Sinai: Moonscape With a Future

Founded in the 6th century, St. Catherine's monastery sits at the foot of Mount Sinai, atop which, according to biblical tradition, the Lord gave Moses the Ten Commandments. In 1946 one adventurous visitor to this Greek Orthodox abbey, which then was 100 miles from the nearest town of any consequence, was shocked to learn that the monks had not yet heard of World War II. He was even more astounded to discover that some of them had never heard of World War I.

St. Catherine's is no longer quite so remote. Last week hundreds of Israeli tourists stormed the monastery and broke down the gate after the cloister's eleven frightened monks tried to lock them out. The tourists were there to celebrate Succot, a Jewish holiday commemorating the survival of the Children of Israel during their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. The pilgrims apparently assumed that by this time next year the Sinai would again be under the control of Egypt, and they might be denied access to the site where, according to Exodus, God spoke to Moses from a burning bush.

For centuries before the Israelis captured the Sinai during the Six-Day War of 1967, the 24,000-sq.-mi., arrowhead-shaped peninsula (twice the size of Belgium) was pretty much a forgotten wasteland. As late as 1967, its population was only about 50,000, including 10,000 Bedouins and perhaps 40,000 Palestinians and Egyptians who lived in the town of El Arish near the Israeli border. The Egyptians, who have had a somewhat vaguely defined sovereignty over the area since 1906, developed some oilfields in the Sinai, but for the most part they preferred to preserve it as a buffer zone between themselves and the Israelis. To the Egyptian peasants, the region seemed a scorched, treeless moon scape, ill-suited for settlement. They preferred the congested misery of their villages in the fertile Nile Valley.

Then came eleven years of Israeli occupation, and the desert began to bloom. The Israelis settled 4,500 people there, primarily in the towns of Yamit and Ofi-ra and in 15 agricultural communities. They grew vegetables in Rafah and built resorts on the Gulf of Aqaba. They spent $150 million on civilian enterprises and $2 billion on military installations, including two big new airfields, two old ones, three early warning stations and about 1,000 miles of roads. Jerusalem continued to develop the Sinai even after the disengagement agreements of 1974 and 1975, under which the Israelis pulled back from the Suez Canal, the Egyptians reduced their forces in the area, and the Israelis returned the Ras Sudr and Abu Rudeis oilfields to Egyptian control.

The years of Israeli occupation of the peninsula have heightened the Egyptians' sense of loss. As a "last mission," President Anwar Sadat dreams of building a shrine on Mount Sinai at which Christians, Jews and Muslims can pray together. And now that Israel has agreed in principle to withdraw, Egyptian planners are busy drawing up ambitious schemes for transforming the Sinai into a rich national asset. In addition to oil exploration, mining and tourism, the government has plans for reclaiming 700,000 acres of land in the northwestern Sinai by piping in water from the Nile.

Why did the Egyptians not try harder to develop the Sinai before the Israelis seized it in 1967? Osman Ahmed Osman, the country's biggest building contractor, argues that the Aswan Dam has made new dreams possible. In the past, Osman claims, Egypt was in constant danger of running out of water in any given year and thus could not develop new areas. Now, the Egyptians believe, they have the water power to make the northwestern Sinai blossom like the Nile Valley.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.