Reuters late Wednesday conveyed reports that the Palestinian delegation charged with negotiating opposite Israel had resigned and cited for its resignation Israeli construction within communities beyond the Jewish state’s 1948 armistice lines.

The move comes despite the cancellation of previously announced massive building plans by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Alan Baker, the director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, noted that that until a few years ago, Palestinian negotiators had for decades conducted talks while Israel bolstered such communities:

The Palestinians have thus agreed and undertaken to negotiate this issue with Israel, and they cannot now unilaterally remove it from the negotiating table and turn it into a separate and independent precondition for further negotiation. In so doing they are undermining the agreements, and in trying to recruit the support of the international community, they are bypassing their commitment to negotiate the issue with Israel.

As such they are deliberately misleading and manipulating the international community.

For their part the Israelis have recently released two batches of Palestinian prisoners convicted of murder as goodwill gestures designed to jump-start and maintain negotiations. The most recent was done despite a wave of Palestinian incitement and in the absence of reciprocal Palestinian gestures, and was particularly politically controversial.

The Israel Project yesterday hosted a conference call with Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in which he described systemic problems – with endemic Palestinian Authority (PA) corruption being among the most trenchant – that have undercut efforts to create robust and sustainable institutions in the West Bank.

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