Word: rafah
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Israelis see it, their proposal offers the Egyptians several concrete concessions. It would allow the Suez Canal to be reopened and leave the Egyptians free to develop the northern shore of the Sinai as far as Rafah, a region the Israelis have been eying for new resort communities. The exact eastern border would be subject to negotiation. As one Israeli Cabinet minister put it: "They have something solid here with which to convince both their people and the rest of the Arab world that they have done an honorable deal...