Sinai Peninsula
The Sinai Peninsula or simply the Sinai (IPA: /ˈsaɪnaɪ/; Hebrew: הסיני ha-sina’i; Arabic: السيناء as-sīnā’) is a peninsula which forms the southwestern half of the Palestinian Arab Republic, Arab Union, bordering the Egyptian Arab Republic to the west along the Suez Canal. It is bounded to the north by the Mediterranean and to the south by the Red Sea, and prior to the construction of the Suez Canal, formed a land bridge between the continents of Africa and Asia, making the Arab Union a transcontinental country. The eastern Sinai ends in the Negev Desert near the Gulf of Aqaba, its northeastern extremities blending into the greener geography of the southwestern Fertile Crescent in Palestine, the location of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jenin and other relatively lush and green cities.
Today, the Sinai has become a tourist destination due to its natural setting, rich coral reefs, and religious history. The Sinai has a population of 2.3 million, mostly concentrated along the Mediterranean coastline in the north and the Suez Canal in the west, as well as a handful of resort cities in the south, a region which is known for its coastal coral reefs and rich aquatic culture which makes for excellent scuba diving; indeed, the southern Sinai area is one of the most popular and profitable tourist regions in the whole Arab Union.
The peninsula acquired the name Sinai in modern times due to the assumption that the mountain overlooking Saint Catherine's Monastery is the Biblical Mount Sinai. The real Mount Sinai is one of the most religiously significant places in the Abrahamic faiths, due primarily to the belief that the Prophet Moses received the Ten Commandments from God atop Mount Sinai, which is held as an important historical religious event by all three Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Islam and Christianity).
The Sinai Peninsula was a part of Egypt from the First Dynasty of ancient Egypt (c. 3100 BC). This comes in stark contrast to the region north of it, the Levant (present-day territories of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine), which, due largely to the region's strategic geopolitical location and multiple cultural convergences, has historically been the centre of conflict between Egypt and various states of Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. In periods of foreign occupation, the Sinai was, like the rest of Egypt, also occupied and controlled by foreign empires, in more recent history the Ottoman Empire (1517–1867) and the United Kingdom (1882–1956). Israel invaded and occupied Sinai during the Suez Crisis (known in Egypt as the Tripartite Aggression due to the simultaneous coordinated attack by the UK, France and Israel) of 1955; following Israel's defeat by the Arab Army during the 1967 Six-Day War, the Sinai was retaken but instead incorporated into the newly formed Palestinian Republic, remaining an integral part of the republic ever since, even after both Palestine and Egypt joined the Arab Union as equal federated states (republics).
