Word: kallia
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Dates: during 1969-1969
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...Kallia workday is long for the na-halniks, as they call themselves. Eight hours are spent on farm work, followed by four to five hours of military training and guard duty. The settlement provides Israel with a close watch on traffic over the main highway from...
Jordan River to Jerusalem, and each morning the first order of the day is inspection. The dirt tracks that lead through Kallia's fields must be minutely examined for mines that fedayeen infiltrators from Jordan may have planted during the night. Until that task is completed, no one is allowed to venture out of the settlement to farm. The boys do the rough work in the fields, the girls work in the kitchen and care for Kallia's menage of 450 ducks, eight dogs and a mule...
Private Sources. The most important man at Kallia is not a soldier but a 27-year-old agronomist named Dani Afik. A specialist in arid-zone agriculture, Afik so far has put into cultivation 50 of Kallia's 4,000 acres of arable land. His first problem was finding water. Two bores have turned up unusable water, and he had to turn to the Wadi Kelt supply some five miles away. Trouble was, they were owned by an Arab family. "Whoever heard of private families owning water sources," says Afik more in amusement than anger. "At first the Arabs...
...same colonial principle has been applied to the construction of a new road from Kallia to En Gedi, another settlement 25 miles to the south on the Dead Sea. "We could have built the road in half the time," says Dani, "but we wanted to give the Arabs work." Most of the road workers are from the Gaza refugee camps. The pay is good, they say, twice as much as they got under the Egyptians...
...Arabs might not agree. "No one ever worked this land. No one ever lived here. We are not throwing anyone out. It does not belong to anybody, except to God. The earth is lifeless. Smell it. It has no odor. We will put life back in it." As for Kallia's immediate future, Dani says: "We need three things. The road, water and peace. The one we're building. The second we'll find. And if we have those two, the third will come in due time...