Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas agreed to a Jewish Israeli serving as mayor of an umbrella municipality for Jerusalem that would govern over the capitals of Israel and a Palestinian state, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert revealed exclusively Wednesday in an interview previewing the April 6 Jerusalem Post Conference in New York.
Abbas received applause from a visiting group of left-wing Israeli students to Ramallah last week when he said that Jerusalem could be two open cities coexisting under one municipal umbrella. Olmert reveled that when Abbas made such a commitment to him in their negotiations that ended in September 2008, he also addressed who would head the joint municipality.
“Abu Mazen agreed that while Jerusalem would be separated into two capitals, there would be an umbrella mayor and given the Jewish majority in the city, he is likely to be Israeli,” Olmert said.
Neither Olmert nor Abbas defined what role the umbrella municipality would have over the two capitals, whether it would have proper administrative functions or be largely symbolic.
In their negotiations, Olmert proposed that Jerusalem's entire Old City would be internationalized under the control over five countries: Israel, the new Palestinian state, the United States, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Asked whether Abbas accepted the offer, Olmert said “ I think he liked the idea that three out of the five countries who would be part of the international trusteeship were Muslim.”
Olmert said some of the information about what went on in his talks with Abbas that has been leaked by the Palestinians has been untrue. For instance, he said it is not true that the Palestinians made him an offer of Israel keeping two percent of the land over the pre-1967 border.
“Someone must have made up that number afterward,” Olmert said. “Maybe it was a negotiating point the Palestinians intended to raise when they came back to the table. I'm giving you a fair, honest account of what happened.”
Olmert said he spoke to the Palestinians about Israel keeping 6.3% of the land over the pre-1967 line, which would be compensated by land swaps from inside the line. But he said Wednesday that “with much less than 6.3%,” Israel could relocate some 90,000 settlers who would be evacuated from their communities into three demographic centers in the parts of Judea and Samaria that Israel would keep.
In Olmert's plan, Israel would not have kept a security presence in the Jordan Valley. There would have been security measures that could be taken by Israel, the Palestinians, Jordan, and international forces, which might have been stationed on the Jordanian side of the border with the new Palestinian state.
On the issue of Palestinian refugees, Olmert said he offered to accept 1000 a year for five years on a humanitarian basis, not on a Palestinian right of return. He said that Abbas expected more, but he never said how many more.