Every time the Palestinians rebuff a peace proposal, commentators reach for an observation by the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban: ‘The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ It’s pithy, and depressingly accurate, but I’ve always been more struck by another Eban aphorism: ‘Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.’ Not as witty, I’ll grant you, but it gets closer to the psychology at play in this conflict. The Palestinians have been able to miss one opportunity after another because doing so has brought no lasting diplomatic consequences.
The western liberal mind is a captive of the two-state solution ideology, a lethal idealism convinced that Palestinian statehood will bring peace even as every step towards it brings only more violence. At the United Nations and in the foreign ministries of Europe, each Palestinian rejection of an Israeli offer proves that more pressure must be brought to bear on Israel. To cite evidence of the failure and futility of this model is to commit the gravest heresy. The two-state solution isn’t diplomacy, it’s religion.
A revelation from former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert ought to turn even the most devout believer at least agnostic. It was 2008 when Olmert tried to get Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to accept a state, but like Yasser Arafat before him Abbas walked away. The broad outline of the deal was known but we have had to rely on a hasty sketch Abbas scribbled on a napkin for the contours of the Palestinian state he rejected. Now Olmert has revealed the map he presented 17 years ago, and it depicts a territorial settlement strikingly favourable to the Palestinians.
Olmert offered Abbas a Palestinian state on 95.1 per cent of the West Bank, 100 per of Gaza (which Israel had relinquished three years earlier), and 4.9 per cent of sovereign Israel. Jerusalem would be divided and the eastern sections handed to Palestine for its capital city. Israel would give up sovereignty over the Old City and the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism – to an Arab-majority international committee. Olmert would demolish 78 settlements, expel 88,000 thousand Jews to make way for Palestinians, and build a road or tunnel connecting the two Palestinian territories on either side of Israel. In return, Israel would get to retain 4.9 per cent of Judea and Samaria in the form of settlement blocs Ma’ale Adumim, Gush Etzion and Ariel, and 45 smaller communities.
Olmert is a hate figure on the Israeli right, in part for his willingness to compromise so much in pursuit of peace and in part for his apostasy as a former right-winger who shifted to the centre. But it is not only right-wingers who would object to his 2008 offer. It is difficult to imagine even a left-leaning government making such an offer today. The concessions are simply too many and too extensive and, besides, Israeli attitudes have been hardened by years of Palestinian rejectionism and terror. The Olmert map was the best offer the Palestinians ever received. They will never see another one like it.
Arafat’s decision to spurn a state at Camp David in 2000 has come to be seen as a tragic error, followed as it was by a quarter-century of bloodshed in the Second Intifada and several more wars between Israel and Gaza. The same cannot be said for Abbas’s decision, for he had one thing Arafat did not: the lesson of Arafat’s failure. Abbas understood the wages of inflexibility, he knew the price of rejection and that the Palestinians would pay it in blood. In declining Olmert’s blueprint, he condemned his own people to decades of dispossession. He didn’t just deny them a state, he stole the Palestinians’ future. That is not a tragedy, it is treason.
Perhaps Abba Eban was right. Maybe the Palestinians will behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources, but their resources are diminishing rapidly. The 7 October massacre has brought down upon Palestinian heads a ferocious Israeli retaliation and reliably sympathetic western governments are under threat from right-wing populists who harbour more affinity for Israel. The transfer of Palestinians out of the land, once a fringe prescription promoted by the likes of Meir Kahane, is now advocated by the president of the United States. Israel has shifted rightwards and any appetite for the sort of territorial division proposed by Ehud Olmert is limited to a depleted and moribund left. If the Palestinians ever return to the negotiating table they will find themselves negotiating over much less than before.
Mahmoud Abbas is another Palestinian leader who chose self-sabotage over self-determination and the Olmert map is a symbol of his inexcusable folly. The Palestinians have more enemies in Ramallah than they will ever have in Jerusalem.
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