World: A Sense of Betrayal

"Only yesterday we were being hailed as the commando troops of Zionism. Now we have become the main obstacle to a peace settlement."

So said Shlomo Re'em, a resident of the Israeli settlement of Di-Zahav on the Gulf of Aqaba. As TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief Dean Fischer and Correspondent David Halevy discovered on a tour through Sinai last week, inhabitants of the 18 Israeli settlements in the peninsula are united in feeling that they have been betrayed by the Camp David accords, and by their own government.

To demonstrate their anger, settlers from Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights snarled traffic in Jerusalem last week by staging a massive tractor drive-in. Later, a vociferous band of 2,000 protesters marched outside the Knesset waving banners that read WE BEG YOU NOT TO RETREAT FROM SINAI and BEGIN: ALWAYS IMPOSSIBLE TO RELY ON. Among the picketers were members of the 20 families that inhabit Ne'ot Sinai, one of 15 communities along the Mediterranean coast. The Ne'ot Sinai group was particularly angry with Begin: during a visit last year, he asked them to save a retirement cottage for him in the oasis. "We're going to stay here, no matter what," said Ofira Seibert, a Ne'ot Sinai pioneer. "We do not accept this as Egyptian territory. This is Israeli territory; it says so in the Bible. We didn't conquer anything. We just took back what was ours."

Yamit (pop, 2,000) is the largest Israeli community in Sinai. A trim town of white stucco bungalows, a modern shopping center and good schools, it was originally promoted by Moshe Dayan—then Defense Minister in Golda Meir's Labor government—as a potential regional metropolis of 250,000 people whose sheer size would make an Arab attack through northern Sinai impractical. Atzila Safrir, who operates a prosperous sidewalk cafe in Yamit, was infuriated by the way Jerusalem had reversed its support. "For ten years the government brainwashed me," she complained. "Now in two weeks they tell me the whole doctrine has gone down the drain. This is a sellout, and we are the ones on sale." Watching children play ring-around-a-rosy in the sandy yard of a nearby school, Sara Cohen softly expressed another of Yamit's objections: "If we knew that peace would be secure, it would be easier. But we're very suspicious."