The map of the solution of two states that promised to resolve the Middle East crisis

“In the next 50 years, you will not find an Israeli leader who proposes what I propose now.

“Firm! Firm and let’s change the story!”

It was 2008. The prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, was imploring the Palestinian leader to accept an agreement that believed that he could have brought peace to the Middle East.

It was a solution of two states, a perspective that seems impossible today.

If implemented, a Palestinian State would have created in more than 94% of the occupied West Bank.

The map that Olmert had elaborated now has an almost mythical state. Several interpretations have appeared over the years, but has never revealed it to the media.

Until now.

In Israel and the Palestinians: The road to October 7The last series of the Documentarista Norma Percy available in Iplayer as of Monday, Olmert reveals the map that says he showed Mahmoud Abbas in a meeting in Jerusalem on September 16, 2008.

“This is the first time I expose this map to the media,” he tells the filmmakers.

Sample, in detail, the territory that Olmert proposed to attach Israel, 4.9% of the West Bank.

That would have included the main blocks of Jewish settlements, as well as the previous proposals that date back to the end of the 1990s.

In return, the prime minister said that Israel would renounce the same amount of Israeli territory, along the edges of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The two Palestinian territories would connect through a tunnel or road, again, something that had been discussed before.

In the movie, Olmert remembers the response of the Palestinian leader.

“He said: ‘Prime Minister, this is very serious. It’s very, very, very serious.'”

Crucially, Olmert’s plan included a proposed solution to the thorny theme of Jerusalem.

Each side could claim parts of the city as its capital, while the administration of the “sacred basin”, including the old city, with its religious sites and adjacent areas, would be delivered to a trust committee consisting of Israel. , Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United States.

The implications of the map, for Jewish settlements, would have been colossal.

If the plan had been implemented, dozens of communities, scattered in the West Bank and Jordan Valley, would have been evacuated.

When the previous Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, forcibly eliminated a few thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, was considered a national trauma by those of the Israeli right.

Evacuating the majority of the West Bank would have represented an infinitely greater challenge, which involves tens of thousands of settlers, with the very real danger of violence.

But the test never arrived.

At the end of his meeting, Olmert refused to deliver a copy of the mahmoud abbas unless the Palestinian leader firm him.

Abbas refused, saying that he needed to show his experts to the map, to make sure they understood exactly what he was offering.

Olmert says that the two agreed to a maps expert meeting the next day.

“We separate, you know, as if we were about to embark on a historic step forward,” says Olmert.

The meeting never happened. While they moved away from Jerusalem that night, the chief of cabinet of President Abbas, Rafiq Husseini, recalls the atmosphere in the car.

“Of course, we laugh,” he says in the movie.

The Palestinians believed that the plan was dead in the water. Olmert, wrapped in an unrelated corruption scandal, had already announced that he planned to resign.

“It is unfortunate that Olmert, regardless of how pleasant it was … It was a lame duck,” says Husseini, “and therefore, we will not go anywhere with this.”

The situation in Gaza also complicated matters. After months of rocket attacks from the Hamas -controlled territory, Olmert ordered a great Israeli assault, Operation Cast Lead, at the end of December, causing three weeks of intense struggles.

But Olmert tells me that it would have been “very intelligent” to sign the deal. Then, if a future Israeli prime minister tried to cancel him, “he could have told the world that the failure was Israel’s fault.”

The Israeli elections followed in February. Benjamin Netanyahu de Likud, an vocal opponent of Palestinian stateity, became primer.

Olmert’s plan and map vanished from sight.

The former prime minister says he is still waiting for Abbas’ response, but since then his plan has joined a long list of lost opportunities to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 1973, the former Israeli diplomat, Abba Eban, joked that the Palestinians “never miss the opportunity to lose a chance.” It is a phrase that Israeli officials have frequently repeated in later years.

But the world is more complicated than that, especially because the two parties signed the historical agreements of Oslo in 1993.

The peace process introduced a handshake in the White House grass between former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had moments of genuine hope, scored by the tragedy. Ultimately, it resulted in a failure.

The reasons are complex and there is a lot of guilt, but in truth, the stars never aligned properly.

I witnessed this non -alignment first hand 24 years ago.

In January 2001, in the Egyptian Taba complex, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators once again saw the contours of an agreement.

A member of the Palestinian delegation drew a difficult map on a napkin and told me that, for the first time, they were looking at the rough contours of a viable Palestinian state.

But the conversations were irrelevant, drowned by violence in the streets of Bank and Gaza, where the second Palestinian, or “intifada”, had exploded in the previous September.

Once again, Israel was in the midst of a political transition. Prime Minister Ehud Barak had already resigned. Ariel Sharon comfortably defeated him a few weeks later.

The map on the napkin, like Olmert’s map eight years later, showed what could have been.