Israel-Egypt Progress Reported on Taba but Key Point Is Unresolved

Egypt and Israel, ending a marathon round of U.S.-mediated talks, have made “major progress” toward resolving a festering border dispute blocking the normalization of relations frozen four years ago, U.S. sources said early today.

However, Egyptian and Israeli officials both said the talks failed to make any progress toward overcoming the main obstacle blocking an agreement over Taba, a disputed strip of beach front along the Egyptian-Israeli border in the Sinai Peninsula.

That disagreement, which centers on the wording of the question that is to be put to a team of arbiters chosen to settle the territorial dispute, was not solved despite “exhaustive” U.S. efforts over three days of talks to formulate a compromise.

“We are not speaking the same language,” said Nabil Arabi, the head of the Egyptian delegation. “As long as the Israelis insist (on their present negotiating position), we are not going to have an agreement.”

“The Egyptian position has not moved in any substantial way,” an Israeli source said. “The talks were very tough.”

However, the negotiators, emerging bleary-eyed from a final session that lasted into the early hours of the morning, reported that “very substantial progress” was made on a number of other technical but thorny problems that had eluded solutions for months.

They declined to give details but said an agreement to send the Taba dispute to binding arbitration was now “more or less complete” apart from the one outstanding issue relating to the nature of the arbitration itself.

‘A Major Achievement’

“What we accomplished was a major achievement,” said one member of the U.S. mediation team. “It still leaves us with the biggest issue ahead, but most people were skeptical that we’d get this far in only three days.”

Nevertheless, the outcome failed to live up to the expectations that both sides had publicly invested in the negotiations before they began Monday. Although the talks--held alternately in Cairo and this seafront suburb of Tel Aviv--have been dragging on for 14 months, hopes of a breakthrough this time have been raised by both sides.

In apparent anticipation of an agreement, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres sent Minister Without Portfolio Ezer Weizman to Washington to urge Secretary of State George P. Shultz to become personally involved in efforts to improve Egyptian-Israeli relations, according to reports here. U.S. officials were quoted in Israeli newspapers Wednesday as saying Shultz was considering a trip to the Middle East once the two sides had reached an agreement to submit the issue to binding arbitration.

Israel retained Taba, a 700-yard track of Red Sea beach front, when it withdrew from the rest of the Sinai in 1982 under the peace treaty signed with Egypt three years earlier. A few weeks after the withdrawal, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Israeli-Egyptian relations began deteriorating.

As a mark of its displeasure over the invasion, Egypt withdrew its ambassador from Israel. Now, Egypt has made the restoration of Taba a condition for returning its ambassador, for fleshing out relations in the fields of trade, tourism and cultural exchanges and for a summit meeting, eagerly sought by Israel, between Peres and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Policeman Opened Fire

Relations were further strained last October, when an Egyptian policeman on duty on the Sinai border apparently went berserk and opened fire on a group of Israeli tourists on the Egyptian side of the border, killing seven of them. Arrested by Egyptian authorities, the soldier later committed suicide in his jail cell. Largely as a result of the shooting incident, Israeli tourism in the Egyptian Sinai has dwindled to almost nothing.

The United States, which hopes that a resolution of the dispute will give the floundering Middle East peace process a much-needed boost, has been exerting considerable pressure on both sides.

After initially refusing, Israel earlier this year agreed to Egypt’s demand to submit the Taba dispute to binding arbitration. However, the two sides have not been able to agree on the terms for arbitration.

The disagreement centers on the wording of the question that will be put to the yet-to-be-chosen arbiters. Egypt wants the arbiters to affirm the “exact” location of the Egyptian-Israeli border between 1948, when Israel became independent, and 1967, when it captured the Sinai from Egypt during the Six-Day War. Phrased in this way, there would be no question that Taba belongs to Egypt.

Israel, which has built a luxury hotel at Taba and relies on it to help draw tourists to the neighboring resort of Eilat, insists instead that the arbiters decide on the “correct” location of the border.

Although the negotiations have come to center on a dispute over two words, the difference involves more than semantics, for the Israelis hope to argue that the “correct” border is not the internationally recognized boundary line that existed between 1948 and 1967 but the line described in a 1906 agreement between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.