It’s even stranger where the Muslim Quarter abuts the Jewish Quarter. Arabs own shops at street level while Israeli Jews own apartments upstairs. The ground floor on that street would be in Palestine, while the second floor would be in Israel.
I asked Lozowick if the people who drew this theoretical border have ever walked around in the Old City and looked at what they were proposing.
“I asked them that,” he said, “and they wouldn’t answer. They wave their hands.”
* * *
After looking at the proposed division of Jerusalem, I drove to the already divided city of Hebron in the West Bank with talk-radio host Eve Harow. I’ve visited too many places in Israel and the West Bank to keep track of, and none are more ominous and disturbing than Hebron.
Five hundred Jewish settlers live in a cramped section of the city. Hundreds of Israel Defense Forces soldiers are stationed there to protect them because they’re often shot at by their Palestinian neighbors. A small number of tourists occasionally drop by to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the second holiest Jewish site in the world, but they understand there’s a chance they’ll be murdered by gunmen.
As a direct result of ethnic strife in the city, Palestinian movement is restricted or prohibited in a large swath through Arab neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the Jewish settlement area. It is completely locked down by Israeli soldiers. Shops have been forcibly closed, their doors welded shut and covered with spray paint. This is in Hebron’s Old City, the part of town that would be filled with thousands of tourists and pilgrims from all over the world if it weren’t a war-torn slum made ugly by hatred and security measures. The Israeli military describes this section of Hebron as the “sterile zone,” but it’s not an operating room in a hospital. It was once a vibrant ancient city, but today it looks like a ghost town emptied by a violent catastrophe.
This, Lozowick wrote, “is what happens when Israelis and Palestinians agree to divide a city, but can’t agree to live together in peace. The blame for lack of peace is irrelevant: each side will doubtlessly say it’s all the fault of the other, but the result won’t be any nicer thereby. The myriads of observers, pundits, politicians, dreamers, visionaries and true believers who all know for a certainty that dividing Jerusalem is the key to peace in the Middle East need urgently to visit Hebron.”
* * *
Maybe Jerusalem will be divided again and maybe it won’t. Partition might solve the problem and it might not. Nobody knows, though a number of major players, including the most experienced diplomats, have convinced themselves otherwise.
“Many people still say we all know what the final settlement is going to look like,” said Israeli political analyst Jonathan Spyer when I interviewed him in central Jerusalem, “so we just need to get the two sides together and work it out. To that I say, no. You don’t know what the final status is going to look like. The final status you have in mind is what you came up with by negotiating with yourself.”
It has been years since I’ve managed to find an optimist who lives in the region and believes the conflict will end anytime soon. It’s possible that everybody is wrong about that, but it isn’t likely. This is a part of the world where the past and the present are the most reliable guides to the future. Hillel Cohen summed it up best when I asked him what he expects for Jerusalem 50 years from now. “Some war,” he said and shrugged. “Some peace. Some negotiations. The usual stuff.”
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. Both Israelis and Palestinians are irresistible forces, and they’re both immovable objects. The White House can keep cajoling the two sides to negotiate, and the Geneva Initiative can tinker with its lines on their Google Earth maps, but they need to understand that there’s a chance no progress will be made during their lifetimes and that a premature or botched partition may precipitate ruin.
Chapter Five
Tower of the Sun
Golan Heights, 2010
Before the Six-Day War in June of 1967, the Syrian army built fortified bunkers on the ridge of the Golan Heights and fired sniper rifles, mortars and artillery cannons at Israeli civilians below. The cities, farms and kibbutzim on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, and in the wider region around it, were perilous places to live or even to visit when Syria commanded those heights.
“If they saw tractors down there,” Golan resident Hadar Sela said after leading me to one of the bunkers, “or anything moving at all—even a child walking to the store to get milk—they opened fire. There were bunkers like this along the entire ridge of the Golan.”
Israelis have controlled the ridge since they seized it in 1967, when the combined Arab armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt launched a war of annihilation against the Jewish state.
“Syria lost it fair and square,” she said.
The bunker she showed me is just a two-minute walk from her house on kibbutz Kfar Haruv, where she and her neighbors enjoy the spectacular formerly Syrian view of the Galilee far below.
Her family is part of a small but committed Israeli movement to settle the Golan Heights, partly in order to strengthen Israeli control for security reasons but also because building and living on fresh, open, conquered land, for them, is an adventure.
“Nobody came to live on the Golan because it was comfortable or easy,” Hadar said. “I came 20 years later, in 1985. It may sound corny, but in the beginning it was out of a pioneering spirit. It really was, though I know that sounds unfashionable. We remind Israelis of simpler days here.”
Alongside the path to the bunker is a minefield marked off with barbed wire.
“People ask me how I could raise children in a minefield,” she said. “I always say that in Tel Aviv they teach their children not to step into traffic. Here we teach them not to step into minefields.”
Hadar and her significant other, Reuven, hosted me in their house and lent me their spare room for two nights. Their children have grown and built their own houses, so she and Reuven had the space. I enjoyed their company and was glad to escape Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city. The same infernal eastern-hemisphere heat wave that was setting Russian forests on fire turned the Mediterranean Sea and the Israeli lowlands into a steam bath. The coastal air felt like soup on my skin even at five o’clock in the morning. The cooler mountain air of the Golan massaged the heat out of my muscles and back.
Hadar was born and raised in Britain. Reuven is a Sabra, born and raised in Israel. “I have nowhere else to go,” he said, addressing his comments not to me so much as to those who think Israelis should go “back” to Europe. His parents were ethnically cleansed from Libya.
The Golan Heights doesn’t feel like Israeli-occupied Syria. At least it didn’t to me, not compared with the West Bank, anyway.
Though the West Bank is technically disputed territory rather than occupied territory—it hasn’t belonged to anyone, according to international law, since the British left in 1948—Area C, where the settlement blocs are located, is under Israeli control. (The Palestinian Authority controls Area A, and the two jointly control Area B.) But Hadar and Reuven’s house on kibbutz Kfar Haruv felt like Israel. There are no Palestinians on the Golan. And the Israelis who settled it come from a completely different part of the Zionist movement than the settlers in the West Bank.
“I’ve never voted for a party to the right of Meretz,” Hadar said. Meretz, in many ways, is to the left of Israel’s left-wing Labor Party.
Reuven chuckled. “She’s not really that far to the left,” he said.
“Yes, I am,” she insisted.
Aside from her love for the democratic socialism of Israel’s kibbutzim, she didn’t sound all that left-wing to me, either. She even sounded to the right of Reuven in some ways, though he is no hard-liner.
“Before the First Intifada we didn’t think much of the Palestinians,” Reuven said. “They were just low-wage workers who commuted to Tel Aviv from refugee camps in Gaza or wherever. They didn’t have
equal rights and we didn’t care. It wasn’t until after the First Intifada that we saw them as human beings. We got what we deserved, if you ask me.”
Hadar agreed in principle, but she wouldn’t go as far as he did. “I was nearly killed by Palestinians who threw rocks the size of small boulders at my car,” she said. “So don’t tell me the First Intifada was nonviolent.”
Syria’s and Egypt’s failure in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, despite their strong performances at the beginning, finally convinced Arab governments that the Jewish state could not be destroyed by conventional means. The Israel Defense Forces had proved itself too hard a target, not just in 1973 but also in 1948 and 1967. And now that Israel was sitting on the Golan, the Syrians had no soft Israeli targets to shoot at. They couldn’t even see the Galilee region, let alone fire upon it.
Later that same decade, however, Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in Tehran, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamists came out on top in the postrevolutionary struggle for power. When Israel invaded South Lebanon in 1982 to oust Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization from the Lebanese-Israeli border area, Khomeini redeployed 1,500 men from battlefields in the Iran-Iraq war to Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to arm, train and equip his new overseas project—Hezbollah.
Syria’s then ruler Hafez al-Assad did everything he could to help the Iranians. If the Syrians couldn’t fight Israel from their side of the border, Hezbollah could do it for them in and from Lebanon. So the Syrian-Israeli front line shifted from the Golan and the Galilee over to South Lebanon and the Israeli region below it.
Though the Golan physically looms over all this terrain, Hezbollah mostly left it alone during the war in 2006, when it fired thousands of Katyusha rockets into Northern Israel. Israelis on the Golan, though, take a keener interest in Lebanon than Israelis who live farther away and out of Hezbollah’s rocket range—or at least Hezbollah’s rocket range in 2006. According to all the latest intelligence out of Lebanon, today Hezbollah can strike not only as far as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem but all the way down to Eilat on the Red Sea in the remote south of the country.
Reuven wanted to know what I thought about Lebanon after I told him I lived there during parts of 2005 and 2006. He was interested not only because he lives a short drive from the border but also because he served there as a soldier for seven months in 1982.
He spent most of his time in the Chouf Mountains.
“Have you been to Jezzine?” he asked me.
I had.
“It is an amazing place,” he said to Hadar, who has never been there. “It’s like somebody lifted a village from Provence and dropped it in Lebanon.”
He fell in love with the country despite all the carnage.
“For the first few months everybody was really nice!” he said. “Everyone seemed to like us.” Then he laughed. I laughed. Hadar laughed.
“I can’t understand that place,” he said. “The Christians and Druze were shooting each other. They weren’t shooting at us—they were shooting each other. Most of the time they seemed to get along perfectly fine, but then Thursday or Monday would come along and they’d fight. Why? Why did they think their lives would get better if they shot at the neighbors?” He seemed genuinely baffled. “It is a crazy country.”
“I don’t care if they like me,” he added later, referring this time not to the Christians or Druze but to the predominantly Shia southern part of the country where Hezbollah is ensconced. “I just want them to stop trying to kill me.”
* * *
Syria is only two years older than Israel. Like the Jewish state, it was forged upon the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after interim European powers withdrew from the region shortly after World War I.
What is now Israel was still under the control of the British Mandate when Syria declared independence from the French Mandate in 1946. The British had control of the Sea of Galilee and wanted to keep it. So while the Golan Heights above the sea’s eastern shore went to Syria, Britain kept control of the actual shoreline. The border was set 10 meters from the edge of the water. If the sea level rose or fell and the shoreline moved, the border moved with it.
So when Israel declared independence from the British Mandate in 1948, it acquired the sea’s eastern shore from Great Britain. Water is a precious resource in the Middle East, and the Syrians were not happy. They were enraged that the Jews achieved independence at all and—along with the Egyptians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese—immediately launched an aggressive war to destroy it, though Lebanon participated merely in a token manner to keep up appearances.
They lost, of course, and Israel went on existing. Israel’s existence was in fact secured. Yet Syria seized control of the eastern shore of the sea by force a year later. That campaign was easy. Israel couldn’t defend an isolated 10-meter-wide ribbon of land between water and cliffside. Borders like that don’t work between countries at war. So the Syrians gained control of part of the Galilee even though they were not entitled to it, and they held it until Israel snapped up the entire area after Syria, Egypt and Jordan tried yet again to destroy the country in 1967.
The 1990s were supposed to be the decade that heralded peace. The Soviet Union had burst. It looked like “the end of history,” such as it was, might even reach the Middle East. Yet the Oslo peace process broke down between Israelis and Palestinians, and Israel’s peace talks with Syria hit the rocks.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to return the Golan in exchange for peace in 2000, but Syria’s Assad said no. Most Middle Eastern political analysts assume Assad never wanted a deal, that he merely went through the motions because it suited him at the time. Syria’s secular, non-Muslim, Alawite-dominated government needed a permanent state of war with Israel to survive in a country with a hostile Sunni majority. Resistance temporarily lent the regime the legitimacy it would otherwise lack. Assad needed an excuse, though, to say no when the Israeli government agreed to return the Golan. And his excuse was that Israel would not give him the eastern shore of the Galilee.
Syria’s internationally recognized border never included an inch of that shoreline, but Assad knew Israel would refuse to sign over the title, and he knew his own “street” would applaud him for insisting upon it. Israel can’t give back the Golan unless Syria will say yes. And Syria will not say yes. So the Golan remains in Israel’s hands, and Assad’s son Bashar got to keep the grievance he needed to justify war.
The territory has now been in Israel’s hands more than twice as long as it was in Syria’s.
“The Alawite regime is the best guarantor that Israel will be able to keep the Golan,” Israel Eshed, head of the Golan Tourism Association, told me. He’s one of Hadar’s neighbors in a village up the road, and she took me to his house to meet him.
While the nature of the Alawite regime and its interests may be the ultimate guarantor of Israeli control of the Golan, it wasn’t always this way. During the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Syria almost took it back.
“They reconquered more than half the Golan for four days,” Eshed said. “They sent 100 tanks up the Valley of Tears.”
Egypt attacked Israel in the south at the same time, and the Israelis were entirely unprepared for it. Initially, it looked like they might actually lose, and by the end they lost more than 2,500 soldiers.
“What happened to Israeli civilians on the Golan who lived in the areas that were captured?” I asked.
“They were evacuated,” Eshed said, “before the Syrians took them. Otherwise the Jews here would have been massacred. There were Jewish villages on the Golan in ancient times, and again since the 1800s, but the Syrians massacred them in 1948, and they would have done it again in 1973 if they could.”
“That war was deeply traumatizing for us,” Hadar said. “It still feels like a fresh wound here, like your Vietnam.”
War memorials are scattered from one end of the Golan to the other.
“There are only two crossing points to the Golan from Syria,” Eshed said, “in the nort
h and in the east. Thanks to the topography, we can easily hold off the Syrians in the southern Golan. And if they can’t take the Golan, they can’t invade Israel.”
Even so, he doesn’t believe holding onto the Golan Heights matters as much for Israeli security as it used to.
“Giving up the Golan would be bad for the Zionist movement,” he said. “Israelis love the Golan. We want to keep it.”
Security concerns aren’t entirely idle, however, not when the Golan looms so large over the vulnerable Galilee. “We can’t act like Europeans in the Middle East,” Eshed said. “The Arabs don’t understand Yiddish.”
Hadar’s house on kibbutz Kfar Haruv is on the southern and all but impenetrable part of the Golan. It’s wedged between sheer cliffs to the east and the west. I needed to see more, and she accompanied me in my rental car on a drive north, where we would meet Yehuda Harel, a former member of the Knesset, for lunch.
We passed a number of destroyed Syrian military bases.
“Have you heard of our famous spy Eli Cohen?” she asked me as I stepped out of the car to take pictures.
“Of course,” I said.
The Israelis sent him to Syria in 1962, and he worked his way very high up in Damascus. For a while, he was the chief adviser to the minister of defense before Cohen was found out and executed.
“I’m not sure if it’s true,” she said, “but many say it was his idea to have the Syrians plant eucalyptus trees on their bases when he came to the Golan. They grow fast, and he said they would provide shade for the soldiers during the summer. But what they also did was mark out military targets for the Israeli air force. Our pilots could easily see the trees from the skies.”
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 10