Olmert says Israel must yield for peace

JERUSALEM - Israel will have to give up virtually all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem if it wants peace with the Palestinians, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a farewell interview published yesterday.

Olmert, who began talks with the Palestinians and Syria during his soon-to-end term, also said Israel would have to leave the Golan Heights to obtain peace with Syria.

The comments were the clearest sign to date of Olmert's willingness to meet the demands of Israel's longtime enemies in peace negotiations. But their significance was uncertain, since Olmert's days in office are numbered and peace negotiations will soon become the responsibility of a different Israeli leader.

However, his remarks could restrict the ability of his successor to maneuver, by defining a land-for-peace equation.

More than anything, the interview marked Olmert's transformation from a vocal hard-liner who for decades opposed any territorial concessions to the Palestinians, to a leader whose views are virtually identical to those of the dovish politicians he once pilloried.

As mayor of Jerusalem and a hard-line lawmaker, Olmert opposed any compromise in the city and encouraged efforts to build Jewish neighborhoods in the largely Arab eastern sector to cement Israel's control.

"I'm the first one who wanted to enforce Israeli sovereignty on the whole city. I admit this," he told the daily Yediot Ahronot. He said that for decades he "was not prepared to look at reality in all of its depth."

The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem - areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war - for a future independent state. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but retains overall control over the West Bank and all of Jerusalem.

Olmert said Israel would keep "a percentage" of the West Bank but would have to give Palestinians the same amount of Israeli territory in exchange, "because without this there will be no peace."

He said Israel would have to leave parts of East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians claim as their future capital, and said Israel could not hope to maintain its control of the more than 200,000 Palestinian residents there. He mentioned three recent attacks in which Palestinians from East Jerusalem rammed Israelis with vehicles, killing three people and wounding dozens. He said anyone who wanted to stop the attacks "must give up parts of Jerusalem."

There would be "special arrangements" for the city's holy sites, he said, without offering details. East Jerusalem is home to key Jewish, Muslim and Christian holy sites, and resolving the competing claims to the area is perhaps the most contentious issue.

Olmert said time was "so short that it is terribly distressing. We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, meaning that we will withdraw in practice from nearly all of the territories, if not from all of them."

He said that if Israelis are to forge peace deals with the Palestinians and Syria, the decision they now had to make "was a decision that we have been refusing to look at open-eyed for 40 years."

Olmert spokesman David Baker confirmed the content of the interview was accurate.

Silvan Shalom of the hard-line Likud party criticized Olmert, a former Likud member who helped found the centrist Kadima party in 2005, for adopting the views of Israeli doves, and called Olmert "naive."

Olmert has been forced to step down by corruption allegations and will depart officially once Kadima's new leader, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, forms a government or elections are held.

Peace talks were launched at a U.S.-sponsored conference last November, but talks have not yielded dramatic results and the sides have all but abandoned the goal of reaching a deal by the end of 2008.