seem to have been confused, however, with Mark Regev, the Israeli PM’s spokesman telling the media that (i) there was hostile fire from the school; (ii) the explosion that resulted was “out of proportion to the ordnance we used.” (e.g. that the school had been booby trapped).

Ging makes a much stronger allegation in his account of another attack – this one on an UN school in Beit Lahiya (which was being used as a shelter for refugees). 

Watch this video and you’ll see him accuse the Israelis of firing two phosophorus rounds into that school, two into its perimeter and a further high explosive round onto its roof. The latter killed two brothers aged 5 and 7 and seriously injured their mother. “I’ve seen the phosphorus. It looks like phosphorus. And it burns like phosp0rus,” he says.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ging goes into more detail here, adding that UN schools are clearly marked, with their co-ordinates sent to the Israeli military. (Warning: some graphic footage.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am not confident that I have got to the bottom of this story as yet – but I am sure that Daniel will flesh out his thoughts on UN culpability as more details emerge tomorrow.

Israeli shelling killed more than 40 Palestinians on Tuesday at a U.N. school where civilians had taken shelter, medical officials said.

The BBC reported that

. . .at least 40 people were killed and 55 injured when Israeli artillery shells landed outside a United Nations-run school in Gaza, UN officials have said.

But though the BBC story placed the shell outside the school, UN officials have now set the record straight. As Haaretz reports, Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Jerusalem, clarified that the IDF mortar shells fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself.

UNRWA said that the source of the mistaken story had originated “with a separate branch of the United Nations.” Unfortunately, this branch seems to have pretty good access to the UN Secretary-General’s office, because on 6 January 2009 Ban Ki-Moon himself spoke out against Israel’s “totally unacceptable” attacks against what the UN’s own News Centre called “three clearly-marked United Nations schools, where civilians were seeking refuge from the ongoing conflict in Gaza”.

Who knows what actually happened. The fog of war was deliberately made thicker by both the IDF and Hamas. It is clear many people, including civilians, died in Gaza. But the UN school story is beginning to look like the Jenin “massacre” story from 2002. Then the Palestinian news agency Wafa was reporting that Israel had committed the “massacre of the 21st century” in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. “Medical sources” informed Wafa of “hundreds of martyrs.” Reports of the supposed Israeli atrocities in Jenin were spread by Palestinian sources on CNN and elsewhere.

But this turned out to be a lie. There was a battle in Jenin. But the “hundreds” of martyrs were an invention. The death toll was 56 Palestinians, the majority of them combatants, and 23 Israeli soldiers. By then, however, the story had served its purpose, much the same as the UN school story did.

In war, information is a weapon. But not one usually used by the UN.