Jerusalem - Israel's departing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that his country will have to withdraw from "almost all" of the land it seized in a 1967 war if it wants to have peace with Syria and the Palestinians.

    In an interview published in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper yesterday, a week after his formal resignation, Mr. Olmert said that Israelis need to make a "supremely difficult" decision about whether or not they really want to have peace with their neighbours. If the answer is yes, he said, Israel will have to withdraw its soldiers and settlers from the Golan Heights and nearly all of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

    Mr. Olmert said that peace is within reach on both fronts if Israel is willing to accept the necessary sacrifices. He said that he will continue to pursue peace agreements as long as he remains in office and suggested that his presumptive successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, will continue on the same path.

    "We have an opportunity that is limited in time, in which we can perhaps reach a historic deal in our relations with the Palestinians and another historic step in our relations with Syria. In both cases, the decision we must reach is a decision that we have been refusing to accept for the past four decades," Mr. Olmert said in what the newspaper called a legacy interview.

    While the comments are the clearest signal to date of his willingness to meet the key demands of Palestinian and Syrian leaders, their significance is unclear given that Mr. Olmert is now only a caretaker leader with dwindling clout. The interview, however, does highlight how completely Mr. Olmert's perspective has changed since his days as the hard-line mayor of Jerusalem, when he was a staunch supporter of Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

    "I have not come here to justify my actions over the past 35 years," he said. "For a large portion of that period, I was unwilling to look reality in the eye."

    Mr. Olmert said that while Israel can expect to retain some key settlement blocs under a future peace deal with the Palestinians, it will have to give up the vast majority of the West Bank, where tens of thousands of Jews live in more than 120 government-sponsored colonies. The Palestinians, meanwhile, will have to be compensated for any settlements that Israel retains by land swaps "at a ratio that is more or less 1:1."

    "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the significance of which is that we will withdraw from almost all of the territories, if not all of them. We will maintain control over a certain percentage of the territories, but we will have to give the Palestinians a commensurate percentage of our land, because without this, there will be no peace," he said.

    Mr. Olmert said that Israel also needs to let go of predominantly Arab East Jerusalem, which the Palestinian Authority hopes to make the capital of a future state, and agree on a "special creative solution" regarding sovereignty over disputed holy sites in the Old City. The comments predictably enraged Israel's political right, which considers Jerusalem to be the country's indivisible capital.

    Meanwhile, left-wing politicians and Palestinian officials alike condemned Mr. Olmert for waiting until he was almost out of office before making clear his willingness to give up territory. Mr. Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas have been meeting regularly since an American-sponsored peace summit last year in Annapolis, Md., but there has been little discernible progress in those negotiations.

    Mr. Olmert has also presided over backchannel peace talks with the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad; he told Yedioth Ahronoth they began with informal contacts in February of 2007. He said that Israel's side of any peace deal was clear: It will have to give up the Golan Heights, a verdant and strategic plateau that overlooks the road to Damascus but which is currently dotted with Israeli fruit orchards and vineyards.

    "I do not believe that there is a single reasonable person in Israel who believes that we can make peace with Syria without ceding the Golan Heights," he said. For its part, Syria needs to cut its ties to militant groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, he said.

    Mr. Olmert also dismissed the idea of a unilateral Israeli strike to destroy Iran's nuclear program. Though the idea is routinely floated by Israel's security establishment, Mr. Olmert said such talk is an example of "our delusions of grandeur" and said the Iran issue can only be dealt with by the international community.

    The journalists who interviewed him, Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer, wrote that Mr. Olmert's comments were some of the strongest ever made by a sitting prime minister on Israel's need to give up the territories it has occupied for more than four decades. Mr. Olmert seemed to be trying to establish a new foreign policy doctrine to pass on to his successor, the journalists noted.

    The deeply unpopular Mr. Olmert was forced to resign amid a series of high-profile corruption scandals, though no charges have yet been laid. In the interview, he again promised to clear his name and pointedly did not rule out a political comeback.

    Earlier this month, Mr. Olmert was succeeded as leader of the centrist Kadima party by Ms. Livni. Israeli President Shimon Peres has since named her as prime minister-designate, and she has five weeks remaining to either form a government or face a general election. Under either scenario, Mr. Olmert will remain in office until his successor is sworn in.