Diplomatic correspondent
“In the next 50 years, you will not find one Israeli leader who will now suggest what I now suggest.
“Sign it! Sign it and change history!”
It was 2008. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert begged the Palestinian leader to accept an agreement he believed he could bring peace to the Middle East.
It was a solution with two countries – the potential that seems impossible today.
If implemented, it would create a Palestinian state to more than 94% of the occupied west coast.
The Olmert Map is assembled now almost mythical status. Various interpretations have emerged over the years, but he has never revealed it to the media.
So far.
IN Israel and Palestinians: The way to October 7The latest series from the documentary movie filmmaker Norma Percy available on Iplayer from Monday, Olmert reveals a map that he says he showed Mahmoud Abbas at a meeting in Jerusalem on September 16, 2008.
“This is the first time I have been exposing this ticket to the media,” he says to the filmmakers.
It shows in detail the territory that Olmert has proposed to the attachment to Israel – 4.9% of the West Coast.
This would include the main Jewish settlements – just like the previous proposals dating from the late 1990s.
In return, the Prime Minister said that Israel would give up the same amounts of Israeli territory, along the edges of the west coast and Gaza’s belt.
Two Palestinian territories would be connected through a tunnel or highway – again, something that was discussed before.
In the movie, Olmert remembers the answer of the Palestinian leader.
“He said,” The prime minister, this is very serious. It’s very, very, very serious. “
What is crucial, Olmert’s plan included a proposed solution for the thorny issue of Jerusalem.
Each side could ask for parts of the city as its capital, while the administration of the “Holy Pool” – including the Old Town, with its religious places and neighboring areas – to surrender to the Custodian Committee consisting of Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the US .
The implications of the map, to the Jewish settlements, would be colossal.
If the plan was implemented, dozens of communities, scattered all over the West Coast and Jordan Valley, would have been evacuated.
When the previous Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, forcibly removed several thousand Jewish settlers from Gaza’s belt in 2005, they considered it a national trauma with the Israeli right.
Evacuating the majority of the West Coast would be an infinitely greater challenge, which included tens of thousands of immigrants, with a very real danger of violence.
But the test never came.
At the end of his meeting, Olmert refused to hand over a copy of Mahmoud Abbas, unless the Palestinian leader signed him.
Abbas refused, saying that he had to show his experts a ticket to make sure they knew exactly what was being offered.
Olmert says the two of them agreed to a meeting of a ticket expert the next day.
“We stayed, you know, as if we were going to move a historic step forward,” Olmert says.
The meeting never happened. As they drove from Jerusalem that night, the head of the President Abbas, Rafiq Husseini, remembers the atmosphere in the car.
“Of course, we laughed,” he says in the movie.
The Palestinians believed that the plan was dead in the water. Olmert, embedded in a disabled corruption scandal, has already announced that he plans to resign.
“It is inconvenient that Olmert, no matter how beautiful he was … was a poor duck,” says Husseini, “and that is why we won’t go anywhere.”
The situation in Gaza also complicated things. After several months of rocket attacks from Hamas -controlled territory, Olmert ordered a great Israeli attack, operating actors at the end of December, launching three weeks of intense struggle.
But Olmert tells me that Abbas would be “very smart” to sign an agreement. Then, if the future Israeli Prime Minister tried to cancel him, “he could say to the world that the failure was to blame Israel.”
The Israeli elections followed in February. Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a vocal opponent of Palestinian statehood, became a prime minister.
Olmert’s plan and ticket, faded from view.
The former prime minister says that Abbas’ response is still waiting for, but his plan has since joined the long list of missed opportunities to end Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In 1973, former Israeli diplomat, Abba Eban, gave up that Palestinians “never miss the opportunity to miss the opportunity.” It is a phrase that Israeli officials often repeat in years since then.
But the world is more complex than that, especially since the two sides have signed historical agreements on Oslo in 1993.
The peace process that initiated handling on the White House lawn between the former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had moments of true hope, which was emphasized by tragedy. Ultimately, it resulted in failure.
The reasons are complex and it is a lot of blame to visit, but truly, the stars have never been properly aligned.
I testified to that dislining in the first hand 24 years ago.
In January 2001, in the Egyptian resort of Tabe, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, they once again saw the outlines of the agreement.
A member of the Palestinian delegation attracted a rough map on the napkin and told me that they first watched the rough outlines of the sustainable Palestinian state.
But the conversations were irrelevant, suffocated by the violence raging on the streets of the West Coast and Gaza, where the second Palestinian uprising, or “intifada” broke out in the previous September.
Once again, Israel was in the midst of a political transition. Prime Minister Ehud Barak has already resigned. Ariel Sharon defeated him a few weeks later.
Map on the napkin, just like Olmer’s ticket eight years later, showed what it might be.
