BICOM

The latest batch of documents leaked from the offices of the Palestinian Negotiations Support Unit and published by al-Jazeera and the Guardian suggest Britain’s intelligence service, MI6 were closely involved in attempts to weaken Hamas.  MI6 helped the Palestinian Authority to draw up a plan for concerted action against Hamas and other extremist groups in 2004. The seven-page Palestinian Security Plan, drafted by British intelligence officers, was written to “encourage and enable the Palestinian Authority (PA) to fully meet its security obligations under Phase 1 of the Roadmap” – the US brokered 2003 peace initiative, under which the Palestinians agreed to clamp down on militant activity. It proposes a number of ways of “degrading the capabilities of rejectionists”, naming Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Brigades. This would involve “the disruption of their leaderships’ communications and command and control capabilities; the detention of key middle-ranking officers; and the confiscation of their arsenals and financial resources held within the Occupied Territories.”

The documents also reveal the key role played by US General Keith Dayton in liaising between the Israeli authorities and the PA. One document quotes Dayton as saying to PA Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat that Israel had agreed that the Palestinian security forces under Dayton’s command should be trained in anti-terror tactics. Another shows the process by which Dayton brokered the situation that pertains today in which the IDF restricts its actions in areas patrolled by the forces trained by the US General to the hours of night.

While these are all important and interesting details, the latest documents, in common with their predecessors, do not reveal anything of strategic importance which was not already known. Rather, they appear to be intended by al-Jazeera as part of a campaign to depict the PA as excessively pliant to Israeli interests, and insufficiently militant. PA officials continue to deny the veracity of the reports. PA President Abbas referred to the documents yesterday as a “forgery.” However, other Palestinian officials accept that the documents are genuine, but claim that they are being presented in a distorted and dishonest way. Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat, meanwhile, said that al-Jazeera is engaged in a “horrible, dangerous and criminal campaign against Palestinians.” Erekat said that he had set up a committee to establish how the documents were stolen from his office. In this regard, the Palestinian Ma’an news agency yesterday carried a report identifying two former employees of the Negotiations Support Unit, French-Palestinian Ziad Kalut and US citizen Clayton Swisher as possible suspects. The two are both now based in Doha, Qatar.