The Olmert Offer (2008)

The Olmert offer is the peace proposal Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert put to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas at the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem on 16 September 2008: a sovereign Palestinian state on 93.5 to 94 percent of the West Bank, plus a land swap of roughly 5.8 percent from Israel proper, plus a corridor linking the West Bank to Gaza, giving the Palestinians the territorial equivalent of the entire West Bank; a capital in the Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem; no Israeli sovereignty over the Old City, the Temple Mount or the Mount of Olives, which would pass to an international trusteeship of five states; and the admission into Israel of thousands of Palestinian refugees. It went further than the Clinton Parameters eight years earlier, further than any Israeli government has gone before or since. Abbas asked to take the map home to study. Olmert refused to hand it over unless he signed, so Abbas traced it onto a napkin and left. He never came back with an answer, and he has never disputed that he did not.

What Olmert actually put on the table

The offer was the end point of thirty-six one-on-one meetings between the two men across nearly two years, running in parallel to the negotiating teams set up after the Annapolis Conference of November 2007. The terms, as Olmert has described them consistently since and as Abbas has never contested:

Territory. A Palestinian state on 93.5 to 94 percent of the West Bank, with Israel transferring 5.8 percent of its own sovereign territory in exchange for the settlement blocs it kept, and a tunnel or elevated road connecting the West Bank to the Gaza Strip under Palestinian control. Olmert’s own summary of the arithmetic: the Palestinians would receive “the equivalent of 100 percent” of the territory occupied in 1967.
Jerusalem. The city divided on the Clinton principle, Arab neighbourhoods to Palestine and Jewish neighbourhoods to Israel, with the Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem.
The holy sites. This is the clause no Israeli leader had ever offered. The Holy Basin, meaning the Old City, the Temple Mount, the City of David and the Mount of Olives, would fall under no national sovereignty at all, administered instead by a committee of five states: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian state, Israel and the United States. Israel would give up sovereign claim over the holiest site in Judaism to close the conflict.
Refugees. Israel would admit a symbolic number of Palestinian refugees on humanitarian grounds, a figure Olmert has given as roughly a thousand a year for five years, with an international fund for compensation and resettlement in the new state. No general right of return into Israel, the same principle every serious negotiation has rested on since Clinton.
Security. A demilitarised Palestinian state with international monitoring.

The napkin

Olmert has told the same story for fifteen years, in his memoir, to Israeli television, and to American interviewers, and the detail that survives every retelling is the map. He spread it on the table, showed Abbas the lines, and told him he was ready to sign that day. Abbas said he needed to consult his experts and asked to keep the map. Olmert said he could have it only with both their signatures on it, because he was not prepared to have an unsigned Israeli concession map circulating as the new baseline for the next round of talks. Abbas took a piece of paper and traced the outline by hand. Then he left, saying he would return the next day with his people.

He never returned. Olmert’s account: “He said he would come the next day. He never came back.” Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, later confirmed that the meeting happened and that the map was shown.

The excuse, and why the dates kill it

The standard defence of Abbas is that Olmert was a lame duck: he was under criminal investigation, he had announced on 30 July 2008 that he would resign, and there was no point signing a treaty with a man on his way out. It is the answer Abbas himself has given.

The dates do not support it. Olmert remained prime minister with full authority until 31 March 2009, more than six months after the offer. Foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who won the Kadima leadership that September and was running the parallel negotiating track, was the likeliest next prime minister and was inside the same process. Nothing prevented Abbas from accepting in principle, or from returning with a counter-map, or from saying publicly that Israel had offered this and that he was ready to close on it, an act that would have transformed the Israeli election then underway. He did none of those things. He did not answer at all.

And the man who most wanted him to answer was not Israeli. Condoleezza Rice, then US secretary of state, was in the room at Annapolis and across the file for two years; her account is that the American side was astonished by how far Olmert had gone, and that the Palestinians let it die. Rice pressed Abbas to keep the offer alive by putting the terms in writing at the White House. He did not.

What Abbas himself has conceded

In May 2009, eight months after the meeting, Abbas sat with the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl and described the offer in his own words: Olmert “showed me a map,” he said, and “the gaps were wide.” He did not claim there had been no offer. He did not claim it was a trick or a fraud. He said he would wait, and that Israel and the United States would eventually deliver Palestinian demands without his having to concede anything for them. Diehl’s summary of the strategy was that Abbas intended to sit still while the Obama administration pressured Israel on settlements.

That is the whole answer to the “there was never a real offer” claim about 2008: the man who received it says he received it, and says he did not take it.

The pattern this completes

The strongest objection to counting 2008 as a rejection is that an offer refused in a back room, never written into a signed document, is not the same as a formal Palestinian “no”. It is worth stating because it is the serious version of the argument. It also fails on its own terms. A leader who wants a state does not need a signed document to say yes; he needs only to come back the next day, as he said he would, and begin closing the gaps. The offer was concrete enough for Abbas to trace it, describe it to an American journalist, and characterise its gaps. What was missing was not clarity. It was an answer.

Placed in sequence, that answer is not an isolated failure of one negotiation. Palestinian leadership was offered a state by the Peel Commission in 1937 and refused. It was offered a state by UN Resolution 181 in 1947 and refused, then joined the war to destroy the one that was declared. It was offered a state at Camp David and in the Clinton Parameters in 2000 and refused, then ran the Second Intifada. In 2008 it was offered more than all of those and did not reply. Five offers, five refusals, and after each one the maximalist demand returned intact, which is what tells you the demand was never the territory.

The Clinton Parameters (2000) · The Peel Commission Report (1937) · UN Resolution 181: the Partition Plan (1947) · Who started the intifadas · Are the settlements legal, and are they wise? · The offers refused, the full record

Sources

Ehud Olmert, interviews and public accounts of the 16 September 2008 meeting, including his memoir and subsequent Israeli and American press interviews.
Bernard Avishai, “A Plan for Peace That Still Could Be,” The New York Times Magazine, 7 February 2011: the extended interviews with both Olmert and Abbas in which each describes the meeting and the map.
Jackson Diehl, “Abbas’s Waiting Game,” The Washington Post, 29 May 2009: Abbas in his own words on the offer and the gaps.
Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (Crown, 2011): the American record of the Annapolis process and its end.
Elliott Abrams, Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2013): the White House account of the negotiations.