Sharm el-Sheikh

Sharm el-Sheikh is the setting for a brief attempt at independence by Boaz Brandstetter: he works on a glass-bottomed tourist boat there and seeks money to buy one for his own business. The boat’s theft from the civilian anchorage at Ophira and the ensuing confrontation with police connect this coastal setting to the precariousness of his new life, while disputes over funding show how far his plans remain subject to other people’s decisions.

Work and a Business Plan

When Alexander Gideon reports that Manfred Zakheim and detectives have found Boaz, he says Boaz is working on a glass-bottomed tourist boat at Sharm el-Sheikh and doing quite well for himself. Gideon tells Zakheim to leave the young man alone and asks that Boaz be treated as his contribution to the redemption of the liberated territories. The request is characteristically double-edged: it offers Boaz a measure of independence while casting that independence as something Gideon can account for through money and political purpose.

Boaz later asks Gideon for $5,000 to buy a glass-bottomed boat and set up his own business at Sharm el-Sheikh, plus $1,000 to build a telescope for tourists. Zakheim relays the request by telegram and reports that Gideon has refused. The proposal turns the place from a workplace into the imagined base of a business, but the refusal leaves Boaz’s intended next step dependent on the same distant benefactor whose money he seeks to escape.

The Boat’s Theft and the Ophira Arrest

An investigator’s report places the next crisis at the civilian anchorage at Ophira. During the night of 10 to 11 June, the tour boat on which Boaz had lately been working was stolen. It was found abandoned near Ras Muhammad at two o’clock in the morning, apparently after Bedouin smugglers had used it to carry hashish from the Egyptian coast. The report thus shifts the boat from livelihood and business prospect to an object implicated in a criminal pursuit.

At five o’clock, as dawn broke on 11 June, police arrested Hamed Mutani, a young Bedouin who was living with Boaz at a gas station alongside three young women from abroad. The accounts of the arrest conflict: Hamed denied resisting, while the investigator believed police and military personnel had beaten him, allegations they denied. Boaz intervened. Using a tire attached to a rope, he injured nine soldiers and five members of the Ophira police force before being overpowered and charged with obstructing a lawful arrest. At the station, his account was that the arresting officers had used violence against Hamed and that both men had acted in self-defense.

Escape and the Search Elsewhere

The report records that Hamed was released after a few hours, when interrogators concluded that he had no part in either the boat theft or the smuggling. Boaz, however, remained in custody for less than twenty-four hours. On the night of 11 to 12 June, he broke through the wall of the prefabricated police station and escaped. The officer on duty believed he was still wandering in the desert, perhaps sheltered by Hamed, and the Ophira police searched in that direction.

The investigation soon pointed away from the desert. An assistant investigator had located Boaz in a rented apartment in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, where he had stayed until two days before the report. The discovery limits what Sharm el-Sheikh and Ophira signify in this episode: they are the setting of his work, his proposed business, and the violent arrest and escape, but not the end of his flight. Together, the locations mark a sharp reversal from apparent success on the tourist boat to a life again shaped by police pursuit and movement between places.