Officials announced today that groundbreaking for a new Jewish township on the Golan Heights will begin within a few weeks. The announcement was apparently intended to underline Israel’s determination not to return any of the Golan Heights territory captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. Premier Golda Meir had made that clear over the weekend in a speech to settlers from the Golan Heights and other regions.
The new township will be populated by regular army soldiers and by civilian employes of army installations in its initial stages, the announcement said. The army’s manpower division will award concessions and subsidies to the settlers, to be announced shortly. Plans call for specially constructed houses of re-enforced concrete, public utilities, a service center and industrial area. The new town, which has not yet been named, will be located on the Kuneitra-Benot Yaacob bridge road about 16 kilometers from the 1967 cease-fire lines. It is expected to have a population eventually of between 5-8000.
In a separate action, Hakibbutz Haartzi, the Mapam-sponsored kibbutz movement, announced last night that it would build two new settlements–one on the Golan Heights and one in the Arava region of the Negev–as “our contribution to the strengthening of our future borders.” The announcement was made by the movement’s secretary, Shimon Avidan, after a two-day meeting of the Hakibbutz Haartzi Executive at Givat Haviva.
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