Fight Over a Topless Beach

Diplomats describe the Taba dispute as "symbolic," if only because, on its merits, the spat is so thoroughly ludicrous. Taba is a 750-yd. stretch of beach front on the northern shore of the Gulf of Aqaba, which is shared by Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Yet for the past four years, Taba has helped chill relations between Israel and Egypt.

Egyptian President Anwar Sadat promised his countrymen that "every inch" of Egyptian territory seized by the Israelis in 1967 would eventually be recovered, but when the Israelis withdrew from the rest of the Sinai in April 1982 under the terms of the 1979 peace treaty, they held on to Taba. The coastal strip, five miles southwest of the Israeli town of Eilat, already boasted a Tahitian-style resort village, complete with topless beach, which had been built by a businessman with a 98-year lease from the Israeli government. Seven months later, in November 1982, another entrepreneur completed a 326-room, $20 million hotel at Taba. The builder, Eli Papouchado, knew that ownership of the land was disputed, but says he went ahead with government approval. Israel bases its claim to Taba on a 1906 Turkish map that delineated the border between Egypt and Palestine, which was then a province of the Ottoman empire. According to that document, the line ran close to three palm trees that still exist. The Egyptian counterclaim hinges on a 1915 map drawn up by British military surveyors, including T.E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia. This map places the border on a hilltop more than half a mile east of the 1906 line -- and, as it turns out, in or near the present hotel.

The Israelis reject the 1915 version, claiming it was faked by the British in order to give them a pleasant view of the port of Aqaba, now part of Jordan. In fact, say the Israelis, the British blurred the issue quite literally by marking the border on the 1915 map with a very thick pencil. But if the Israelis had a claim to Taba, reply the Egyptians, why did they make no attempt to retain it when they overran and then withdrew from the Sinai following the 1948 and 1956 wars? Papouchado favors a Solomonic solution, suggesting that the two countries maintain joint control of Taba and that he be allowed to run his hotel in peace.