The small town and holiday resort of Taba, which shares a boundary with Israel on the Sinai Peninsula, is a symbolic place for the Egyptian people. It is here that current obsessions with security meet the tourism industry, an industry crumbling under pressure at the moment.      

The small town and holiday resort of Taba, which shares a boundary with Israel on the Sinai Peninsula, is a symbolic place for the Egyptian people. It is here that current obsessions with security meet the tourism industry, an industry crumbling under pressure at the moment.      

“I am sorry folks, but you cannot enter,” said the police officer in charge of security on the road between Taba and Nuweiba, a coastal town further east on the Sinai Peninsula. Four men from Cairo had driven ten hours and they wanted to spend the holiday of Eid in Taba. But they didn’t have a hotel booking and were turned away at the border because of that.

“They don’t want us to disturb the Zionists’ peace,” one of the men commented sarcastically.

In fact, the “Zionists’ peace” is largely irrelevant in Taba these days as Israeli tourists have almost completely stopped coming here since the Egyptian revolution that toppled former leader, Hosni Mubarak. This is due to fears about security and the ongoing relationship between Egypt and Israel.

However the disappointed traveller’s reaction is not unusual: it reflects the way a lot of Egyptians feel about this boundary area.

Despite Mubarak’s attempts to make Taba thoroughly Egyptian after 1989 negotiations that saw the territory, which had been taken over by Israel, restored to Egypt, Taba is still an anomaly. The strict security measures are an indication of this.

Such measures  have all but made any public transport impossible in Taba, and I had to hire a private car to drive me five minutes down the road. The car’s Bedouin driver, Hassan Hweti, complained that nothing had changed here since the late 1980s. The streets, which were paved by Israeli forces in expectation of further construction, have never been repaired or improved.

When I got out of the car, I didn’t have any signal on my mobile phone. But then I received two messages from foreign mobile telephone networks – one from Saudi Arabia and the other from Jordan. Both of these told me I was now within their coverage area. A message from an Israeli network then told me the same.

In fact, as Hweti explains, the people of Taba only have access to one Egyptian mobile phone service here.

Taba is a quiet town. It is bordered by sea on the left and the desert to the right and has only five hotels – the more populous tourist resort, Taba Heights, is down the coast. And locals seem to fear strangers: it’s hard to get answers to the simplest questions here. This is due to the “sensitivity of the area,” Zakaria Fathallah Mukhtar, head of security in one of Taba’s hotels, says.

“Only 74 apartments have been constructed here by the Egyptian government since 1989,” Mukhtar, a former Chairperson of Taba’s Chamber of Commerce, said. “And most of those apartments are inhabited by members of the security forces. We proposed that land be bought so that a housing co-op could be built but the Egyptian government denied us. Also, there is a lack of basic services like sewage systems,” he complained.

Recently a hospital was opened in Taba, although there is a well-equipped hospital in Sharm el-Sheikh, an area about 200 kilometers away very popular with tourists. The level of service at the Taba hospital is allegedly much lower.

A foreign tourist was near death, one ambulance driver, Ramadan Srour, says, and she had to be taken to the hospital in Sharm el-Sheikh because services were not available in Taba.

Taba’s lack of administrative support and infrastructure were also discussed by Ahmad Ankawi, the General Secretary of Southern Sinai Governorate. He said that the Egyptian Ministry of Development was going to conduct a study to assess whether it was possible to zone Taba as a “city” rather than as a “village”, as it currently zoned. This would allow authorities to allocate extra funds to Taba and to declare an area near the harbor an economic free zone, where foreigners would be able to invest more easily.