Haggling over a beach

Press, 4 March 1989, Page 20

Haggling over a beach

From a correspondent in Cairo for the “Economist”

IF YOU are hopeful about peace in the Middle East, pause to consider the tale of Taba. In Cairo this week, while senior Egyptian, Israeli and Soviet officals were exchanging views on a Middle East peace conference, humbler Egyptians, Israelis and Americans were still toiling away to reach agreement on returning 750 metres of sandy beach to Egypt. Almost seven years ago, when Israel returned the rest of Sinai to Egypt, it held on to the Taba beach-front on the Gulf of Aqaba, where a fancy hotel was under construction. Seven months later the hotel opened, alongside some scruffy beach huts.

In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon. Israeli-Egyptian relations froze. The negotiations about Taba and some other even tinier border disputes froze too.

In January 1985, with the Americans prodding both sides, the Taba talks resumed. Like all the rest of the “peace process,” they promptly got stuck in Israel’s politics. The Likud Party sought to hold the beachhead hostage to a general improvement in Egyptian-

Israeli relations. The Labour Party argued that refusing to give even a dot of land back would prevent those relations from improving. After 20 months the two halves of the Israeli Government agreed that they, and Egypt, could not agree. The two countries submitted the dispute to international arbitrators, to whom each side presented hundreds of documents. Among them were the memoirs of British colonial officials and the original, borrowed from Turkey, of a 1906 border treaty between Palestine, then in the Ottoman empire and Egypt, then controlled by the British empire. Last September

29 the arbitrators uttered. Border pillar 91E, the southern marker between Sinai and pre-Israel Palestine, was where Egypt said it was.

The Taba talks, having consumed more time, money and expertise than the 1979 EgyptianIsraeli peace treaty, were still not over. The arbitrators’ decision was supposed to be carried out in 21 days; it has already taken nearly five months. Negotiators, many of them the

same weary people who failed to reach a compromise in 1985-86, have been shuttling between Cairo and Taba, worrying over Israeli access to this postage stamp of land, the precise amount of Egyptian compensation for the hotel, and such minutiae as whether the form tourists need to fill out at the border should be on soft paper or cardboard. American diplomats grimace when Taba is mentioned. Even the usually phlegmatic President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt has accused the Israelis of “repulsive” foot-dragging. The Egyptains now say that a price for the hotel was agreed to on February 21, and hope that the Israelis will

leave on March 15, inshallah. The Taba talks, for all their tedium, are proof that diplomacy can work in the Middle East. Pessimists wonder how long it

will take politicians, diplomats and lawyers to draw lines in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank, home to 70,000 Israeli settlers, if it has taken seven years to decide the fate of a hotel and a beach.

Copyright — The Economist