Nigeria Content Online

It’s easy to affect
cynicism about revelations in the various leaks currently flooding
local and international media. We tell ourselves that there is nothing
being exposed that we didn’t really know already. Or we caution
ourselves this is only one diplomat’s view, not his or her government’s
official policy. And anyway, the documents are not authentic; they are
made up, or doctored.

In countries where
the population is used to being lied to by their rulers, the news that
our own late President Umaru Yar’Adua connived at deceiving the
Nigerian people about the state of his health – albeit with the alleged
good (but ultimately mistaken) intention of “avoiding unrest” – is not
really news. After all, compared to the monumental deceptions of the
Abacha era, when our own government was planting bombs and killing its
own soldiers in order to blame the National Democratic Coalition and
justify a crackdown on dissent, the Yar’Adua deception is relatively
small beer. Worse, its chief victim was Yar’Adua himself. That he was
ill could hardly be denied for ever, but one cannot help feeling deeply
sorry that he waited too long, dismissing the pleas of genuinely
well-meaning Nigerians that he should forget about the presidency and
go and take care of his failing health, until it was too late for him
to make any autonomous decision.

And if WikiLeaks
tells us that Governor Bukola Saraki of Kwara State was running the
Governors’ Forum show and strengthening (as he thought) his own
position for a run at the presidency, well, we kind of knew that too.

So when the
international Doha-based news channel, Al Jazeera, and the British
Guardian newspaper began leaking ‘The Palestine Papers’ on the ‘peace
talks’ between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, one might be
tempted to brush them off in the same way: faked, doctored or one-sided
etc.

Yet the side that
the leaks show exposes three major points about the issue at the heart
of the malaise in the Middle East: first, the extent to which the
Palestinian Authority was prepared to compromise on absolutely
everything – including Jerusalem, the right of the Palestinian people
to return to their ancestral homeland, and the right to its own armed
forces (for anything except ‘internal security’) – in its desperate
anxiety to declare success and establish a Palestinian State.

Second, the
stone-faced rejection of those concessions by Israel, raising hard
questions about whom exactly is the missing “partner for peace”. And
third, confirmation that those whom the Palestinian Authority considers
to be its real enemies are not in Israel, but a range of internal
rivals, starting with Hamas and running the whole gamut of discontented
citizens and even ostensible allies, such as the 2005 commander of the
al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Hassan al-Malhoun. Although al-Mahoun was
eventually assassinated by Israel, lead Palestinian negotiator Saeb
Erekat’s admission (and complaint) to Israel that: “We have even killed
our own people to maintain order and the rule of law” shows how much
the Palestinian Authority’s focus had changed.

While the
spluttering and unconvincing denials of this level of complicity are
hardly surprising, the Authority’s 2009 report that its crackdown on
Hamas in the West Bank had resulted in 3,700 arrests appears to be
matched by facts on the ground.

Indeed, it is easy
to be cynical, and tell oneself that this is what must be expected,
that this is realpolitik, politics as the art of the possible rather
than politics as the dream of pie in the sky.

Yet against a
background of instant denials by the Palestinian Authority, one can’t
help wondering not only – if peace cannot be achieved on these terms,
on what terms can it be achieved – but what does this mean for those
caught in the middle, squeezed between uncompromising extremists on
both sides?

The Palestinian
Authority is desperately resiling from some of the concessions offered
in the face of the furious rejection expressed by its own people, but
does it seriously hope for better terms? If it does, what happens while
it waits for these to materialise? What hope for the beleaguered
inhabitants of Gaza, still under Israeli siege? What hope for the
thousands of Palestinians detained in Israeli jails, most languishing
without trial sustained only by the hope that perhaps they might be
released as arbitrarily as they were detained? What hope for ordinary
Palestinian men, women and children living out a rigidly constrained
existence under the daily humiliations of Israel’s overarching control?

Although most
attention is on Palestine, with little pressure on Israeli leaders to
explain just how much more blood they hope to wring from Palestinian
stone, one must also wonder what hope for ordinary Israelis such as
those who fled repressive regimes in the former Soviet Union with
dreams of freedom, or the racist segregation of apartheid South Africa.
It may be easier for Israeli citizens to push the effects of
occupation, intransigence and the absence of peace to the back of their
minds. But they are still there.

And however cynical
I might tell myself I am about the ‘Pali-Leaks’, in reality I can’t
help thinking that the deep depression about Palestine that settles
down on me as the revelations, reactions and retractions keep on
coming, must be magnified a thousand times in the actual arena of the
stalemate.