The Sinai during the 15-year Israeli occupation: a pioneer dream. After the Six-Day War, the Jewish state established an exclave on the peninsula between Asia and Africa. Along the Mediterranean coast, the Gulf of Suez, and the Gulf of Aqaba, as well as in the inhospitable hinterland, two cities and more than a dozen villages were created between 1967 and 1982. Where once Theodor Herzl had sought his "Old-New Land," a new generation was to realize the ideals of the labor-Zionist founding era. Young men and women were to bring the biblical desert to life as workers, farmers, and soldiers, and watch over it. In reality, however, the communes developed into alternative places where secular Israelis cultivated an unconventional counter-life. The author portrays the Sinai Peninsula, which, due to its geographical location, never...