In what Yediot Ahronot has billed as a “legacy interview” on the occasion of Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has - as he himself says - expressed ideas unheard from any previous Israeli leader.

Ideas like withdrawing from nearly all the territories under Israeli control since the 1967 war, including east Jerusalem.

Inevitably, some Israeli commentators have reacted with cynicism. Aluf Benn lampoons Olmert for linking the failure of peace process with the corruption charges against him and contrasts him unfavorably with Ariel Sharon: “Sharon really was vague, but he was the only leader willing to stand up to the settlers and evacuate them from their homes,” writes Benn. “Actions, not words. Olmert is a hero in a newspaper interview, but in reality has been a marionette of the settlers just like the leaders who preceded him.”

It’s always difficult to take lame duck politicians seriously, particularly when they puff their chests out with bold principles. But this isn’t really about Olmert and he is not the only Israeli thinking in these terms. In another interview, Ze’ev Sternhell, the Hebrew University Professor wounded in a bomb attack on his home thought to have been carried out by Jewish extremists, describes the vision of Eretz Yisrael HaShlema - Greater Israel - as essentially anti-Zionist: “Whoever supports the occupation, i.e. a binational state, is no Zionist. This could also be said of politicians who drag their feet in negotiations intended to bring about a two-state solution for two nations. They’re putting off this solution to the unforeseeable future, endangering the Jewish state’s future…I fear that unless an immediate change takes place, in 50 years my granddaughters will have no reason to live here. If we’re doomed to be a minority in a multinational state, why live in Tel Aviv rather than California?”

It’s important to remind ourselves that none of these ideas are new. Nearly thirty years ago, the Israeli philosopher, religious thinker and scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz - a man who famously turned down the Israel Prize awarded earlier this year to Professor Sternhell - wrote that the “‘unpartitioned Eretz Israel’ is internally unstable. Even if the Arabs do not become the majority, the state will no longer be a Jewish state. Its problems, needs and functions will no longer be those of the Jewish people in Israel and abroad, but those arising from the specific tasks of government and administration of this strange system of political domination.”

What is significant, I think, is that the notion of radical territorial concessions in exchange for peace is becoming more and more entrenched in Israel’s mainstream political conversation. The warnings of the past from those like Leibowitz about the danger to the Jewish state’s integrity (often delivered, I have to say, with unnecessary hyperbole,) are now accepted stoically by many Israelis. And this at a time when the outlook for a credible negotiating partner on the Palestinian side remains bleak, and when a major conflict with Iran peers ominously over the horizon.