Several days ago I happened upon a yellowing Haaretz newspaper clipping from mid-August 1973, less than two months prior to the Yom Kippur War. It reported that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had declared he was “giving top priority to the establishment of the town of Yamit in the Rafah salient (in northern Sinai), as he would to a top-rated defensive military line, to a front-line stronghold on the banks of the Suez Canal.”
The hero of the 1967 Six Day War explained that “the urban and agricultural settlement will constitute a partition between the Gaza Strip, with its 350,000 residents [who number more than 1.5 million today] and the Egyptian desert.” The senior politician attacked opponents of the Sinai settlement initiative within his Mapai (later to become Labor) party. “This whole show about Yamit is absurd,” lashed out the man who coined the saying “Sharm el-Sheikh without peace is better than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh,” a reference to the southern Sinai Peninsula town captured by Israel in 1967.