Al-Shabaka policy advisor Sam Bahour translates a recent unverified leak about the peace talks that indicates major, very worrying, Palestinian concessions to Israel and the U.S. Bahour analyses the impact on the Palestinians and the region if the leak has any truth in it.

Alaa Tartir, Al-Shabaka Program Director, discusses four rules for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, arguing that “for peace talks to succeed, negotiators must have a popular mandate. It is essential to build up a legitimate national body that represents all Palestinians ... Otherwise, peace will be another form of colonialism wrapped up in modernity.”

There are many advocates of the renewed US-sponsored peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, despite widespread scepticism. One particularly active set of advocates is the group known as The Elders. Three of the Elders - former US President Jimmy Carter, former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari, and former Algerian Foreign Minister and freedom fighter Lakhdar Brahimi - recently spent time in Washington and London making the case for the peace talks. It is instructive to review their arguments, as I had the opportunity to do in July during their London visit.

The U.S effort, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, to revive negotiations between the P.L.O. and Israel recently brought negotiators to Washington D.C. to revive the peace process and settle the 65-year-old conflict. Yet, at the same time that peace is being promoted, the Israeli government has crafted a plan to forcibly displace some 40,000 Palestinian Bedouins living in the Negev desert. The plan was approved by the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) in a first reading on June 24 2013.

Next to U.S. support for Israel, the main reason why the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip continues is that the Europeans have reduced themselves to a subservient role in the Middle East Peace Process: one in which they underwrite the cost of Israel’s occupation by artificially propping up the Palestinian Authority, which created from the Oslo Peace Accords but has no sovereign authority whatever...

On May 15th, Palestinians commemorate the 65th anniversary of the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) that led to the expulsions from their homes and decades of exile and dispossession. We hear their stories and hopes for a resolution to the conflict, including those of Al-Shabaka co-founder Osamah Khalil, Assistant Professor at Syracuse University.

Al-Shabaka Policy Advisor Samah Sabawi says that "land swaps" rhetoric is designed to protect the large Israeli settlement blocks and their buffer zones.

Given that Israel is costing U.S. taxpayers over $3 billion annually and has put the U.S. in a weaker position in the Middle East because of its intransigence, it is past due that every American demand of their government to withdraw its resources and political clout from entities that are moving the region away from peace, instead of closer to it.

The dust is settling after US President Barack Obama's visit to Israel, the occupied Palestinian territory and Jordan, and it is now easier to see the extent of the debris he has left behind. It is perhaps at the geopolitical level that Obama has done the most damage - and that to the weakest party, the Palestinian authority, he met. The surprise reconciliation he engineered between Israel and Turkey has reversed the only regional realignment in the Palestinians' favour for years.

We won't achieve democracy with a movement that's not democratic. Read a shortened version of Osamah Khalil's original Al-Shabaka policy brief, "'Who are You?'": The PLO and the Limits of Representation."