In first, Olmert reveals map of his offer to Abbas for two-state solution

Former prime minister Ehud Olmert for the first time reveals the map of his 2008 offer to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for a two-state solution that would have given the Palestinians 95.1% of the West Bank and Gaza, with one-for-one land swaps in Israel.

Details of the offer have long been known, but largely from a hand drawn version of the map that Abbas recreated after the meeting.

“This is the first time that I expose this map to the media,” Olmert says in the documentary, “Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October,” which airs on the BBC today.

“In the next 50 years, you will not find one Israeli leader that will propose to you what I propose to you now,” Olmert recalls telling Abbas. “Sign it! Sign it and let’s change history!”

Olmert presented Abbas with a large formal map in September 2008 showing his territorial compromise proposal for the contours of a Palestinian state as part of a permanent peace accord, and demanded that Abbas initial the proposal before taking it back to Ramallah for consideration by the Palestinians. Abbas refused to do so.

The map shows that Olmert was willing, more or less, to return to the pre-1967 lines, though maintaining the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem, the settlement city of Ma’ale Adumim to the east, and a slice of territory that would encompass the large settlement of Ariel in Samaria. In exchange for expanding Israeli sovereignty to those areas, Israel would have given up some of its own land to the new Palestinian state.

He also endorsed a tunnel route to link Gaza and the West Bank.

Olmert was also prepared to divide Jerusalem into Israeli- and Palestinian-controlled neighborhoods, and to relinquish Israeli sovereignty at the Temple Mount and the entire Old City. He has said that he proposed that the “Holy Basin” be overseen instead by a five-member, non-sovereign, international trusteeship, made up of Israel, the PA, Jordan, the US, and Saudi Arabia.

In the documentary, Abbas’s then-chief of staff, Rafiq Husseini, says the Palestinians did not take the offer seriously because Olmert was embroiled in a corruption scandal and would soon resign.

“It is unfortunate that Olmert, regardless of how nice he was… was a lame duck,” Husseini says, “and therefore, we will go nowhere with this.”