A City in Sinai

Except for occasional maneuvering armies, the only people who ever lingered on the scrub-and cactus-sprinkled sand dunes of northeastern Sinai were Bedouin tribesmen. That will soon change. Within the next two months, Israeli surveyors--to be followed by bulldozers and construction workers--will begin charting the site for a new city in a 40-sq.-mi. strip of coastal land below the Gaza border town of Rafah in a corner of the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula. By the end of 1974, a settlement large enough to support 350 families will have been built. By the end of the century, if the planners have their way, the settlement will have grown to a community of 232,000 people. All this is happening on territory that is still legally Egyptian, in clear defiance of a United Nations resolution and overwhelming world opinion that Israeli-conquered territory should be returned to Egypt.

"At Rafah," says an Arab lawyer in Beirut who specializes in international law, "the Israelis will be building on sand, legally speaking as well as literally. But that has never deterred them in the past." Indeed not, judging by one of Zionism's favorite epics. In 1909 a band of Jewish families followed Meir Dizengoff out of Jaffa to a deserted stretch of dunes; they listened in hope and disbelief as Dizengoff prophesied that a Jewish community of 25,000 would rise on the sand where they stood.

Dizengoff's settlement of Tel Aviv (The Hill of Spring) far exceeded even his expectations. Today greater Tel Aviv, one of whose main streets is named after Dizengoff, has a population of 1,200,000. It has swallowed up Jaffa, crowned its busy industry with smog as thick at times as Los Angeles, and generated so much crime that tough border police have been retrained and reassigned to Tel Aviv to cut down robberies and street violence.

Today, the rest of Israel is growing almost as rapidly. The present population of 3,100,000 is expected to reach 5,000,000 by the year 2000, and there is not much space to move to. Jerusalem (pop. 291,000) can accommodate few more people, and the port city of Haifa (pop. 217,000) is equally crowded. From the Lebanese border town of Nahariya to Ashkelon in the south, Israel's coastline is becoming an urban sprawl much like the Boston-Washington metropolitan corridor. Israeli planners already refer to their emerging mini-Bos-Wash as NASH.

Defense Minister Moshe Dayan's solution for this is new settlements on occupied land. In order to secure its borders, Israel, since the Six-Day War, has been building permanent settlements in territories captured from neighboring Arab states. On the Syrian Golan Heights, for instance, there is a new Israeli settlement called Benei Yehuda. Sharm el Sheikh, overlooking the Straits of Tiran in southern Sinai, has been renamed Ophir and is being developed as an Israeli town, along with the communities of Di-Zahav and Neviot farther up the coast. The Gaza Strip, although it will continue to have an Arab identity, is to remain in Israeli hands.

Buffer Zone. Dayan's concept in northern Sinai is to build up the area with Israeli settlements, not only to provide needed Israeli housing but also to make Egyptian attack impossible. He contends that the original settlement can be stretched to create a buffer zone, with satellite towns as far as the Sinai hills 50 miles away. His most vigorous opposition springs from the left-wing Mapam Party. It accepts border settlements as a temporary protective measure but believes that in the long run, the country will be more secure if a formal peace is negotiated and Arabs are granted equal rights and a separate state within what once was Palestine. Mapam leaders have criticized Dayan's proposal as "creeping annexation behind a smoke screen of pragmatic talk."

The Sinai plan was hotly debated at a recent meeting of Premier Golda Meir's Labor coalition. "Who has the strength to undertake such a city?" asked Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir, citing initial cost estimates of $950 million. Dayan's answer: "I believe in the power of the Jewish people."

For the present the proposed center is known only as Pithat Rajah (Approach to Rafah). The community is a planner's dream. Two-thirds of the population will live in twelve-story high-rise apartments. The remainder will occupy semidetached houses, eight families to an acre. Many of their social needs have already been slide-ruled and computerized: 30 students to a class room, a movie theater for each 3,500 families, four acres of sports facilities for every 1,000 families.

To control pollution and congestion, manufacturing will be limited to light industry and scattered on the edges of the city. More than 50% of the work force will have service jobs connected with the tourist industry that is expected to develop from the sandy beaches nearby and the warm, rain-free skies overhead during nine months of the year. Pithat Rafah even has the beginnings of a chamber of commerce: boosters are already bragging that the climate is much nicer than Tel Aviv's.

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