Peace cover-up

Press, 4 March 1978, Page 15

Peace cover-up

By

ARIK BACHAR,

of NZPA-Reuter

' One side effect of an Arab-Israeli peace agreement could be the disappearance of perhaps the only nudist resort in the Middle East. Every year thousands of youngsters from the United States, Europe, and the Far East flock to this oasis on the southern shore of the Sinai Desert to disport naked amid the palm trees and the sand dunes. It was built up as a resort by Jewish settlers who moved in after the area was captured from Egypt in 1967. Under present Israeli peace proposals the Sinai Desert, including Nuweiba. would be handed back to Egypt. Set some 90 kilometres south of Israel’s port of Eilat, on the Gulf of Aqaba, Nuweiba lies on the road which the Israelis built along the coast to the strategic Red Sea port of Sharm El-Sheikh. Israeli engineers drilled a well and put up a few buildings which became the settlement of Neviot. When the 250-kilometre road to Sharm El-Sheikh was completed, a group of Israelis from the Tel Aviv area received Government premission to settle in some of the houses, and turn the others into a resort village. While mid-summer weather there is unbearably hot, the combination cf desert and sea provides comfortable temperatures about 25 degrees in winter. Israelis flock there when rain hits the north of the country. When the settlement was first established nearly seven years ago, income from the resort village was insufficient for the 40 families living there, so the settlers turned to agriculture.

Soon they had market gardens flourishing in the desert. The climate enables the farmers to export melons and cucumber to Europe in the middle of winter. The manager of the settlement, Ofer Rosenfeld,

said the desert formed no obstacle to the development of agriculture. “We use the most sophisticated techniques, like fertilising the soil through our drip irrigation system.” He said the Government had dug a second well in the area and the water was now just enough for the resort needs and irrigation. “Just give us enough water, and we will turn this desert into one big garden,” he declared. However, the emphasis has been on developing the area for tourism. The capacity of the holiday village was doubled, and the settlers added sporting facilities, such as a subaqua club and diving school. Foreigners who visited the area in the early days of the settlement spread its name around. The place was soon packed with hippies, who realised they had found an ideal place “away from the square world,” as one of them put it. They could lie on the beach naked and use drugs in almost complete freedom, since police were rarely seen in the area. The Israeli inhabitants, Mr Rosenfeld said, were not so keen on having

“that type of population around us with all the litter and drugs. They keep away respectable tourists.” The police were called in to enforce order, and now six cough-lOoking officers stage occasional raids on the long beach near the village trying to catch drug takers.

As a result, many youths from abroad have headed further down, to the next Israeli settlement, 100 kilometres along the road, or even as far as Sharm El-Shejkh. Betsy, from Michigan, arrived “just for a week or so.” She spent a fortnight on the beach, and then got a job as a waitress in the resort dining hall.

“It’s just too lovely here, so I’m thinking of stying until spring returns to the freezing homeland,” the sun-tanned girl said. A teen-ager from Sweden who refused to be identified remarked: “We have representatives here from enough countries to enable us to form our own United Nations. Every other youngster in Europe knows about this place, although I’m not sure how many have heard of Tel Aviv.”

Mr Rosenfeld said he and his colleagues had a lot of ideas to develop the area, and the Government had already promised to provide aid. Asked about the prospects of 'the area’s returning to Egypt under a peace settlement as a result of the present negotiatons, he said: “None of us here is a fanatic like those settlers on the (occupied) West Bank (of the Jordan). We shall not demand to stay here at any cost, or it will place an obstacle on the road to peace.”