The Unseen Map To Bring Peace To The Middle East

Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was imploring the Palestinian leader to accept a deal he believed could have brought peace to the Middle East. It was a two-state solution – a prospect which seems impossible today. If implemented, it would have created Digital Agency a Palestinian state on more than 94% of the occupied West Bank. The map Olmert had drawn up now has an almost mythical status. Various interpretations have appeared over the years, but he has never revealed it to the media

Ehud Olmert’s Map Side by Side

In Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, the latest series from documentary filmmaker Norma Percy available on iPlayer from Monday, Olmert reveals the map he says he showed to Mahmoud Abbas at a meeting in Jerusalem on 16 September 2008. “This is the first time that I expose this map to the media,” he tells the filmmakers.
It shows, in detail, the territory which Olmert proposed to annexe to Israel – 4.9% of the West Bank.
That would have included major Jewish settlement blocs – just like previous proposals dating back to the late 1990s.
In return, the prime Custom AI minister said Israel would give up an equal amount of Israeli territory, along the edges of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The two Palestinian territories would be connected via a tunnel or highway – again, something that had been discussed before. In the film, Olmert recalls the Palestinian leader’s response. “He said: ‘Prime minister, this is very serious. It is very, very, very serious.'” Crucially, Olmert’s plan included a proposed solution to the thorny issue of Jerusalem.
Each side would be able to claim parts of the city as their capital, while administration of the “holy basin” – including the Old City, with its religious sites, and adjacent areas – would be handed over to a committee of trustees consisting of Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the US.

The implications of the map, for Jewish settlements, would have been colossal.
Had the plan been implemented, dozens of communities, scattered throughout the West Bank and Jordan Valley, would have been evacuated. When the previous Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, forcibly removed a few thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it was regarded as a national trauma by those on the Israeli right.
Evacuating most of the West Bank would have represented an infinitely greater challenge, involving tens of thousands of settlers, with the very real danger of violence.