(3 of 9)
Explosion In Elath. "Israel's ships voyaged through these straits over 3,000 years ago in the days of King Solomon," said Ben-Gurion in a recent speech. Back in 1935, when Ben-Gurion was an executive of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, he prophetically wrote the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that for the coming state of Israel, "whose mission is to become the Middle East's industrial center . . . Elath will play a greater economic and political role than in Biblical times." Egypt's seven-year blockade forced Ben-Gurion to shelve his projects for the outlet to Israel's other sea. But when his armies took the Egyptian gun positions last November, his plans for Elath exploded into reality.
In three months the sun-baked settlement of mauve, cerise, orange, pink and green houses set on the vast, drab coastal flats has trebled its population, will double again to 4,000 by year's end. Three and four planeloads of newcomers, including refugees from Hungary and Poland, arrive daily. Workers sleep in shifts, some on benches. Some 500 families are waiting to come as soon as housing opens up. The place has only brackish water, no bar, no milk, no private cars, one broken-down bus, one barber, one doctor. But young Elathniks work themselves to exhaustion on new projects, getting rich quick on the fantastic (for Israel) pay of $8 for a six-hour day, plus overtime.
Since the Sinai invasion, ten merchant ships have tied up at Elath's small jetty, and the volume of cargo is expected to jump to 100,000 tons over the next four months. Bright yellow bulldozers are churning up space for a new dock, the first of half a dozen planned under a $12 million, three-year program. Goal: to be able to handle 30 million tons of oil and other cargo a year.
To link Elath up with the rest of Israel, the government is paving a highway, surveying for a railroad, laying an 8-in. pipeline north to Beersheba, and dickering with a French consortium to build a 32-in. pipeline capable of transporting 25 million tons of oil a year across to the Mediterranean and Western European markets. By March, oil should be arriving from Iran, whose government, remembering how Arab countries increased their oil output during the Mossadegh troubles, seems willing to sell oil to Israel when Arab sheiks will not. "With Elath open," exults a top Israeli official, "the major powers would for the first time have a real stake in Israel just as they have a stake in the oil states."
Through Elath, Israel also hopes soon to push its trade east of Suez up to $70 million or $80 million yearly. Through Elath it also hopes to pour out the mineral wealth of the Negev—copper from King Solomon's mines processed at a refinery at Elath, and sulphates and phosphates for the five-year plans of Asia.