Yamit - History

History

On January 14, 1972, the Israeli government ordered the expulsion of the Bedouin inhabitants of the Rafiah plain, about 18 square miles of land in northeast Sinai. The tribal sheikhs claimed 20,000 people were affected by the expulsion. Israeli army statistics put the number of expelled at 4,950. Those with tents were given a day to remove them and abandon their communities. Those in concrete houses were given an extra day to leave, and their homes were reduced to rubble. The decision to build the town of Yamit was approved by the Israeli government in September 1973.

Settling northeastern Sinai was an idea strongly promoted by Moshe Dayan. The idea was subsequently proposed in a document on Israeli policy in the occupied territories written by Yisrael Galili, drafted to bridge the gap between hardliners and moderates in the Israeli Labour Party. According to one Israeli kibbutznik who visited the area immediately after the expulsion:

"A group of members from kibbutzim in the region, including me, started to investigate. We went out and toured the area, and were stunned by the dimensions of the wreckage, and by the number of persons who were expelled. The IDF and the government denied the facts that we presented, and claimed that they had merely evacuated a few nomads from state lands onto which the nomads had recently encroached."

The expulsion was not mentioned in the Israeli press. A month later, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross met and raised the issue with Dayan's viceroy in the territories, Shlomo Gazit, who knew nothing of it. The IDF chief of staff David Elazar, on being informed, flew over the area by helicopter to see for himself and subsequently appointed a commission to investigate what Ariel Sharon had done.

The subsequent inquiry revealed that the expulsion of the Bedouins had occurred under Dayan's personal initiative and without government authorization. Golda Meir's government implemented the pre-prepared plan for settlements on this Bedouin territory. According to one source, it was this official decision to establish a large Israeli city at Yamit which, for Anwar Sadat and senior Egyptian officials, "was the straw that broke the camel's back", eventuating in the loss of hopes for a peace agreement and the onset of the Yom Kippur War. Avi Shlaim argues however that the Arab decision to go to war preceded the Galilee Document's publication. Nonetheless, Dayan made public remarks about his intention to build a deep-water port at Yamit, cutting Egypt off from the Gaza Strip and Sadat is on record as saying: "Every word spoken about Yamit is a knife pointing at me personally and at my self-respect."

Local kibbutzniks, such as Oded Lifshitz, and Latif Dori, many of whom were also activists in the left-wing Mapam party ran Rafiah tours in order to show Israelis the destruction that had taken place, and to bring to public attention the fact that the image of the Bedouin as nomads was inexact, and that their orchards were being bulldozed. In July 1972, nine Bedouin sheikhs from the area petitioned the Supreme Court of Israel in order to obtain an order permitting them to return to their homes. Their case was presented by a Mapam man, Haim Holzman, who argued that the evacuation had no legal or military rationale, and violated the Geneva Convention. Ariel Sharon was ordered by the court to show cause for the expulsion. General Israel Tal gave a deposition arguing that the Rafiah Plain area had been used by terrorists, who had attacked Israelis, as a shelter. A buffer zone, involving "Jewish settlement and presence" between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, was required for security reasons. Holzmann replied, arguing that Tal's own maps showed terrorist attacks had been in decline, and the incidents enumerated lay outside the zone where the expulsion had taken place. Holzmann died of a heart attack before his summation, later given by his law partner, could be delivered.

Moshe Dayan envisaged a metropolis whose population would be expanded to a quarter of a million people by the year 2000. His plan was shelved because its cost would have had serious consequences for Israel's poor. The first residents arrived in August 1975 and the population quickly expanded, reaching a peak of four thousand within three years. Most of the population was composed of secular Israelis who were attracted to the pristine settings near the Mediterranean and the low cost of housing. The town was positioned about half a kilometer away from the shore, adjacent to Bedouins who lived nearby along the shoreline itself.

The evacuation of Yamit was part of the final stage of Israeli evacuation from Sinai. It was carried out in the face of powerful domestic opposition in Israel. Moshe Arens (Likud), the head of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and professor Yuval Ne'eman, the leader of the right-wing Tehiya party, led that opposition. They wanted to stop the evacuation and revoke the peace treaty with Egypt, arguing, that once Egypt had the entire Sinai, it would cancel the peace treaty with Israel and rejoin the rest of Arab world. Yamit was evacuated on April 23, 1982 amid resistance by some Yamit settlers and other supporters. Some residents barricaded themselves on the rooftops before being dragged into buses by Israeli soldiers. Political extremists from the rest of the country infiltrated Yamit to demonstrate their solidarity and sabotage the withdrawal. Among the more extreme examples of resistance were the disciples of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who vowed to take their own lives rather than surrender. After the personal intervention of Kahane, they agreed to leave.

The initial agreement between Israel and Egypt stipulated that Egypt would pay $80 million for the houses and infrastructure of Yamit. Ariel Sharon, though he claimed, wrongly, that he did so in response to an Egyptian request, decided to destroy the settlement. According to the Israeli ambassador to Egypt at the time, Moshe Sasson, Begin feared that the Israeli settlers would return to their homes surreptitiously and a disastrous clash between them and the Egyptians might occur. One suggestion was that Sharon deliberately made the whole process more traumatic then it needed to be, so that the Israeli public would refuse the dismantling of other settlements even for the sake of peace. The decision to raze the settlement caused substantial ill will towards Israel among the Egyptian public.