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The National Interest
Taba Mythchief
by David Makovsky
After the U.S.-led coalition routed Iraq in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, President George H.W. Bush told Congress that he would vigorously pursue the Arab-Israeli peace process. . . .
This American impulse is likely to be strongly reinforced by other actors. . . .
If such a push should come, it would be tragic were it plagued by a misleading mythology-that Israelis and Palestinians were at the verge of peace in January 2001 as they met at Taba, a tiny Egyptian resort adjoining the Israeli port city of Eilat. According to this myth, both sides had essentially agreed on the critical and difficult issues of land, refugees and the status of Jerusalem, and it was only Ariel Sharon's rise to power that prevented these discussions from coming to fruition.
This myth has wide currency in both the Arab world and in Europe. . . .
France's former Foreign Minister, Hubert VŽdrine, notes that a viable Palestinian state needs to be created "not on the basis of the Camp David accords, which were not specific enough, but by using the terms of the subsequent negotiations at Sharm al-Sheikh and Taba."3 Even some Americans are taken by the myth of Taba: thus Michael Lind writes that, in contrast to earlier negotiations, the Israelis and the Palestinians at Taba "came close to agreeing on a different plan acceptable in its broad outlines to moderates on both sides."4
This is just not so.
First of all, the Israeli delegation at Taba did not have the moral authority to negotiate two weeks before an election in which Prime Minister Ehud Barak was widely expected to lose in a landslide; and Israel's delegation was led by a government that had the support of only 42 of Israel's 120-member parliament. Noting the oddity of a minority government holding the most sensitive negotiations in the country's 52-year history, Israel's Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein wrote Barak a letter questioning the legitimacy of such a step. Even had a deal been reached, therefore, it is very unlikely that the Knesset would have ratified it.
But no deal was ever in prospect. Palestinian negotiators made only conditional and tactical concessions at Taba, and even these were never agreed to by the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat. While some key Palestinian negotiators wanted a deal, no evidence suggests that Arafat himself was willing to make any concessions of real significance. Even the diplomat who has put forth the rosiest assessment of the Taba negotiations- EU Middle East peace envoy Miguel Moratinos-wrote in a document summarizing those talks (published in the February 14, 2001 Ha'aretz) that "serious gaps remain."
It is important not only to avoid misreading what happened at Taba, but to examine carefully what did and did not occur in the period just before and after it. Doing so will constitute good preparation for the next round of serious Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. . . .