Who ended the Taba negotiation, and why? Yossi Beilin says that
Shlomo Ben Ami and Abu Ala (Ahmad Qurei) agreed to end it, but Abu
Ala denies this. Gilead Sher says he and Saeb Erekat were planning
from at least Friday to end it on Saturday. Ehud Barak acknowledges
that he wanted to end it, and there is no record that the
Palestinians objected. So it is a reasonable inference that
leadership on both sides were comfortable with a termination at
that point. The question is why? Why in the face of a Sharon
election, time racing away, a growing intifada, and the real
possibility of a framework agreement, would the two leaders decide
against sprinting for the goal line?
I put the question to former prime minister Ehud Barak: With an
agreement at least possible and with at least four days left to
negotiate, why did you end a negotiation on Saturday? He was
equally direct: "Because that was the day the Palestinians brutally
killed two Israelis and further negotiation was impossible." When I
pointed out that there were no terrorist killings on Saturday or
Friday, he said, "Oh, right, but that was the day that Arafat made
that horrendous speech calling us fascists, and there was no way to
negotiate with someone who spoke like that." And when I pointed out
that that speech was made the day after Taba ended, he said, "It
doesn't make any difference why I ended it. It had to end because
it wasn't going anywhere." When I told him that my piecing together
of interviews and memoirs suggested that a framework agreement was
at least possible with a few more days of negotiating, Barak simply
denied it.
This of course may represent precisely how he saw things on
Saturday, January 27. In the swirl of an election campaign, with a
somewhat loosely managed negotiation, and with little effort made
to coordinate the various negotiators working on different issues,
it is possible that Barak did not know how close the negotiators
were to reaching agreement. Indeed it is possible that no single
person at the negotiation was aware of this larger picture either.
Barak, however, is not known as one to acknowledge when he is
uninformed or in error. In any event he rebuffed further effort to
discuss what he knew at the time.
What Barak did not do was take the easy, conventional way out. He
did not say that Arafat wanted no deal, and he did not mention the
Wednesday night meeting. This is a hint that he had not been aware
of it at the end of Taba, and perhaps, if he had not read Sher's
memoir, he had not been aware of it at all. Barak did explicitly
negate the idea that Israelis would not have accepted a deal: "If
we had reached an agreement at Taba I was ready to go door to door
throughout the country to convince Israelis to approve it, and I
believe they would have," he said.
One possible reading of a survey of forces at work around Barak is
that his optimism and drive to reach an agreement were not enough
to overcome the pessimism and skepticism all around him, and in
him. It would have taken a leader of extraordinary strength,
willing to take larger risks, with something larger than his tiny
and diminishing base of popular support, to continue the
negotiations and push for agreement.
I have less evidence about Arafat's motive. He sent a good team,
one that clearly thought agreements were possible, that worked
diligently throughout the week and that tried to keep the Israelis
at the table. But perhaps the clearest clue to Arafat's intent,
oblique to be sure, is the ready acquiescence by the Palestinian
leadership on Saturday to the Israeli decision to end the
negotiation. When I asked Palestinians close to Arafat why he
seemed willing to end the negotiation, they professed no definitive
knowledge of his motives.
Negotiation and PoliticsM
During the week of Taba, Barak gave inconsistent, unenthusiastic
signals about his desire for an agreement. Most of his negotiators,
however, behaved as if seeking some kind of an agreement was their
purpose. What accounted for this difference?
Politics is one way to resolve differences, negotiation another.
Each has its own imperatives. ("Politics" here refers to the full
range of a politician's legitimate concerns, from staying in office
to the welfare of his/her nation.) The point of negotiation is to
reach agreement, and the process creates strong tows in that
direction. Politics is more open to the play of forces that pull
both toward agreement and toward non-agreement. Politicians can see
as much value in conflict, stalemate or delay as they can in
agreement. (The right enemy can be a political asset.) Negotiation
will normally be deemed a success only if it results in agreement.
Negotiation tends to have a near horizon. Politics can have one
near or far. When it works well, negotiation can change the
viewpoint of the negotiator by increasing his/her understanding of
the other side's view. Politicians are close to constituent
pressures, negotiators somewhat less so. Politicians see a bigger
picture; negotiators see the possibilities and frustrations posed
by the opposing negotiators with a clarity often lost on their
principal.
Though Barak was in close phone contact with the negotiation
through Gilead Sher, the negotiations often developed their own
momentum. They moved seriously and quickly into solving problems,
and many on each side seem to have been stimulated by the
seriousness of the other side. This created a sense of optimism
among at least some of the negotiators that seems not to have been
true for Arafat or Barak. Taba can thus be seen as a tug of war
between Barak at one end of the rope and some of the negotiators on
the other: on Monday and Tuesday the negotiators were winning, on
Tuesday afternoon Barak pulled back; on Thursday and Friday the
negotiators gained ground, and on Saturday Barak, with Arafat's
apparent concurrence, ended the negotiation. Several of the
negotiators asserted that the negotiation would have had a better
chance of reaching an agreement had it been conducted in secret,
i.e. a step further removed from the pull of politics, and more
like Oslo. Further, as the question of how many Palestinian
refugees would be allowed to return to Israel was explosive
politically, the negotiators worked to complicate the issue. They
developed several categories and time frames through which
Palestinians could return, making it possible for political
leadership on each side to justifiably assert different numbers
returning. On the issue of the holy places, on the other hand, the
negotiators were unable to find a solution that would be acceptable
politically, and were prepared to leave it to the political leaders
to confront.
Writing it Down
The basic question for this inquiry has been to learn why the
parties did not reach agreement. A clue can be found in the
pervasive anxiety, shared by both sides, about anything written as
part of the negotiation. On some occasions this took the form of a
resistance to putting anything down in writing; on others it took
the form of not allowing anyone outside the negotiation, and
perhaps not even others inside the negotiation, to see the writings
that were produced. Since Taba there has been a clear
Israeli-Palestinian coincidence of intent (was it an outright
agreement?) to keep all such writings secret.
There are a number of examples during the negotiation in which
turning a discussion into a draft would have fit negotiating need,
and such drafts were proposed several times. But the proposals were
declined, each side doing so on different occasions. Some drafting
did occur, however, particularly around the refugee question, but
post-Taba hiding of these drafts, or denying their existence, has
produced almost comical contortions. One previously unpublished
Israeli draft concerning refugees turned up in Le Monde several
months after Taba. It is headed "private" and a "non paper",
suggesting that the Israeli cabinet minister who authored it was,
somehow, acting not in his official capacity. "Non paper" has shown
up heading other Israeli-Palestinian negotiation documents in the
past as well.
Why all this hesitancy and secrecy? The memoirs and interviews
reveal a range of comments that I connect as an explanation for
both. These comments point to an interlocking set of fears that
constrained both negotiating sides. The first is fear of the other
side. Putting something in writing can give the opponent a tool for
use in a future negotiation, defining a place from which to demand
yet more. It is one version of the fear of the slippery slope (if I
concede on this then I will not be able to resist conceding on
other things). A concession on paper will be used by the opponent
at a future negotiating table, in the press or with an important
third party. For all the close, personal, long term, often
convivial, relationships between negotiators from each side, they
were not immune to this fear. The second fear was of citizen and
government groups, on both sides, who saw themselves as smarter and
tougher than the negotiators. Those groups were eager to criticize
the very act of negotiating, and were especially eager to criticize
particular concessions. Many of those groups were important because
they would be needed to approve an agreement and to implement it,
and because they were needed by individual negotiators for other
purposes. Though the negotiators sought some degree of privacy from
the outside world, leaks, during Taba and later, were inevitable. A
document attributable to one negotiator could be easily converted
into a weapon. It is one thing to try to persuade groups who were
not at the negotiating table to accept a package of concessions
that come with a full agreement; it is another to take one
concession, as it might appear on paper, and to justify it in
isolation without the surrounding agreement.
Within each negotiating team there was a great deal of competition,
disagreement and even hostility. The exact dynamics do not seem to
have been the same on each team, but this they had in common: each
negotiator had good reason to fear being undermined by members of
his own team. Thus, any document might be used within the
negotiation, or outside it, to discredit a negotiator in the eyes
of other team members ("he's giving away the store"), in the eyes
of the boss, or in the eyes of some other groups.
In short there was a kind of 360 degree fear: From the front, from
behind, and from the side. Each fear was linked to the other and
each re-enforced the other. Together they lead to a deep aversion
to putting anything in writing. Enhancing these fears were the
highly equivocal mandates under which each set of negotiators
worked: There was no clarity about which concessions would be
accepted by one's own boss, and there were conflicting
interpretations within each team about this question. Underlying
all these fears was one that, though inherent in most negotiations,
is especially potent among Israelis and Palestinians, the fear of
being seen as a dupe or a sucker.
This pattern of fears suggests that most of the documents are kept
hidden because, as mentioned above, they contain concessions. Were
they to be revealed in isolation and not as part of an agreement,
they could endanger their authors. The negotiators' commitment to
secrecy was part of their effort to overcome those fears. In a
setting flooded with incentives to distrust, both sides worked hard
to combat them. That so much of the writing generated at Taba has
still been kept secret is a sign that the negotiators continue to
see value in protecting each other and the ideas they
produced.
But keeping it oral and secret had a price. Most obviously, there
is no reliable record on which future negotiations can build. There
is an ongoing controversy about what was accomplished at Taba,
generally fed by the absence of available documents. In addition,
the absence of writing means that a highly charged and complex
negotiation was conducted using only spoken words and human memory.
That made a tough job a good deal tougher.
Conclusion
In trying to understand a particular negotiation, it is good to
assume that all contemporary accounts, based usually on what the
participants say, are misleading or worse. It is fair to generalize
that all Israeli-Arab negotiations have been marked by a mix of
skepticism and hope. Certainly that was the case at Taba. When the
negotiation failed to produce agreement, however, the respective
views tended naturally to emphasize the recalled skepticism, thus
distorting how things looked at the negotiation itself. One result
of this distortion is that public opinion, formed primarily by what
the press presents, becomes itself a force, influencing a
politician's sense of possibility in future negotiations. The same
hazard holds for scholars creating negotiation theory when they
base it on examples from those sources. Thus the importance of
looking skeptically at first hand accounts, of seeking a more
reliable account of what happened in a negotiation.
Every negotiation is characterized by ambivalence. Parties want a
certain solution, but only if the price is right. Parties can't
afford complete candor, and even if they provide it, the other side
can't know if it is candor they are hearing. Constituents are as
difficult to placate as are the negotiators across the table, and
neither those away from the table nor those across it are likely to
be of a single view. The passion for an agreement is always at odds
with the fear of being taken for a fool, as are the related
incentives to collaborate with the other side and to seek victory.
The negotiation at Taba exemplifies this ambivalence, and it is a
tribute to the negotiators that they could resolve these tensions
so often on the side of seeking agreement and come as close to
success as they did.
I think there will never be a better opportunity than was present
at Taba to reach an agreement. The inevitability and power of the
deadline they faced, the inevitability and power of increasing
violence if they failed, the quality of the negotiators, the small
size of most of the gaps they had to bridge, all these constituted
an unprecedented coincidence of settlement-inducing events.
Nevertheless, as with any long-term conflict, there were enormously
powerful forces working against agreement. There were reasons not
to agree that gave even the most pro-peace partisan at least some
pause. Finding agreement was not only a matter of finding the right
answer to an intellectual problem; it required a response to the
reasons and forces (including violence) working against agreement.
The possibility of intra-Israeli or intra-Palestinian civil strife
could never be ignored. Though the job for negotiators included
strategy and problem solving, the overall task was more like that
of two teams playing chess on the deck of a ship in a storm: they
had to play out the game while coping with a tumultuous environment
which included the possibility of a violent attack by an apparently
uncontrollable leviathan.
The press, popular opinion, and the official memories of
participants all account Taba to have been a failure. I dissent. In
the same way that Palestinian concessions at Oslo, Israeli
concessions around and after Camp David II, and President Clinton's
guidelines will be seen in the view of history as the largest steps
toward finding the acceptable ground for agreement, Taba will be
seen as the occasion on which the negotiators demonstrated that an
agreement between them was, probably, reachable.