Taba mythchief

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by David Makovsky

Two months later, with the outbreak of the so-called Al-Aqsa intifada, Israeli public opinion began to change dramatically: either the Palestinians were using violence as a tool in negotiations, or Arafat did not want peace at all. Either possibility represented a depressing revision of the hopes nurtured by the Oslo accords, but the former at least held out some hope that a deal was still possible. But which was it? It was not clear, nor was Arafat's role in the onset of the violence.

The Barak government boldly assumed the former, more optimistic assessment of Palestinian strategy and maintained its intention to negotiate despite the violence. But the latter view was strengthened when the Palestinian Authority released dozens of convicted terrorists from jail after the outbreak of violence, and when Arafat refused to publicly call a halt to that violence.

Then came the "Clinton parameters", put forward on December 23, 2000, which the Barak cabinet accepted. In other words, Israel now agreed to give up 97 percent of the West Bank, yield all but the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and concede that virtually all the Temple Mount would be exclusively Palestinian. Barak's acceptance of such terms amid continuing violence was the final blow to his political standing in Israel. But Arafat still demurred. At a meeting with Clinton on January 2, 2001, Arafat emptied the Clinton parameters of any meaning. U.S. peace envoy Dennis Ross characterized Arafat's reply as follows: "He said yes, and then he added reservations that basically meant he rejected every single one of the things that he was supposed to give." As Arafat himself said in the first sentence of his letter to Clinton, published in the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam on the day of his meeting, the President's proposals "do not meet the required conditions for a lasting peace."

Hopes for peace seemed to have gone up in smoke. Arafat turned down the President who had opened the Oval Office to him on twelve occasions, making him his most frequent foreign guest. Now this President was leaving office. Like most observers, Barak believed that, in the wake of Arafat's rejection of the Clinton parameters, any further talks were pointless. Barak was also being trounced in polls by 15-20 percent margins by a man heretofore deemed unelectable, Ariel Sharon. Even had he believed a deal possible, Barak was running out of time.

The Road to Taba

YET THE doves in the Barak cabinet, led by Shimon Peres, did not relent. Because of the Palestinian violence and the Israeli public's reaction to it, Barak was entirely dependent on the doves and on the frail hope that following their counsel would provide a last-minute breakthrough to rescue his tenure. The doves, too, threatened to desert him before election day if he did not enable a peace delegation to hold eleventh-hour talks at Taba. As Barak's own foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, later portrayed it in an October 17, 2002 Ha'aretz interview, alluding to Peres, there was a pistol on the table. The elections were a month away, and there was a minister who told Ehud that if he did not go to Taba they would denounce him in public for evading his duty to make peace. He had no choice but to go to a meeting for something he himself no longer believed in.