The bilateral decision card that promised to resolve the crisis in the Middle East

“In the next 50 years you will not find an Israeli leader to offer you what I offer you now.

“Sign it! Sign it and let’s change the story!”

It was 2008. Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is pressing the Palestinian leader to accept a deal he believes can bring peace to the Middle East.

It was a decision with two countries – a perspective that seems impossible today.

If applied, it would create a Palestinian state for more than 94% of the occupied west coast.

The card that Olmert has made now has almost mythical status. Different interpretations have emerged over the years, but he has never revealed it to the media.

So far.

In Israel and the Palestinians: the road to October 7The latest series of Documentary Documentary Documentary Perseer, available on Iplayer on Monday, Olmert reveals the map that he says he showed Mahmoud Abbas at a meeting in Jerusalem on September 16, 2008.

“This is the first time I expose this map of the media,” he tells the makers of the movie.

This shows in detail the territory that Olmert offered to annex to Israel – 4.9% of the west coast.

This would include large blocks of a Jewish settlement – just like the previous offers dating from the late 1990s.

In return, the prime minister said Israel would abandon an equal part of Israeli territory, the edges of the west coast and the Gaza Strip.

The two Palestinian territories would be connected via a tunnel or highway – again something that had been discussed before.

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

“He said,” The prime minister, it’s very serious. Very, very, very seriously. “

The most important thing is that Olmert’s plan included a proposed decision by the thorny issue of Jerusalem.

Each country will be able to claim parts of the city as its capital, while the Administration of the Holy Pool – including the Old Town, with its religious sites and neighboring areas – will be handed over to a committee of guardians consisting of Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United States.

The consequences of the map, for the Jewish settlements, would be colossal.

If the plan had been implemented, dozens of communities scattered across the west coast and Jordan Valley would be evacuated.

When previous Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon forcibly removed several thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, he was considered a national trauma by those of Israeli law.

The evacuation of the bigger part of the west coast would be an infinitely larger challenge, including tens of thousands of settlers, with the 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’s map, unless the Palestinian leader signed it.

Abbas refused, saying that he should show his experts the card to make sure they understand what is being offered.

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

“We split, do you know we are about to start a historical step forward,” Olmert says.

The meeting has never happened. As they moved away from Jerusalem that evening, President Abbas Staff Rafik Husseini’s headquarters 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, woven into unrelated corruption scandal, had already announced that he was planning to resign.

“It’s a pity that Olmert, no matter how nice he was … He was a lame duck,” Husseini says, “and that’s why we won’t go anywhere with that.”

The Gaza situation also complicates the questions. After months of missile attacks from Hamas -controlled territory, Olmert ordered a large Israeli attack, Operation Operation at the end of December, triggering three weeks of intense battles.

But Olmert tells me that it would be “very smart” for Abbas to sign the deal. Then, if the future Israeli prime minister tried to cancel him, “he could tell the world that failure was Israel’s fault.”

The Israeli elections followed in February. Benjamin Netanyahu, a vowel opponent of Palestinian statehood, became Prime Minister.

The Olmert and the map plan faded from the view.

The former Prime Minister says he is still waiting for Abbas’s answer, but since then his plan has joined a long list of missed opportunities to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 1973, former Israeli diplomat Aba Eban replied that the Palestinians “never miss the opportunity to miss the opportunity.” This is a phrase that Israeli officials have often been repeated over the years since.

But the world is more complicated than this, especially since the two sides signed the historical agreements in Oslo in 1993.

The peace process, introduced by the handshake of the White House grass between the former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, had times of real hope, redirected by tragedy. In the end, this led to failure.

The reasons are complicated and there are many guilt to go around, but in reality the stars have never been properly aligned.

I witnessed this discrepancy first -hand 24 years ago.

In January 2001, in the Egyptian resort of Taba, the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators again saw the outline of the deal.

A member of the Palestinian delegation attracted a rough map of a napkin and told me that for the first time they looked at the rough outlines of a viable Palestinian state.

But the conversations were irrelevant, drowned by the violence that raged on the streets of the West Coast and Gaza, where the Second Palestinian Uprising or Intifada broke out the previous September.

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

The napkin card, just like the Olmert card eight years later, showed what it could be.