The Golan Heights Revisited!

DAMASCUS – At a time when television news channels in the Middle East are spilling over with heart-wrenching stories of frightened children undergoing psychological counseling in their freshly bombed-out schools in Gaza, a reprise on the Golan Heights – the Syrian-Israeli conflict zone – may seem a little out of place, if not a downright invented crisis. This calendar-perfect rolling country, snuggled somewhere near the heart of parched holy lands, is the relatively quieter dispute in these parts.

According to Santwana Bhattacharya,Asia Times,the picture of pretty, unforced repose provided by weekend picnickers who dot the wild-flowered green meadows a few kilometers from the winding roads of Quneitra, which is under Syria’s control, underscores the calm. Here the breeze is cool, the fruits sold by the village vendors fresh and juicy, and the children playing handball look the way they should: free of cares. Nearby, parents busy themselves with nothing more pressing than a relaxed game of backgammon.

One look at this Enid Blytonish idyll and it could be legitimately asked: why open old wounds? After all, the bullet marks are  on the destroyed hospital in Quneitra , more historical memento than live and active omen. Syria and Israel have off and on been in dialogue, through mediation. They were close to a settlement even in April 2008, and are not averse to talking again. Guns are not blazing.

But, as the canny old saying goes, looks can be deceptive. A chance meeting with Hazira Mohammad, and another reality comes creeping in. The elderly Druze woman dressed in her traditional attire – black, flowing overall with light silver embroidery – had strayed from the rest of her crowd, three of her grandchildren in tow. Standing at a crossroad near a half-rubbled church, she indicates a spot where she used to sell her berries in the village across the barbed wire (which you otherwise missed) nearly half a century ago.

“There … that is the road that goes to my village, Jubhil Maizi. You walk down four kilometers, take a left turn and walk for another half kilometer … take another left. Can you see it? Can’t you see it? It’s there … on the other side … I do not know if I can go there again,” she says, haltingly. Well, I could not see. As the road wound down and wound up, there were scattered settlements visible on the far side. But I could see no village that the old Druze woman saw so clearly.

It is to remind her sons, daughters-in-law and her grandchildren of their village that she comes to Golan every summer. At least three times. Lest they forget who they are and where they come from – in a small corner of the Earth, in terms of civilization the center of the Earth for long, a sacred geography scarred by competing visions, the Druze from Golan too are a tiny flock of mohajir (emigrants) estranged from their homeland.

Hazira has been living in a tiny flat in Damascus with her family of 10 members ever since the Six-Day War in 1967. Picnics are just a pretext to draw the younger generation close to the roots, to keep them anchored. You slowly realize that behind the jollity of every bouncing ball, and every food hamper spread around the shady trees, there is a history of loss. That these are no ordinary weekend revelers, but strange pilgrims.

With a new audience before her, Hazira launches into her story – probably recounted every year to the family. She points to each and every pile of rubble lying amid the greens to resurrect a village market. “This was the biggest souk [market], our souk, in the entire Golan. It used to be very busy, full of people, music, tea-stalls … I feel sad.” Her impatient family members try to drag her away from the story-telling session. But she refuses to budge, “How can I forget? How can I live anywhere else? That was my village, they have to remember … This is where ribbons where sold, the silversmith who made my first earring.”

You can’t quite blame the younger lot. It is really hard to imagine this place was a bustling market. As her voice trails off, the quiet of the place almost gets at you. Suddenly, the stillness of the surroundings – Hazira’s marketplace of memories – engulfs everyone. For a second, you are almost tempted to mistake it for another one of those archaeological sites that abound Syria. Opulent, but dead.

The screeching sound of car tires wakes everyone from the reverie of the lost world. A family packed into an old convertible is rushing somewhere. The man behind the wheel reveals he has no time for a chat, he has to reach back before it’s too late. “Apples” was one of the words we caught. He had come to deliver apples. Israel, I learnt later, has been allowing limited sale of apples, grown by the Syrians in the Occupied Territories, to mainland Syria.

These are a few concessions – granted perhaps more on occasional whim than as part of a coherent system of peace-making – that have been extracted by Syrians in the Occupied Territories. Apart from the free university tuition that Syrian students from the villages across the concertina are allowed to access in Damascus and elsewhere.

We say “Syrian” with deliberation: the original inhabitants of occupied Golan have steadfastly refused to surrender Syrian citizenship in favor of an Israeli identity. And the authorities on the Syrian side say even the little movements that are allowed them are fraught with short-term and long-term consequences for the people.

Mohammad Ali, a senior official in the Syria-run Quneitra Governorate, claims the years of resistance put up by the Syrians in the Occupied Territories have only earned them a tough and unstable life. That they are denied electricity and water by Israel – “we are supplying them from this side”.

It seems too much prosperity in the apple trade is also not taken kindly. “They often go back to see their entire orchards have been uprooted on some pretext or the other,” he adds. Just as the students who choose to study in the Syrian universities have “to go back to plough their fields … they get no jobs”.

There is an alternative view emanating from the pro-Israeli lobby in the West, ascribing the reluctance of the Golan Syrians to come under the Israeli umbrella only to a fear of retribution in the future event of the lands reverting to Syria. From this side of the concertina, one can only fall back on general truths: a certain “stateless” modern youth have indeed come into being in our times everywhere who seek a better, stable life.

They are alive to their history and culture. What we can do is trace them as communities, through the broken-up numbers. While some 20,000 Syrians live in the Occupied Territories, 76,000 live in the part of Golan (roughly 600 square kilometers) that was restored to Syria after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. According to the report of a conference held in London in June 2007, there are also currently 346,000 displaced persons, like Hazira’s family, living scattered across Damascus and other Syrian cities.

As was widely reported in the international media, before making the 1974 withdrawal, Israel left a trail of destruction in which schools; hospitals, villages and towns were razed. While the United Nations (UN) condemned the action and still does not recognize the Israeli occupation of Golan, the Syrian government continues to preserve Quneitra in its bombed-out state as a reminder of the Israeli action.

Says Ali, “Our president has made it clear, we will not rebuild Quneitra [which was the capital of Golan] till we get back our land.” The rationale goes a bit beyond those war-era skeleton buildings preserved, for instance, in Berlin: this is not architecture as moral fable, but as evidence in court.

At the “Shouting Valley” in Majdal Shams, a small town right at the edge of the UN-monitored border, our cell phones received text messages that said “Welcome to Israel”. It is here that Syrians gather to peer at the Occupied Territories through binoculars. Sometimes they contact their relatives on the other side through loudhailers.

Sixteen-year-old Jahina Safi Ali, who’s come to Golan for the first time to “see it with her own eyes”, says “the experience” is much beyond what she “ever thought it would be”. However, the teenager adds quietly that though young people like her want their occupied land back, “I don’t want people to be killed, rather we should talk. And try very hard [to break the deadlock].”

The settlements on the Israel-held side look quite prosperous. Big houses, none less than three storey, big cars, air-conditioners, pretty garden patches. And there’s heavy-duty construction work going on, as the half-finished new houses and rumbling sounds from the beyond tell us. That fact says something. The dispute over Golan is, finally, not just for military, strategic reasons, but also because of the ecosystem of the Golan plateau, which is rich in water sources. The scenic beauty is just a plus. It continues to provide Israel 15% of its total water supply.

Meanwhile, on no-man’s land between the two Golans, UNDOF (the UN Disengagement Observation Force) peacekeepers man towers to ensure the ceasefire is not broken. And so that there’s no fresh encroachment. They mostly have the view of the snow-clad Mount Hermon for company.

Mohammad Abdo Al-Ibrahim