A Geneva records office has begun stamping version numbers on ceasefire proposals so negotiators stop rediscovering them.
Records staff in Geneva say the current US roadmap for Gaza is the twenty-sixth version of one long-circulating document. Fresh drafts are now watermarked with version numbers, and each round of talks opens with a recap of the previous twenty-five. A twenty-seventh draft has been commissioned with the delivery date left blank.
The cabinet in the sub-basement of a Geneva annexe is fireproof, alphabetised and rarely troubled. On Tuesday an archivist opened the third drawer down and found the whole thing already written.
Staff at the Office of Diplomatic Continuity now say the current American roadmap for Gaza is the twenty-sixth version of a single document that has been circulating, under various names, for decades. The wording changes. The furniture does not.
The finding lands mid-crisis. Jared Kushner has been shuttling round the region to meet Hamas officials and the Israeli prime minister, after Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rejected the US-backed plan and its fifteen points.
"We are not judging the contents," said Marguerite Ellsworth-Payne, the office's deputy registrar. "We simply noticed that clause nine has now been agreed to in principle by four separate generations of men in identical suits."
Her team has begun watermarking every fresh proposal with a version number in the top corner. Drafts arriving without one are returned unread.
A recap for late arrivals
Under the new system, each round of talks opens with a short spoken summary of what happened in the previous twenty-five. Delegates are asked to remain seated during it.
"Nobody enjoys the recap. But people were walking in and proposing the corridor again as though it were new."
Not everyone is grateful. Hendrik Vos, a mediation consultant who has worked on three of the earlier versions, called the numbering "unhelpful and faintly insulting to the profession".
"Every draft is different," he said. "Version fourteen had a monitoring committee. Version nineteen had a monitoring committee with a chairman. You cannot flatten that."
Ellsworth-Payne disagrees. She points to the annexes, which she says are photocopies of photocopies, some still bearing the folded corners of the Norwegian original. Oslo, 1993, is drawer two.
The office has also recovered a set of maps drawn in 2000 and never used, a phased withdrawal timetable with the dates left blank, and a press statement announcing a breakthrough that was apparently written before the breakthrough.
What the archive cannot supply is the ending. Every version stops in the same place, at the point where implementation begins, as though the author lost interest or the funding.
Version twenty-seven has already been commissioned. Nobody has been told who is writing it, and the delivery date on the file is a blank line waiting for a pen.
Ellsworth-Payne says she will stamp it anyway. "It is a filing question," she said. "The politics is somebody else's floor."
