With the withdrawal from eastern Sinai now imminent, Israel has had to think in terms of substitutes for the glorious vacation and relaxation areas along the Sinai coastline that are to be handed back to Egypt next April.
Hopefully, of course, Israeli and foreign tourists to Israel will continue to be able to visit these sites — Nueba, Dahab, Sharm el-Sheikh, and others. But however simple the procedures for crossing the border will be, the feelings clearly will not be the same as when there was no border to cross.
Among the organizations assessing the meaning of the pullback in terms of tourism and recreational facilities has been the Jewish National Fund. Its chairman, Moshe Rivlin, interviewed by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, spoke of two “alternative” areas inside Israel which the JNF together with the government Tourism Authority are already planning to take up at least part of the slack that will be left by the evacuation from Sinai.
These are the shores of the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias) and the area east of Jerusalem, on the West Bank, between the Etzion block of settlements and the ancient mountain fortress ruin of Herodium.
THE ROLE OF THE JNF
The JNF’s role will be the trail-blazing and earth-works in the initial stages, and later landscaping, tree-planting and laying out recreational facilities. The Sea of Galilee project will focus, according to Rivlin, on the northern and eastern shore of the lake, and will blend into the existing “Jordan Park,” an ambitious JNF project which has converted a large area around the Jordan River’s entry-point into the lake into a natural recreation area.
The Etzion-Herodium idea, too, would blend into another ambitious JNF scheme which is just now beginning to be implemented, the “Jerusalem Green Belt.” Having won government and municipal approval, JNF planters have embarked on a project, which, five years from now, according to Rivlin, will have created a forest belt around the capital over an area of 10,000 dunams (2,500 acres).
The belt would be largely on the fringes of the municipal boundaries of the city, all of it on state-owned land, so expropriations are not necessary. It will stretch from Atarot and Neve Yaacov in the north to Gilo in the south, both new suburbs of greater Jerusalem.
Rivlin termed this “a giant project.” He said now that the green light has been given, work will proceed at a “smart pace.” There will be a preponderance of pines in the forest as there is in the Jerusalem area in general, but the forest will contain many other species, too.
The Jerusalem Green Belt project itself dovetails into the overall national master plan for forestry in Israel which, Rivlin disclosed, has recently won government approval.
In barest outline, the plan calls for Israel to have 1.5 million dunams of woodland by the end of the century as compared to one million today. There are 27 million dunams of land in the country as a whole outside the administered territories. Rivlin said the 1.5 million dunams target was a “reasonable” area proportionally.
For the JNF this will mean planting 25,000 dunams each year or, expressed in terms of trees, three million trees a year. The project is in addition to the JNF’s ongoing care of new and middle-aged forests which require attention if they are to continue flourishing.
The master plan’s effects in the Negev will be little short of revolutionary, Rivlin said. He termed it “pushing back the desert” and spoke of the various arid-zone research undertakings that are proceeding in the area.
In the region of Yatir in the northern Negev — the Hebron hill range on the West Bank — there are plans for six or seven new Jewish settlements. All of these will directly and materially benefit from this research into making the difficult soil of the region fruitful. In addition, the JNF plans to plant 2.5 million new trees in the region which will serve as a recreational facility for Beersheba.
An even more unpromising area which is being made fertile is the Sodom valley. To date only one settlement has been built there, Neot Hakikar, founded in 1970. By damming and channelling work, the JNF and the Jewish Agency settlement department have been able to divert winter flood waters into additional area and provide sufficient potential arable land for the planners to blueprint the establishment of another five or six settlements in the region.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
