HAD Mr Shimon Peres won the Israeli elections in May, his government would have granted the Palestinians independent statehood in most of the West Bank.
The Palestinian flag would have flown from the mosques atop Temple Mount, in an Old City of Jerusalem formally designated as being "without sovereignty".
The Palestinians would have recognised west Jerusalem as Israel's capital and Israel would have recognised a Palestinian state capital - to be called Al-Kuds (the Arabic name for Jerusalem), and to be located outside the city's official municipal boundaries.
Such understandings, which could have brought a permanent settlement to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, were hammered out in secret negotiations earlier this year - led on the Palestinian side by Mr Yasser Arafat's deputy Mr Mahmoud Abbas, and for Israel by Dr Yossi Beilin, a minister in the Peres government, and Dr Yair Hirschfeld, an architect of the Oslo autonomy accords.
In interviews yesterday, Dr Beilin and Dr Hirschfeld indicated they had begged Mr Peres to publicise the terms of the nascent deal before the May elections considering them attractive to most Israelis.
But Mr Peres, who narrowly lost the elections to the Likud hardliner, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, refused.
"I am absolutely certain," said Dr Hirschfeld, "that if the Labour Party had presented this programme to the public, it would have won the elections."
He noted that, while the Palestinians were to gain demilitarised statehood in most of the West Bank, the understandings provided for Israel to annex about 10 per cent of the territory there - delineated in such a way as to bring 70 per cent of the 140,000 Jewish settlers under Israeli sovereignty.
Remaining settlements were not to have been dismantled, Dr Hirschfeld said.
In all, it would have required another month or two to tie up the full accord, he said.
That seems optimistic, given the delays that plagued peacemaking even under the Rabin and Peres governments.
But the details revealed yesterday suggest a solution both sides could live with. And Dr Hirschfeld was probably correct in asserting that "even a large number of the settlers would have voted for it, because it promised them a secure existence for ever".
Elements of the package have been leaked before. But a statement of confirmation from Mr Abbas's office yesterday showed the talks had made more progress than was previously believed.
Dr Beilin insisted that he was "not completely frustrated" that election defeat had aborted the plan. "Eventually this will be the solution," he said.
But Mr David Bar-Illan, a spokesman for Mr Netanyahu, dismissed the understandings as "an intellectual exercise", underlining how fundamentally the Israeli political scene has changed since the elections.