Wednesday morning Jiries and I got up early and by 8 am we were on the road to the Sea of Galilee and the Golan Heights. We traveled east until we reached the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea, and then turned north along the Jordan River towards Tiberias. The lowest point in the world, the Jordan Valley is a beautiful area known as the breadbasket of Palestine because of its rich agricultural benefits. Beyond the valley there are rolling desert mountains in the distance everywhere you look, in the West Bank and across the river in Jordan. Since the whole Jordan Valley is part of Area C, which means it is a Palestinian land under complete Israeli control, everywhere you stop the stores are filled with settlers and the signs are all in Hebrew. Most of the agricultural land has been confiscated by Israeli officials and given to the settlers, who often times hire the Palestinians as workers on the land that was once theirs. The irrigation for all these crops comes from the Jordan River, which is much more like a stream at this point. It is very likely that it will be completely dried up within the next few years since all of the surrounding countries rely heavily on it as a water source.
The Israeli flag: the two blue stripes represent the Nile and the Euphrates, which is how far biblical Israel supposedly spanned, and is the ultimate land-grab goal for orthodox Zionists today.
The Jordan River- which used to be 3 kilometers wide:
On our trip we passed the ancient city of Jericho, which was once controlled by Israel but as a part of the Oslo Agreements it was given back to the Palestinians along with Ramallah; however, there is only one entrance road into the city because the Israeli military closed down the other. We past the old dirt road that Palestinians used to travel on to go to Jordan, there is a giant sign at the beginning of it that says “Gandi’s Road,” dedicated to the late Israeli Minister of Tourism. Jiries told me that he was the man who advocated the position that all Palestinians should be sent to Jordan and one day he was assassinated by a Palestinian, so now the road to Jordan is named after him. Instead of that road the Palestinians now use the King Hussein Bridge to reach Jordan, which is where they have to go if they want to travel anywhere since Amman has the closest airport and they can’t use the one in Tel Aviv.
Eventually we reached the border between the northern part of the West Bank and Israel. The checkpoint soldiers directed us to the right, where we parked at a small border station. We had to unload everything from the car, bring it inside the building and put it all through an x-ray machine, then go through security ourselves. While we were inside we had to leave the car trunk, hood and doors open so that the soldiers and a bomb-sniffing German shepherd could search it. The whole ordeal took almost half an hour, mostly because the female soldier working at the x-ray machine could not figure out whether Jiries’ laptop was actually a computer or not. It wasn’t that we were particularly suspicious; most cars passing through were stopped to be searched. It’s just procedure.
A couple hours later we got to Tiberias, a city right next to the Sea of Galilee (which is known as Tiberias Lake here). Before the establishment of Israel, it was a well-populated Palestinian town named Tubarias (I definitely didn’t spell that right, but it is pronounced tub-ah-ree-us). We searched for a while until we found a nice beach location that wasn’t too crowded. It was the private beach for a hotel near the water, but for a few shekels it is open to the public. There were a lot of tourists as well as liberal and conservative Israelis. I can’t remember if I have ever mentioned this before, but it is really interesting how much the conservative Jewish and Muslim women have in common. In Israel, the orthodox women cover their hair with bandana-like scarves and wear long sleeve shirts with floor-length skirts. Muslim women also cover their hair, but they usually wear pants with a long tunic-like shirt instead of a skirt. When I was swimming in the sea I saw a Jewish woman completely covered except for her face, neck, and hands playing in the water with her child. It was like a less-intense version of the Muslim woman I saw in the Mediterranean Sea with everything covered except for her eyes. Unfortunately I did not get a picture of her; there weren’t enough people around to make it less obvious.
On the other side of the sea, or lake, are the mountains of Syria, the (occupied) Golan Heights, which is where we packed up and headed to next after the beach. It was an hour and a half long beautiful and depressing drive. Beautiful for reasons I don’t need to explain since you will see the pictures, but depressing because of all the destroyed Arab villages we passed and the “DANGER: LANDMINES” signs everywhere.
By the time we to the town, Majdal Shams, it was late afternoon and we called Dr. Taisseer to meet up with him for a small dinner. Dr. Taissseer runs an organization called Golan for Development (GfD) and on the Tree of Life Journey in March we visited him and learned about life in the occupied part of Syria and what his organization is doing to make it more bearable. He gave us a brochure called “The Occupied Golan Heights”, which explains the mission of GfD and also provides a lot of fascinating information on the Golan Heights. Right next door to the Golan Heights is Lebanon, and the border between Israel and Lebanon is lined with Hezbollah flags. All too often we hear about the “Jew-hating Arab neighbors” of Israel, but here is a good look at the other side of the story. I just finished typing up to brochure, it took me hours but I did it because I think it is comprehensive, well-written information that is VERY important.
The Syrian Golan Heights Under the Israeli Occupation
(Golan for Development, www.jawlan.org)
Visitors to the Golan Heights will see mostly empty areas, an expanse of rolling grassland interlaces- if one looks closely- by crumbled stone fences. Occasionally, an Israeli settlement, new and well-tended, will appear at a crossroad. But a visitor who looks more carefully will see other signs. A line of stone structures on a hilltop, without roofs or windows, a small cluster of stone walls in a grove of trees, or simply an area where the grass is suddenly, rhythmically hummocked.
These are destroyed Syrian Arab villages, where once nearly 130,000 people lived and farmed. There were blown up or razed by Israeli forces after Israel took over the heights in the war of 1967. Their Arab inhabitants were forced out by the fighting or by orders from the Israeli army. Those who remained were forced by the occupational authorities to leave within the first week after the occupation. Most now live in Syria, separated from their homes and land by the fences and no-man’s-land of the Syrian-Israeli cease-fire line, and by the enduring conflict.
Inside Israel, during the 1948 war, hundreds of Palestinian villages were similarly demolished, but most are now difficult or impossible to see. In the Golan, far from Israel’s urban centers along the coast, most of the old villages are still visible in varying degrees of destruction and decay. 139 Arab villages flourished in the Golan Heights before the Israeli invasion. Of these, 134 were systematically destroyed. The vast network of stone fences, which still carves the grassy landscape, marked their pastures, orchards and wheat fields. They stand as monuments to history and to a society erased.
The Golan Heights are located in the southwestern part of the Syrian Arab Republic. The region is 1,850 square kilometers, and includes mountains reaching an altitude of 2,880 meters above sea level. The heights dominate the plains below. The Jordan River, Lake Tiberias, and the Hula Valley border the region on the west. To the east is the Raqqad Valley and the south is Yarmok River and valley. The northern boundary of the region is the mountain Jabal al-asaheikh (Mount Hermon), one of the highest in the Middle East. It is a rich agricultural area, traditionally farmed by an Arab society encompassing 108 private farms and 163 villages and towns
The 1967 War and the Israeli Occupation of the Golan
In sex days of war, Israel accomplished the expansionist aims that pre-state diplomatic efforts and previous wars had failed to achieve. The war was a devastating blow to the Arab regimes. In its conquest of the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the remainder of historic Palestine came under Israeli control. Syria suffered the loss of 1,250 square kilometers of the Golan Heights, including the provincial capital city of Quneitra.
Israel could not affect a mass expulsion of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, but it repeated expulsion tactics it had used against the Palestinians in 1948 against the inhabitants of the Golan. Israel Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan ordered his troops to expel the population of the Golan. As of June 10, 1967m only 6,396 of the pre-war population of 130,000 remained. After the war all that remained of the two cities, 139 villages, and 61 farms were six villages (Majdal Shams, Masadah, Buqatha, Ain Qinya, Ghajar, and S’heita). All of the others had been destroyed. In 1970 S’heita was also destroyed and its population was transferred to Masadah.
Israeli Ambition
Israeli interest in the Golan Heights dates to diligent Zionist efforts in the 1910s to have the rich agricultural area included in the new state of Palestine, where the Zionist movement hoped to establish the Jewish state. Europe’s division of the region in 1919 had included the Golan as part of Syria.
It was not until the Six-Day War in 1967 that Israel succeeded in seizing the Golan, and promptly began a settlement program to affirm its control, establishing the Marom Golan settlement one month after the war’s end. By December 1967, the World Zionist Organization had designated a plan to establish 17-22 settlements, with 45,000-50,000 Jewish settlers within ten years. Due to a lack of settlers, the plan fell short; by 1991, the settlers population was only 11,000 in 30 settlements.
Under the Shamir government, Housing Minister Ariel Sharon announced plans to increase the population to 22,000 by the end of 1992, mostly by settling Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. By spring 1992, the population had topped 13,000. Today, the total number of settlers is estimated to be 18,000 in 34 settlements.
Jewish Settlement: The Annexation Strategy
As in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel’s settlement program is an elaborate and effective strategy to annex land through social engineering. Israeli settlements in the Golan are designed to secure Israel’s claim to the land both by boosting the Jewish civilian population and by erasing the indicting evidence of prior Arab inhabitation.
The Erasure Tactic
Israel’s settlement strategy employs several techniques to veil its nature. The most effective is the placement of Jewish settlements directly over the site of the destroyed Arab villages, used using the stone of Arab homes to construct the new Jewish residences and physically overwhelming the foundation of the original village. The Arab village is erased to all but the best-trained eye, and a visitor would never know it existed.
A second technique is to name such settlements with the Hebrew version of the Arab name, which comes over time to suggest a continuity of the site and to obscure the destruction and displacement of the original Arab community. Many Israeli maps show only the Hebrew names of such sites, although for the previous thousand or more years they held Arab towns.
A third device is to landscape new settlement construction with shrubbery and trees imported fully-grown from the Jordan Valley, to convey a sense both to residents and to visitors that the settlement has been in place for a far longer period. Settlements can be visually transformed from raw construction sites to comfortable, verdant communities within a year.
Expulsion of a People
Before the 1967 war, the Golan Heights was administered as the Syrian province of Quneitra, which embraced 1,750 square kilometers. In 1966, the Arab population of the province was 147,613. Israel occupied 70 percent (1,250 square kilometers) of the Golan Heights in the 1967 war. The area which Israel seized contained 61 Arab farms and 139 villages and towns, which had a population of 130,000 Arab (including 9,000 Palestinians who had fled from northern Palestine in the war of 1948). Many of these residents were evacuated by the Syrian army or fled during the fighting, but Arab accounts and UN reports also document an Israeli program to expel those who remained, one similar to that conducted in the West Bank. This included terror attacks, death threats, and forced signatures of documents agreeing to the residents’ own expulsion. The program was successful: an Israeli census after the war found only 6,296 Arabs, indicating that approximately 124,000 Syrians civilians were expelled.
Within three months, the Israeli army had bulldozed 131 of their villages. Only 5 Arab villages in the northern highlands by Mount Herman remained. With a population of 6,392 immediately after the 1967 war, the Arab villages today hold around 18,000. The Arabs maintain control over only about 6 percent of the original territory; the rest has been confiscated by Israel for military use or settlements.
Israel extended its civil law and administration to the Golan Heights in 1981. However, the Syrian residents of the Golan have refused annexation, and insist on reunification with Syria. Their residence has included extensive agricultural projects to secure their land from Israeli confiscation, and they continue to strive towards developing their own basic services to compensate for Israeli neglect, like sufficient health care.
Water: The Key to Israel’s Hold?
With Israel’s annual water consumption nearly two billion cubic meters already depleting local resources, water is one of Israel’s principal interests in the Golan Heights. The Golan’s territory itself provides one of the water sources for Israel; before the war, the total output of Syrian groundwater wells in the Golan was only about 12.5 million cubic meters (mcm). Today the settler output from the underground water is more than 30 mcm, in addition to more than 45 mcm that they get from artificial water reservoirs. However, the Golan’s relatively high rainfall (averaging 1,000 mcm annually) supplies two aquifers, one draining into Lake Tiberias, Israel’s principal reservoir, and the other rising to form the headwaters of the vital Jordan River (about 500 mcm) from Lake Tiberius south to irrigate settlements in the Negev desert through a pipeline system known as the National Water Carrier.
This diversion has resulted in the depletion of the Jordan River below Lake Tiberius, with devastating effects on Jordanian agriculture in the Jordan Valley. Jordan has only partly compensated for this loss by diverting part of the Yarmuk Ricer southward through a canal. Other Arab engineering efforts have been forestalled by Israel’s strategic dominance over the Yarmuk, from the proximate bluffs of the Golan Heights.
Israel’s occupation of the Golan also eliminated all Syrian access to Lake Tiberius. Prior to 1967, Israel asserted complete control over the lake, where Syrian Arabs had traditionally fished, by patrolling the northeastern shore of the lake with armored boards and launching occasional raids on nearby Syrian villages.
Israel control of the Golan Heights therefore gives Israel strategic control over major water sources. Israel is unlikely to relinquish such control; peace negotiation may find the issue to be a critical stumbling block.
Discriminatory Policies
Israel has taken several measures to limit the remaining Arabs use of the Golan’s water supply. The Water Law of 1959 made all water resources the property of the state, and all water use subject to government approval. The drilling of pools or artesian wells is forbidden. Rainwater collection tanks, built by the Syrian Arabs in the northern villages for irrigation, were metered and taxed, and further construction forbidden in 1986. Ram Pool, lying in the heart of Arab agricultural land near the village of Mas’ada and holding between two and three mcm annually, is closed to Arab use; its water is piped to Jewish settlements as much as 70 kilometers away.
Israel cannot justify such policies on grounds of general conservation; as in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jewish settler water consumption in the Golan Heights has been greatly higher than that allowed to the Golani Arab villagers: as much as 17 times high per capita.
The Political Power of Suffering
Israeli guides to the Golan Hiehgts will say that the stone ruins which litter the countryside are old Syrian army emplacements, dating from the inter war period between 1948 and 1967. If they admit t the existence of the former Syrian residents, they will say they fled on orders from the Syrian army. They will not admit to knowing the numbers.
Israeli settlers will even claim that prior to Israel’s invasion in 1967 very few people lived in the Golan Heights. They will say that the land was basically empty and unused, and that the Jewish settlements are filling a void. Syria’s interest in the region, they claim, is purely hostile, a launching point for an attack on Israel from the Height’s higher elevations overlooking the Galilee.
But the ruined villages bear mute testimony to Israel’s interest in obscuring the truth. They are ruined because they were deliberately destroyed; they are empty because their residents are not allowed to return. The sprinklings of new Jewish settlements have no relation to the stone fences or the organic division of the land affected by centuries of Arab cultivation.
Syria’s interest in the Golan Heights is complex: military strategic concern is a factor, as is the political legitimacy of President Asad in resisting a permanent loss of Syrian territory. But that legitimacy rests not on pride, but on a fundamental issue: popular Syrian concern for the less of a rich land, which sustained a thriving society. The international community, absorbed by the complexities of the Palestinian problem, tends to forget the Golan Heights, or to imagine it an empty area or a purely strategic issue, but this does not erase the memories of the 130,000 who lost their homes, their farms, and their livelihoods to Israeli bulldozers.
On what basis can they be asked to forget?
Too often, the forces of international diplomacy overlook the heads of the people to solutions made of maps and missile agreements. If we have learned any lessons in the last half century, it is that such oblivion has its bitter costs. Care must be taken with people whose pain and resentment form a smoldering political force in itself, simple compassion aside. Someday, even the political elites must come to redefine real-politic to include the experience of the people on the ground, whose needs have been defined as rights partly because of the political power of their suffering.
Israeli success monument:
We returned to the Golan for Development and watched the little kid’s camp singing performance and met the doctor’s young daughter. 
