Taba mythchief

National Interest, The, Spring, 2003 by David Makovsky

As always, the key remained with Arafat, who declared: "Return is a sacred right. People are fooling themselves if they think that can be renounced in exchange for a handful of dollars", alluding to a $30 billion package. This is not just rhetoric. Arafat's struggle for Palestine predates Israel's winning the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, and his comrades-in-arms and main constituency have always been the 1948 refugees. Even a year later when interviewed on this topic, Arafat said publicly what he has said many times since Taba, that he wanted to "begin with my brothers and beloved refugees of Lebanon", making it clear that it would not end there. (15)

Chasm

THE IDEA that the parties were on the verge of a deal at Taba is fantasy. After the talks concluded, Abu Ala'a told Al-Ayyam that "there has never before been a clearer gap in the positions of the two sides." Saeb Erekat concurred, telling the Palestinian daily Al-Quds that Taba "emphasized the size of the gap between the positions of the two sides and the depth of the disagreements, primarily on the subjects of Jerusalem and the refugees." (During Taba, Arafat's top security aide for Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, told the media the talks were "barta barta", a very derisive Arabic slang expression; he subsequently apologized for his language.)

In the two years since Taba, countless diplomatic entourages, including those from members of the Quartet, have pleaded with Arafat to compromise on several key thorny issues. He has not done so. Indeed, Arafat's own words refute the revisionism surrounding Taba, and his actions ever since confirm those words. In remarks made in Gaza three months after Taba, he rhetorically asked, "Did we miss the chance given to us in Camp David and Taba?" After ticking off possible compromise ideas floated around at the time, Arafat declared, "we didn't and will not accept such things." (16) If Arafat had wanted to conclude a deal comparable to terms discussed at Taba in the subsequent two years, he could have stolen world attention (and won a second Nobel Peace Prize?), set in motion the collapse of the Sharon government, driven a wedge between the United States and Israel, and ended his own persona non grata status in the Oval Office. His silence speaks volumes.

As suggested above, there are two ways to view Arafat's behavior since Camp David. One is that his refusal to compromise is a bid to gain the best possible deal from Israel, and it follows that he ultimately would agree to end the conflict if the terms were right. In the meantime, his refusal to compromise on core issues is a survival mechanism at a time when intramural Palestinian politics, as usual, are fractious and potentially bloody. Many observers are sure that this view is correct, and this includes most European and many professional American diplomats. Because they are sure that this is so, these observers can, rightfully in their own minds, blame the present Israeli government for not being sufficiently accommodating in order to achieve peace.