Reply #49: He didnt reject it...

[shaayecanaan]

At no stage did the Palestinians reject "everything in it". Their position was very much that with some movement here and there, it was acceptable to them.

Arafat said as much when he publicly said in 2002 that he accepted each of the basic tenets of the Taba proposal. However, Israel said that the Taba proposal was no longer on the table.

The Taba talks started on January 20, 2001 and ended on January 27, 2001. At the end of the talks the two sides made a joint statement saying:-

The sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli election.

Saeb Erakat, the Palestinian negotiator, was of the opinion that only six weeks were needed to settle a final agreement. This was not so much because there were outstanding disputes, but because the Taba proposal was reasonably complicated and there remained much to be ironed out, as compared with the Egypt-Israel agreement, which was basically a full withdrawal and therefore was less complicated.

Ariel Sharon was elected on 6 February 2001. He immediately made it known he would not continue the Taba talks nor would he meet with Arafat in person.

On 8 February 2001, barely a week after the talks concluded, Barak issued a statement saying that the Taba proposals were not binding on the state of Israel (Barak was still PM until Sharon took power in March):-

Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud Barak clarified this evening that the ideas which were brought up in the course of the recent negotiations conducted with the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, including those raised at the Camp David Summit and by President Clinton towards the end of his term in office, are not binding on the new government to be formed in Israel. In a letter to President George Bush, Prime Minister Barak stated that his government had done the utmost to bring about an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but that these efforts did not bear fruit, primarily because of a lack of sufficient readiness for compromise on the part of the Palestinian leadership...Before sending the letter, Barak spoke with former President Clinton, and they were in agreement that the ideas raised in the past months are not binding on the new government in Israel. Prime Minister Barak intends to convey this position also to the heads of the European Union and to Chairman Arafat.

At the end of the day, it was Sharon that scuttled Taba by refusing to continue negotiations. The two sides had simply run out of time. Even if the Palestinian side had agreed to everything on the first morning of Taba, it is very doubtful that the agreement could have ratified by the Knesset in time before the elections were held. Sharon made it very clear that he would not abide by Taba in the event that he were elected.

As I said earlier, your modus operandi is simply to post bare assertions of facts that are untrue. Sometimes, a poster such as myself or someone like Douglas Carpenter takes the time to counter your streams of drivel with a post that sets out the relevant facts. However, that takes a certain amount of dedication and I have no doubt that in a couple of weeks' time you will simply be spouting the same nonsense on a new post.

I don't know how that might be rectified - some boards have a facility that allows poor-quality responses to be downgraded based on viewers' response - the Guardian CiF does this but it is prone to abuse. Perhaps posts on oft-disputed topics such as Taba might be made into stickies on a forum such as this so that they just dont get buried under the new layers of rubbish.