The Last Palestinian by Grant Rumley

Author:Grant Rumley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633883000
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2017-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

In the early afternoon hours of September 16, 2008, Mahmoud Abbas arrived for a meeting with Ehud Olmert at the Israeli Prime Minister's official residence in Jerusalem. Olmert was in dire straits: just weeks before the meeting, he announced that he would soon resign from his post as a result of a corruption investigation. His party, Kadima, was scheduled to hold internal elections and choose his successor the day after his meeting with Abbas. But as Olmert greeted the Palestinian president at the entrance to his residence, none of that was on his mind. The meeting he was about to have with Abbas, Olmert believed, would go down in the history books.

Olmert and Abbas had met over thirty times before that day in September and had developed something of a routine in their meetings. At first, they would have lunch with a small group of senior aides. Then, as one regular Israeli participant in the meetings recalled, “Olmert would take out a box of cigars, put his hand over Abu Mazen's shoulder, and they'd walk together to Olmert's study, where they'd sit alone for another fifteen minutes, smoking and drinking espresso.”1 That routine played out once again, as the two leaders left their advisers in the main dining room and moved to a secluded office to talk privately.

When they were alone, Olmert surprised Abbas by laying a map on the table with his plan for the future borders of Israel and the state of Palestine. Abbas had never seen that map before. It included a Palestinian state on approximately 94 percent of the West Bank, with land swaps to compensate for Israel's annexation of a number of prominent settlement blocs. Essentially, it was the closest Israel had come in years to proposing a Palestinian state on land equal in size to the West Bank's entire territory.2

In addition to showing Abbas the map, Olmert also offered an unprecedented solution to the question of Jerusalem by suggesting international supervision over the Old City—meaning that neither Israel nor the Palestinians would have sovereignty over the holy area in and around Temple Mount. “It was the hardest moment of my life,” Olmert recalled years later, in an interview with Israel's Channel 10.3 Olmert, the former mayor of Jerusalem, was offering to cede Israeli control over the Western Wall, one of Judaism's holiest sites.

Abbas examined Olmert's map, saying only that it was “very serious.”4 He asked to have a copy of it, but Olmert refused. He said that he would let Abbas keep the map only if he agreed to accept it as the basis for an agreement. “I respected his will not to give it to us,” Abbas explained in an interview in 2015.5 What Abbas didn't respect, however, was Olmert's desperate request that he sign the map “here and now,” allowing both of them to then present it to their respective publics as a done deal.

“Mr. President, I beg you, please put your initials on this map,” Olmert told Abbas. “Let's make an agreement.

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