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.

The majority in the government voted at the time in favor of Dayan’s plan and decided to allocate budgets for an infrastructure to house 250,000 inhabitants in the Yamit strip. President Shimon Peres, then serving as minister of transportation, promised to turn Yamit into a leading Mediterranean port city. At the height of that period, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat sent numerous messages to the government of Prime Minister Golda Meir regarding his desire for peace with Israel. Sadat warned that if Israel did not peacefully hand over the Sinai, Egypt would try to gain it back on the battlefield. Sadat was to recount in later years that the Israeli government’s decision to establish Yamit convinced him beyond a doubt that it was not willing to pay the price for peace with Egypt, and there was no alternative to war.

The Yom Kippur War, which took the lives of 2,650 Israeli soldiers, did not stop the funneling of funds to the Sinai settlements. It’s fair to assume that were it not for Sadat’s 1977 peace initiative, the settlements of Yamit, Neot Sinai and Ofira (the Hebrew name given to Sharm el-Sheikh) would have grown and flourished. Following the peace agreement with Egypt, reached after the traumatic October 1973 war, Israel was forced to evacuate 4,300 Israelis from their homes in 19 settlements in the Sinai Peninsula. For the sake of comparison, in those days, no more than 12,000 Israelis resided in West Bank settlements, less than 4% of their current population.