Robert wrote:
Further, these quotes are representative of a much wider Palestinian literature that is widely available both in the original Arabic and English translation. Finally, these quotes are well verified, and most significantly, the Palestinians themselves do not deny them. In fact, they are proud of them. The only problem is that some people are uncomfortable with these views, and thus keep trying to hide them. That is not worthy of an encyclopedia project.
My problem is that I do not believe selecting some quotes is the proper job of Wikipedia: going to the texts of speeches, interpreting them, and selecting a few quotes from millions of documents is original research. We should be summarizing existing research. If you want to suggest that Palestinians are insincere about the peace process, you should find a historian or respected commentator who has made that argument, and cite him, perhaps also citing the quotes he cited as "so-and-so cites an Arafat speech of 1988 to support his case, as follows: '...'", and so on.
And, while I generally lean towards the Israeli point of view, I do find this text rather biased. It's a primary-research selection of quotes attempting to build an editorial case that the Palestinians are insincere about the peace process. That has no place in an encyclopedia (and, indeed, does not appear in any other mainstream encyclopedia).
-Mark