CRITICS of the publication of the Palestine papers by the Guardian and al-Jazeera are aiming their fire in several directions. They have variously claimed that the documents are fake; that they are partial; that they reveal nothing new; that they should never have been published; and that they help Hamas, damage the peace process and threaten to destroy the two-state solution.

Let’s start with the silliest first: the claim of forgery, casting these papers as the Hitler Diaries of the Middle East. That was swept aside on Tuesday by Nabil Shaath, a former member of the Palestinian negotiation team who, along with several close to the talks, vouched for the documents’ authenticity. Are they partial? Only in the sense that 1,600 pages out of tens of thousands could always be described as incomplete.

Some have complained that the documents only provide the view from the Palestinian side of the negotiating table. But they purport to do nothing else. To suggest that makes them unsuitable for publication is to suggest the New York Times should never have published the Pentagon Papers without an equivalent stash of paperwork from the North Vietnamese defence ministry.

But clearly, say the critics, these were leaked by someone with an agenda. I don’t know the identity of the source, but I’d be pretty surprised if they didn’t have a purpose for their actions.

That is true of every leak through recorded time. Should the Daily Telegraph not have published Liam Fox’s letter protesting over defence cuts last autumn because the leaker of that letter clearly had a political objective?

Of course not. Observe that standard and we’d never know anything. Besides, readers can usually put two and two together.

Still, say some complainers, these papers don’t reveal anything we didn’t know. Indeed, they are “incredibly boring”, according to Noah Pollak of Commentary magazine — so boring that they warrant six separate pieces on the magazine’s website.

Joining the “nothing new” chorus is Benny Morris, eager to pour cold water on the revelation that the Palestinians were ready to concede areas of East Jerusalem settled by Jews. Didn’t the Guardian remember that those very areas were conceded back in 2000 as part of the “Clinton parameters” that followed the Camp David negotiations?

But it’s Morris who’s suffering memory loss here. Surely he recalls the claim, repeated endlessly, that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians had rejected those 2000 terms. He should remember: Morris was one of the lead disseminators of that message. If Palestinians now accept what they once rejected, that’s news.

What of the graver charge that the Guardian had no business publishing papers whose exposure could discredit the Palestinian leadership and thereby damage, even destroy, the peace process? This is not a question confined to the wilder shores of the rightwing blogosphere. In a round of media interviews on Monday, I was asked by one mainstream journalist: “How does the Guardian feel about putting a gun to the head of the two-state solution?”

This touches on the argument rehearsed so fiercely during the WikiLeaks furore. It is that once an organisation has been handed information like this, it either publishes it or it suppresses it. Those are the options. Which is why no news organisation worthy of the name would hesitate to release a trove of documents of this kind.

Only in the rarest exceptions — where there is a direct risk to a named individual’s life — should journalists withhold such information. (Indeed, to protect certain individuals some documents have been redacted by both the Guardian and al-Jazeera.)

— The Guardian, London