A former member of the PLO’s Negotiations Support Unit, Ziyat Clot, has confirmed that he was the source of January’s “Palestine Papers” leak of peace process documents. This revelation represents a kind of coda to George Mitchell’s resignation on Friday as US Mideast envoy, another sign of the demise of the peace process.

In an article published in The Guardian, Clot says he felt compelled to leak these documents because the peace process itself became harmful:

The “peace negotiations” were a deceptive farce whereby biased terms were unilaterally imposed by Israel and systematically endorsed by the US and EU. Far from enabling a negotiated and fair end to the conflict, the pursuit of the Oslo process deepened Israeli segregationist policies and justified the tightening of the security control imposed on the Palestinian population, as well as its geographical fragmentation. Far from preserving the land on which to build a state, it has tolerated the intensification of the colonisation of the Palestinian territory. Far from maintaining a national cohesion, the process I participated in, albeit briefly, was instrumental in creating and aggravating divisions among Palestinians. In its most recent developments, it became a cruel enterprise from which the Palestinians of Gaza have suffered the most. Last but not least, these negotiations excluded for the most part the great majority of the Palestinian people: the seven million Palestinian refugees. My experience over those 11 months in Ramallah confirmed that the PLO, given its structure, was not in a position to represent all Palestinian rights and interests.

Tragically, the Palestinians were left uninformed of the fate of their individual and collective rights in the negotiations, and their divided political leaderships were not held accountable for their decisions or inaction. After I resigned, I believed I had a duty to inform the public.

Shortly after the Gaza war I started to write about my experience in Ramallah. In my 2010 book, Il n’y aura pas d’Etat Palestinien (There will be no Palestinian State), I concluded: “The peace process is a spectacle, a farce, played to the detriment of Palestinian reconciliation, at the cost of the bloodshed in Gaza.” In full conscience, and acting independently, I later agreed to share some information with al-Jazeera specifically with regard to the fate of Palestinian refugee rights in the 2008 talks. Other sources did the same, although I am unaware of their identity. Taking these tragic developments of the “peace process” to a wider Arab and western audience was justified because it was in the public interest of the Palestinian people. I had – and still have – no doubt that I had a moral, legal and political obligation to proceed accordingly.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg interviews Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and poses to her the dubious notion that Arab Spring proves Arabs don’t care about Israel and Palestine. Interestingly, Clinton pushes back (emphasis mine):

JG: Come to the Middle East peace process for one second. The Israelis and a lot of their supporters in America will say, “See, the Arab revolt proves that the people were not upset about Palestinians; they’re upset about a lack of accountability in our governments, etc., economic opportunity –”

HRC: They’re upset about both.

JG: How related to the Arab Spring is the Middle East peace process? And how could it affect it in adverse or positive ways?

HRC: Well, I think a lot of it is sequencing, Jeff. Right now, people in Egypt, for example, are very focused on their own future. That doesn’t mean that the Arab-Israeli conflict doesn’t come up, because it came up when I was there, but it didn’t come up as the only subject people wanted to talk to me about, which was sometimes the case in the past. It came up as, “Okay, for now we’re going to honor the Camp David accords, but you know we’re going to have to take a look at this when we get a new government and we get more stable, we figure out what our relationship really is. We’re not going to be an automatic supporter of the peace process. But right now, we’ve got to get our economy going, we’ve got to get our political transition done.”

So it’s not like it’s off the table. It’s just stuck in a corner until other matters get tended to. But if you talk to King Abdullah of Jordan, it is still very much on the mind of Jordanians, because they live with it every single day.

Also intriguing is that Clinton seems to have internalized the argument that the Israelis don’t actually want Bashar Al-Assad’s regime in Syria to fall.

JG: So lack of progress could have an adverse effect on –

HRC: This is nothing that I haven’t said many times and told my Israeli friends, because I love Israel and I feel so strongly about the future. Right now, you have a secular leadership in the West Bank that has made economic progress and has made security progress. You have an uncertain environment that Israel is now having to cope with, and I do not in any way discount how difficult that is. That has happened in Egypt [for one], and you’ve seen Israeli commentators saying they’re not so sure that change in Syria is in Israel’s interest.