Vice-Premier, Minister Shimon Peres, awoke from a short afternoon nap and went out onto the wooden veranda to look at the bleak mountains, lit up in the reddish sunset. It was the beginning of a hot, dry December, the annual memorial date for David and Paula Ben Gurion at Sde Boqer. The place was the young “Naot Farm” of the Nachimov Family, on the highway between Sde Boqer and the Telalim Junction at Ramat Hanegev.

“Our problem in Israel is overcrowding. The solution to the problem is seclusion.” Shimon Peres expressed his opinion about the short but welcome rest at one of the tens of individual farmsteads that have cropped up along the main roads of the Negev in recent years. “I feel a bit like Herzl on the balcony in Basel ,” he added with a smile; as his assistants urged him out en route for the next section of his busy agenda.

Shimon Peres would not, it seems, have been able to find these few hours of rest without the aid and vision of the KKL-JNF Friends in South Africa , which responded to the pioneering task of supporting the new agricultural settlement in the Negev in general and individual farmsteads in particular.