Settling in Along the Border

A telling anomaly of the 1967 Middle East war is that Israel, in spite of capturing vast stretches of Arab territory, actually ended up with a border 68 miles shorter than before the fighting. Reason: the present de facto lines are straighter. They are also much easier for Israel to defend. In any peace negotiation, therefore, a crucial question will be how much of this occupied territory Israel will be willing to relinquish and how much it will insist on retaining to preserve border security. TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief Marsh Clark made a threeday, 465-mile tour along Israel's eastern boundaries. He discovered "a frenzy of construction and settlement activity," which suggests that Israel is not about to surrender its occupied territory. His report:

My companion on the trip, an Israeli reserve officer, started by placing a 9-mm. pistol on the ledge under the dash of our Ford Cortina. His gesture seemed symbolic of the atmosphere along much of the border. We began at Mount Hermon, the snow-covered peak that cornerstones the border between Israel, Lebanon and Syria. There we spotted the first of the yellow bulldozers that are everywhere in the occupied territories, scraping and pushing, widening and straightening, lifting boulers or rearranging sand. It is said that Israel has more bulldozers per capita than any other nation; I can believe it.

Beneath Mount Hermon, dozers are shaping a road along which Israeli patrols can roll. The patrols keep an eye on "Fatahland," the corner of Lebanon from which the Arab guerrillas have launched destructive attacks on Israel.

From Mount Hermon, the border road winds down the Golan Heights. Until 1967, Syrian troops used the heights as an artillery platform against kibbutzim in the northern Galilee valley below. Now the heights are largely deserted. Kuneitra, which once had a population of 20,000. has only 300 today, most of them members of an Israeli kibbutz that operates a coffee shop selling apple strudel, beverages, and busts of Golda Meir. Moshe Dayan and David Ben-Gurion. Smaller Syrian villages are being bulldozed. "They had become a health hazard," explains an Israeli officer. "They provided refuge for stray dogs, cats and fedayeen." Some Golan fields still carry red-triangle signs denoting Syrian minefields. Others are lush with wheat and cotton grown by Israeli kibbutzniks who ride in tractors with armor plating on the side.

Dead Sea Life. The rolling Jordanian border south of the heights is still Israel's most vulnerable. For that reason, the government has established there a necklace of nahals. fortified camps manned by young Israelis who are equally able to farm or to fight. But where the Dead Sea provides natural protection, Israel is developing tourist attractions. In the vicinity of Masada, the legendary fortress of ancient Hebrew history, there are now three hotels with 228 rooms as well as two guest houses and three youth hostels. Another hotel, the Pan American Dead Sea (no kin to the airline), will be finished in 30 months at a cost of $5 million. The Pan American will have 181 rooms and an indoor pool fed by therapeutic waters from the lowest spot on the face of the earth.

Nearly finished is the road that rolls along the sea from Jericho to Eilat, which before Israel renamed it in 1949 was an Arab police post known, deliciously, as Umm Rashrash. Eilat is already a thriving resort. New motels line its shore and hippies occupy its beaches. But Eilat is strategically important too. The glass-bottom boats that take tourists out to marvel at the Gulf of Aqaba's coral formations rock in the swells of supertankers bringing Persian Gulf oil into Eilat to be. pipelined to the Mediterranean.

See the Battlefields. The biggest adventure of a border tour occurs along the 170-mile road from Eilat to Sharm el Sheikh at the confluence of the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea. All but about 50 miles of the highway have been completed; the immense effort being expended cannot be for any other purpose than to keep a permanent Israeli presence on the western side of the Gulf of Aqaba. When the road is finished, Israeli tourists will speed in three hours through the pink and purple Sinai mountains that it took commandos in 1956 three days to cross.

At Sharm el Sheikh the beginnings of another tourist mecca are already in place. For $14 a night one can get an air-conditioned room in an 80-bed motel, watch movies and go scuba diving. Already along another road to Sharm el Sheikh through the Mitla Pass, holidaymakers from Tel Aviv can take a five-day "See the Sinai Battlefields" tour for $98.60. Egged, Israels' biggest bus line, is now planning a 300-bed motel in Sinai at a cost of $500,000. "Why not?" asks an Egged spokesman. "The government has agreed to a 49-year lease, and who's going anywhere anyway?"

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