El-Arish, chief town of the Sinai Frontier District and the largest place on the peninsula, lies amid beautiful groves of date-palms and fertile oasis gardens on the Mediterranean coast at the mouth of the Wadi el-Arish, Sinai's largest river (dry for part of the year). El-Arish is a fishing port and a bedouin settlement with some recently established industries.
The town is said to have been founded in Pharaonic times as a place of banishment. In the Ptolemaic period it was known as Rhinocorura or Rhinocolura ("severed nose"), perhaps because prisoners confined here had their noses cut off to distinguish them as such.
With its abundant springs and ancient groves of date palms, the town was from an early period an important staging point on the Via Maris, the military road and trading route between Palestine and Egypt. In the Byzantine period the town, then known as Laris, was the see of a bishop. In the 11 th C. its population consisted predominantly of Jews, who called it Hazor. Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem, died here in 1118. In 1799 Napoleon took the town but was compelled to give it up again under the Convention of El-Arish (January 24, 1800).
The Arabic name El-Arish means "hut" referring to a legend that Jacob stayed here in a hut which he constructed for himself during his journey from Canaan into Egypt. This was one factor which led Theodor Herzl to see the town and the Arish Valley as the nucleus of a new Jewish State: a project which foundered on British resistance. In 1948 El-Arish was a base for Egyptian bombers. It was briefly occupied by Israel in 1956, and again after the Six Day War of 1967. In 1980, under the Camp David Agreements, it was returned to Egypt. The return to Egypt of further territory in Sinai in 1982 moved the Egyptian-Israeli frontiersome 25mi/40km east of el Arish, adjoining the Gaza Strip.
El-Arish possesses no tourist sights and accordingly attracts few visitors. The most notable features of the town are its groves of date-palms, which are cultivated by the bedouin in considerable numbers and represent a major source of wealth for their owners. They practice an unusual method of cultivation, found only here, digging down until they find moist soil and planting palm cuttings in the sheltered depressions thus created; the excavated soil is consolidated with stones to provide further protection. After some years by which time the holes have been filled by drifting sand the young palms are strong enough to stand up to the harsh desert conditions. The palms supply the bedouin not only with food but also with building material for the light palm huts which are still commonly found in this area.
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