Peace will come, says head Palestinian negotiator (News Feature)

By Jeff Abramowitz Jan 20, 2011, 14:14 GMT

Tel Aviv - A peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians is not only a Palestinian need or dream, but a necessity for both sides, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Thursday, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of one of the more significant attempts at peace talks.

'Peace is definitely coming,' Erekat said. 'The issue here has to do with a system of interests. The system of interest in Israel has not yet matured for Israel to realize where its interest is.'

On January 21, 2001, Israeli and Palestinian officials met in the Egyptian resort of Taba, just over the border from the Israeli Red Sea port of Eilat, for talks on a final peace deal.

Those negotiations came six months after they failed to reach an agreement during a two-week summit in the United States at Camp David, Maryland. The talks were held against the violent backdrop of the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, which had broken out in September and eroded the remaining trust between the two sides.

They were also held in the shadow of upcoming Israeli elections, called after then-prime minister Ehud Barak lost his parliamentary majority.

A joint statement issued by the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on January 27, 2001, after the discussions ended, said the delegations held 'serious, deep and practical' talks, which were 'unprecedented in the positive atmosphere and expression of mutual willingness to meet the national, security and existential needs of each side.'

However, the statement said it proved 'impossible' to reach a deal, 'given the circumstances and time constraints.'

The statement also noted that the sides 'have never been closer to reaching an agreement,' a claim Erekat denied Thursday. 'It is not true that we were close to reaching an agreement,' he emphasized.

'The Israelis came to us and told us that they have elections on February 6 and therefore it was not possible to reach an agreement even among them. They were divided as a team and they were not able to reach an agreement.'

Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel's foreign minister at the time, said in an interview some months after the talks that Barak had not wanted to go to the negotiations since 'he didn't see any point or purpose in it.'

But at this stage there was a pistol on the table. The elections were a month away and there was a minister who told Barak that if he didn't 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,' Ben-Ami told the Ha'aretz daily in an interview published in September 2001.

Ben-Ami, currently vice president of the Toledo International Centre for Peace, said that Palestinians rejected the Israeli offer of 94.5 per cent of the West Bank, and presented a counter map, giving Israel 2.34 per cent of the West Bank and which 'totally eroded the three already shrunken settlement blocs,' leaving only a few isolated settlements, 'which would be dependent on thin, narrow access roads.'

He was also pessimistic about the Palestinian desire to compromise, saying that 'at the end of the process it is impossible not to form the impression that (they) don't want a solution as much as they want to place Israel in the dock.

'More than they want a state of their own, they want to spit out our state.'

The Taba talks were the last truly serious attempt to reach an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal until the so-called Annapolis process, which lasted from November 2007 until late 2008, when they were suspended as Israel headed for elections.

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