JERUSALEM—A document purporting to show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s readiness for significant concessions to the Palestinians has rocked the Israeli political arena a week before national elections, with extreme right wing leaders accusing Netanyahu of being a leftist sheep who has been masquerading as a wolf.
The Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement saying the document was a draft and not an agreement.
In the document, drawn up in August 2013 by Netanyahu’s chief negotiator together with a confidant of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, Israel agrees that the pre-Six Day War border with the West Bank be the basis for a permanent border with a Palestinian entity, together with land swaps on either side of that line, a formulation that suggests a readiness to give up control of 90 percent of the West Bank. It also calls for a "just, fair, and realistic" solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. "During a defined period and in humanitarian cases," it said, "Israel may approve resettlement of individuals in Israel."
The document was drawn up in the wake of negotiations initiated by Secretary of State John Kerry. It became a dead letter after the Palestinian Authority said the negotiator representing it, Prof. Hussein Agha, a Lebanese academic who teaches at Oxford, had no official authorization to represent the Authority. Israeli journalist Nahman Barnea, who broke the story, said Abbas had effectively used Agha to elicit concessions from Netanyahu, without binding himself to any concessions. Netanyahu was represented by his long-time aide, attorney Yitzhak Molho. Former State Department official Dennis Ross also took part in the talks, which were held in London.
The retention of some settlement blocs in the West Bank is implicit in the document which also calls for evacuation of outlying settlements while enabling those settlers who so choose "to remain in place in the state of Palestine under Palestinian jurisdiction with full equal rights and no individual or communal discrimination".
The document acknowledges "Palestinian aspirations" in Jerusalem, which Netanyahu has insisted is exclusively Israeli.
Netanyahu’s main competitor for right-wing votes, Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home Party, seized on publication of the document to declare that Netanyahu had now revealed his true face. "The masked ball is over," he said.