A Sense of Betrayal

"Only yesterday we were being hailed as the commando troops of Zionism. Now we have become the main obstacle to a peace settlement."

So said Shlomo Re'em, a resident of the Israeli settlement of Di-Zahav on the Gulf of Aqaba. As TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief Dean Fischer and Correspondent David Halevy discovered on a tour through Sinai last week, inhabitants of the 18 Israeli settlements in the peninsula are united in feeling that they have been betrayed by the Camp David accords, and by their own government.

To demonstrate their anger, settlers from Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights snarled traffic in Jerusalem last week by staging a massive tractor drive-in. Later, a vociferous band of 2,000 protesters marched outside the Knesset waving banners that read WE BEG YOU NOT TO RETREAT FROM SINAI and BEGIN: ALWAYS IMPOSSIBLE TO RELY ON. Among the picketers were members of the 20 families that inhabit Ne'ot Sinai, one of 15 communities along the Mediterranean coast. The Ne'ot Sinai group was particularly angry with Begin: during a visit last year, he asked them to save a retirement cottage for him in the oasis. "We're going to stay here, no matter what," said Ofira Seibert, a Ne'ot Sinai pioneer. "We do not accept this as Egyptian territory. This is Israeli territory; it says so in the Bible. We didn't conquer anything. We just took back what was ours."

Yamit (pop, 2,000) is the largest Israeli community in Sinai. A trim town of white stucco bungalows, a modern shopping center and good schools, it was originally promoted by Moshe Dayan--then Defense Minister in Golda Meir's Labor government--as a potential regional metropolis of 250,000 people whose sheer size would make an Arab attack through northern Sinai impractical. Atzila Safrir, who operates a prosperous sidewalk cafe in Yamit, was infuriated by the way Jerusalem had reversed its support. "For ten years the government brainwashed me," she complained. "Now in two weeks they tell me the whole doctrine has gone down the drain. This is a sellout, and we are the ones on sale." Watching children play ring-around-a-rosy in the sandy yard of a nearby school, Sara Cohen softly expressed another of Yamit's objections: "If we knew that peace would be secure, it would be easier. But we're very suspicious."

In the northern settlements Israel's pioneers were encouraged to invest their own money. One who did was Eliezer Shmuel, 31. He fought in Sinai with the army during the 1973 October War and returned to invest $17,000 in a seaside restaurant. Now Shmuel hopes bravely that "the people who brought me here will take care of me." But in the barren, hard-baked south, between a range of sawtooth mountains and the clearwater, coral-reefed Gulf of Aqaba, the government retained ownership of the land. In Ofira (pop. 1,000), residents enjoy subsidized rents that average $40 a month along with more generous income tax deductions than other Israelis receive. Evacuation ought to be financially easier for many southerners, but they are as bitter about it as Israelis in the north. Says Shimon Eluz, 35, a painting contractor who settled near Sharm el Sheikh because he loved skin diving in the deep-blue waters: "It seems to me that Israel paid a high price for the chance to get peace. Why should we give up all of Sinai? God forbid, Sadat can take back everything and then stab a knife in our backs."

A handful of Israelis speak optimistically of continuing to live within Israeli enclaves in Sinai even after Egypt regains sovereignty. Most of the settlers, however, doubt that the negotiations will allow for so amicable a resolution of their situation. "I don't believe there will ever be peace with the Arabs," says one settler. "It's a religious problem, after all, not a territorial or border problem."

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