Taba mythchief

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by David Makovsky

It is unclear if the doves really believed they could reach a deal at Taba, or if they were more concerned about establishing a concessionary baseline for the widely anticipated next Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon. In any event, the fact that the Palestinians did not accept the deal saved the Knesset the acute embarrassment of voting it down.

For the Palestinians, Israel's Taba negotiators were a sort of dream team. Hawks like Rubinstein and the centrist Dan Meridor were absent; in their places were Israel's three arch-doves: Peres, Yossi Beilin and Yossi Sarid, who headed the Meretz Party to Barak's Left. Even had Peres, Beilin and Sand not told them as much--and they did--the Palestinians knew that Israel had never before and might never again put forward such a tractable negotiating team. Yet the Palestinians still refused key reciprocal concessions at Taba.

The Palestinians had wanted Taba to begin after Clinton left office so they could flout his parameters without insulting the president of the United States at the same time. Some Palestinians also imagined that George H.W. Bush's son, George W., might reflect some of the lack of empathy toward Israel that his father sometimes appeared to project while in office. The Palestinians thought they were about to reap a political windfall. American Jews were known to be political supporters of the Democrats, and thus losers in a Bush Administration, especially given the Texan's oil industry connections. At the opening plenary session of the Taba talks on January 20, 2001, according to participants, Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala'a) said what he subsequently told AI-Ayyam on January 29, after Taba broke up: "We refused to accept the Clinton initiative as a basis for the negotiations. The Israelis said that the Clinton proposals should be the basis, but we rejected it." Nabil Sha'ath was even more blunt at the start of the negot iations: "Clinton is a dead horse." As such, there was no agreed upon starting point for the talks. (5)

Retrogression on the Red Sea

THE NEGOTIATIONS at Taba were split up into working groups in a bid to resolve the remaining differences. These primarily concerned land and borders, security, refugees and the status of Jerusalem.

The committee on security hardly convened. Shlomo Yanai, a general who headed Israel's negotiating team at Camp David and Taba, told me that "on security issues, we not only made no progress, but there was retrogression. The Palestinians ... retreated from understandings with us and President Clinton at the summit."

On the territorial issue, Ben-Ami insisted on remaining within the Clinton parameters, but quickly moved toward the upper end of the 95-97 percent zone at Palestinian insistence. He said that Israel should withdraw from 94.5 percent of the West Bank, but once one factored in swapped border areas that Israel would cede within sovereign Israel, he was approaching Clinton's upper limit. Ben-Ami's plan involved the displacement of about 45,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank. When Barak heard about the Ben-Ami map, he insisted that Ben-Ami rescind it, for this was a figure that exceeded what Barak and Clinton had thought the Israeli public could bear without major upheaval. The Palestinian team also drew up a map--a real accomplishment--since this was only the second such map they presented since negotiations with Israel began in earnest the previous spring. According to this map, Israel was to evacuate 130 out of 146 settlements, which would displace 100,000 to 120,000 of the 180,000 West Bank settlers-t hree to four times the number contemplated by Clinton and Barak.