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What Prime Minister Olmert Offered Mahmoud Abbas
(The Australian) Greg Sheridan - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's term in office is best remembered for the extensive negotiations and final peace offer that he made to Mahmoud Abbas. Olmert is right to paint this offer as embodying the most extensive concessions, and the best deal, ever offered to the Palestinians by an Israeli leader. If the Palestinian leadership cannot accept that offer, can they accept any realistic offer? Do they have the machinery to run a state? Is their society too dysfunctional and filled with anti-Semitic propaganda to live in peace next to the Jewish state? Olmert explained his position to me in unprecedented detail. "From the end of 2006 until the end of 2008 I think I met with Abu Mazen (Abbas) more often than any Israeli leader has ever met any Arab leader. I met him more than 35 times. They were intense, serious negotiations." "On the 16th of September, 2008, I presented him with a comprehensive plan. It was based on the following principles. One, there would be a territorial solution to the conflict on the basis of the 1967 borders with minor modifications on both sides. Israel will claim part of the West Bank where there have been demographic changes over the last 40 years." Olmert says this would have involved Israel claiming about 6.4% of the West Bank: "Israel would claim all the Jewish areas of Jerusalem. All the lands that before 1967 were buffer zones between the two populations would have been split in half. In return there would be a swap of land (to the Palestinians) from Israel as it existed before 1967." "I showed Abu Mazen how this would work to maintain the contiguity of the Palestinian state. I also proposed a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza. It would have been a tunnel fully controlled by the Palestinians but not under Palestinian sovereignty, otherwise it would have cut the State of Israel in two." "No. 2 was the issue of Jerusalem....While I firmly believed that historically, and emotionally, Jerusalem was always the capital of the Jewish people, I was ready that the city should be shared. Jewish neighborhoods would be under Jewish sovereignty, Arab neighborhoods would be under Palestinian sovereignty, so it could be the capital of a Palestinian state. Then there was the question of the holy basin within Jerusalem, the sites that are holy to Jews and Muslims, but not only to them, to Christians as well. I would never agree to an exclusive Muslim sovereignty over areas that are religiously important to Jews and Christians. So there would be an area of no sovereignty, which would be jointly administered by five nations, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the United States." "Third was the issue of Palestinian refugees....I think Abu Mazen understood there was no chance Israel would become the homeland of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian state was to be the homeland of the Palestinian people. So the question was how the claimed attachment of the Palestinian refugees to their original places could be recognized without bringing them in. I told him I would never agree to a right of return. Instead, we would agree on a humanitarian basis to accept a certain number every year for five years, on the basis that this would be the end of conflict and the end of claims. I said to him 1,000 per year. I think the Americans were entirely with me. In addition, we talked about creating an international fund that would compensate Palestinians for their suffering. I was the first Israeli prime minister to speak of Palestinian suffering and to say that we are not indifferent to that suffering." "And four, there were security issues." Olmert says he showed Abbas a map which embodied all these plans. "I said 'this is the offer. Sign it and we can immediately get support from America, from Europe, from all over the world.' I told him he'd never get anything like this again from an Israeli leader for 50 years."