Ramallah is extremely angry with Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog. “He sold distorted information to the Israeli public only to save his skin and political future in the party,” a Palestinian official in the Muqata told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity.

On June 19, Israeli TV Channel 10 reported that close to the March 2015 elections, Herzog and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reached a secret “paper of understandings” to the effect that if Herzog were elected prime minister, he would turn over all of Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

The report stated that in the setting of the negotiations conducted between Herzog’s envoy, former Labor Minister Ephraim Sneh, and a senior Palestinian official acting on behalf of Abbas, Herzog agreed that on the issue of Jerusalem — by far the biggest stumbling block in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — Israel would withdraw from all the Arab neighborhoods in the city, and East Jerusalem would become the Palestinian state’s capital. The Western Wall area, however, would remain under Israeli sovereignty. In addition, Herzog reportedly agreed to the return of refugees to the Palestinian state, to provide monetary reparations to the refugees and to withdraw from the Jordan Valley, except for a token Israeli presence.

After the broadcast, Herzog’s office confirmed the details and provided an explanation for why a candidate for the premiership had conducted secret talks with the Palestinians and even agreed to far-reaching concessions without informing his constituents. “I made efforts whose objective was to reach understandings that would pre-empt the wave of terror whose outburst I predicted,” Herzog responded.