JERUSALEM—Nothing demonstrates the gap between secret and public diplomacy as well as Monday’s response to news that Palestinian negotiators have been discussing major concessions during their Mideast peace talks for the last four years.

Palestinian leaders issued outraged statements about being misquoted and even alleged outright fraud, which only raised the anger of most of their constituents. The collection of 1,600 secret memos leaked to Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s largest and most influential TV station, painstakingly outlined that negotiators had been willing to trade parts of Jerusalem, forsake an army or air force, cooperated with Israel’s security forces in combating their own extremists and were even willing to abandon the longstanding blanket claim of Palestinian refugees’ right to return to what is now Israel.

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