Harel has lived in Israel during its entire history as a modern nation-state, though he lived in Damascus during World War II, when his family temporarily relocated there from the British Mandate for Palestine. The pub where we met him looked, felt and operated exactly like a microbrewery in Seattle or Portland.
“I was 8 years old,” he said, “and I remember it very well. My father was there with the British army, and he brought the whole family with him. It was a small town then. Only around 300,000 people lived there. Now it’s more than a million.”
As a young man, he lived in the Galilee region and endured shelling by the Syrians from the Golan for years. After Israel seized the area, he and a handful of others bolted up the mountain to start a kibbutz. The government had nothing to do with their decision, but the Galilee’s kibbutzim gave them their blessings.
“We wanted Israel to annex the Golan,” he said, “for protection.”
The Golan was mostly empty when he and his seven companions arrived. All was blackened from the fires of war, and they settled in a destroyed Syrian camp.
“We weren’t at all confident that Israel would keep the Golan,” he said. “It seemed at the time that there was only a small chance it might happen. But in order to shape the future, you have to act.”
After six months, the Israeli government allowed them to build a proper kibbutz. They lived at first in a Syrian barracks. When the kibbutz population grew larger, they moved into the ruins of the shattered garrison town of Quneitra, a city that once housed 20,000 Syrians and that was at the time half demolished and entirely empty. They lived in an old Syrian officers’ neighborhood surrounded by walls.
The Israelis held the city for seven years but gave it back in 1974. The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) stepped into a narrow demilitarized zone between the two sides.
The Israelis expected Syria to rebuild Quneitra. “As far as I’m aware,” Hadar said, “rebuilding was one of the terms of the agreement under which it was given back.” Israel wanted Damascus to have something to lose in the border area should war break out again. Instead, Assad left it in ruins—and forbade its former residents from ever returning home—as a macabre memorial to “Zionist brutality.” It remains a broken ghost town to this day and has been in a state of ruin and decay longer than I’ve been alive.
After the Yom Kippur War and shortly before the disengagement, Yehuda and his neighbors founded a new kibbutz named Merom Golan next to a volcanic crater 3,000 feet above sea level. They grew apples, grapes and cherries there, and it’s still thriving and growing.
“Tell me,” I said, “is the Golan Heights still strategically important for Israel?”
“Arab armies have started wars with us again and again since 1948,” he said. “They despise us, but we’re stronger and we won all of them. Syria doesn’t believe it can win a war against Israel with tanks or a regular army. So it’s buying missiles, big missiles. And if Syria fires them at us, what can we do? We can shoot back at Damascus. A lot of Syrians would be killed, yet they’d win the war against Israel just like Hamas and Hezbollah won their wars against Israel.”
He was referring to the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009.
“Why do you think you lost those two wars?” I said. “Because you didn’t win? The way I see it, nobody won.”
“We lost,” he said. “We can beat them in a war face-to-face, but we can’t beat them from a distance. And they know it. They are much better at missile war than we are.”
“We certainly lost the war of public opinion,” Hadar said.
“Sure,” I said, “but that’s better than actually losing.”
“And we didn’t finish the job,” she said.
“We can’t finish the job,” Yehuda said. “How can we finish the job? Hezbollah now has more rockets than ever. Bigger rockets. Stronger rockets. We can’t do anything about it. We can bomb Beirut. So what? It doesn’t do any good. It doesn’t help us at all. And it turns the world against us. Syrian rockets can reach Tel Aviv, and we don’t have much of a deterrent. Rockets don’t have to be very accurate if they’re fired at Tel Aviv.”
Most of Hezbollah’s rockets are pathetically inaccurate, but the Tel Aviv metropolitan area is enormous and hard to miss.
“But we do still have a deterrent,” Yehuda said. “Our tanks can reach Damascus in 48 hours from the Golan Heights. We can destroy the Alawite ruling class. We can drive right through the Valley of Tears down below. Damascus is only 60 kilometers from the border. My house is closer to Damascus than it is to Haifa. We could drive there in my car in less than an hour.”
“At the end of the Yom Kippur War,” Hadar said, “our army was less than 30 kilometers from Damascus.”
“You know what Syria is like,” Yehuda said. “Syria is a country with a strong center. Syria is Damascus just like Israel is Tel Aviv. Everything that matters is in Damascus.”
“Well, what would happen if you did give the Golan back?” I said. “Do you really think the Syrians would shell the Galilee again?”
“No,” Yehuda said. “They would shoot Tel Aviv.”
“They’d shoot Tel Aviv from the Golan Heights?” I said.
“No,” he said. “They’d shoot Tel Aviv from Damascus.”
“But they can do that right now,” I said. “So if you gave the Golan back to Syria, what would you lose? Okay, you’d lose the ability to get tanks into Damascus in 48 hours, but you could still get tanks into Damascus. It would just take you a bit longer. And it wouldn’t be dangerous for you if they were here, would it?”
“Yes,” Hadar said. “It would. We can’t afford to have missiles here.”
“They can already hit Tel Aviv without putting missiles on the Golan,” I said.
“But they won’t without the Golan,” she said. “We know they can, and they know they can. The question is, what price are they prepared to pay?”
“They are prepared to pay with the lives of thousands of people,” Yehuda said, “but they are not willing to pay with Damascus or the regime.”
I got the sense, however, that Yehuda Harel wasn’t primarily concerned with security. He’s been living on the Golan for more than 40 years, and his love for it is obvious. Like Israel Eshed, the head of Golan Tourism Association, he wants to keep it because it’s his home now.
“The people of Israel love the Golan,” he said. “More than a million Israelis visit here every year. They won’t give it up. And Israel is a democracy. What the government wants, more than anything, is to continue being the government. What the prime minister wants most is to be the prime minister. Any prime minister who talks about giving up the Golan Heights will be afraid of the next election. So before giving up the Golan, somebody will have to convince the people of Israel.”
“What do Israelis love about it?” I said. I can testify that it’s a nice place. Its scenery is dramatic, its climate mild during the summer. The place reminds me in some ways of the dry side of my home state of Oregon. But few Israelis actually live on the Golan.
“I’ve asked many people this question,” Yehuda said. “Israelis love the Golan more than they love Jerusalem.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
For more than a thousand years, Jews all over the world have said “next year in Jerusalem” at the conclusion to the Passover Seder.
“Yes,” Yehuda said. “It’s hard to believe. But when people are asked if they will give up the Golan or part of Jerusalem for peace, the negative answer for the Golan Heights is twice as high as the negative answer for Jerusalem.”
“Why?” I said. “The Jewish people yearned to return to Jerusalem for 2,000 years. It’s your cultural, historical and political capital.”
“I’ve asked a number of people about this, some of them psychologists,” he said. “And I’ve heard many answers. One is that the Golan is on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Mankind knew that water gives life even before it was mankind. The Golan
Heights, subconsciously, is water.”
The freshwater Galilee is Israel’s primary source of drinking water, and when Syria controlled the Golan, the Syrians did their damndest to take the water for themselves and dry up the sea. The lower portion of the Golan is still scarred by botched Syrian engineering projects that would have diverted or stopped the rivers that pour into the sea in the winter and spring.
Yehuda was a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, from 1995 to 1999. He and a handful of others started their own party solely to prevent the government from giving the Golan back to Syria.
“This was during the time of Yitzhak Rabin’s government,” he said. “I was one of his aides. And I made a party called the Third Way. We were a movement of people on the political left who were against withdrawing from the Golan. So many people joined that we decided to run in elections. We got four seats in the Knesset. So I found myself in the Knesset, and I didn’t know what to do.”
“You were the dog that caught the car,” I said.
He laughed.
“Well,” I said. “How did it go?”
“It was very interesting for a few years,” he said. “My smallest daughter—well, my youngest daughter, she’s not small anymore—was very much against my going into politics. But our movement gets stronger with every new government. Israelis don’t realize how strong our democracy is. They think the government can do anything, but it can’t. I know because I’ve seen it from the inside. The government wants to continue being the government more than anything else. People in the government are afraid of elections, as they should be. They are not good people. They are extremely selfish.”
“You know these people personally,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And in order to keep their jobs, they have to satisfy people. That’s the system. As Winston Churchill said, democracy is the worst system except for all the others. We don’t have to create propaganda for the Golan Heights. We just have to produce the best wine and make sure tourists come here, and the people will stand with us.”
Hadar and Reuven stayed on kibbutz Kfar Haruv during the 2006 war with Hezbollah. A few missiles hit the Golan. I know because I saw them strike it with my own eyes when I covered the war from the border area. Hezbollah wasted few of their precious Iranian projectiles on the Golan, however, because it’s so sparsely populated. The cities of northern Israel took the brunt of the damage. So the Golan offered an almost safe front-row seat during the war.
It was even safer during the Second Intifada than it was during the Hezbollah war. Suicide bombers had no interest in going all the way up there to explode themselves in such a lightly populated and target-poor environment.
“We had so much tourism up here during the Second Intifada,” Hadar said. “It was the safest place in Israel.”
“It was the only safe place in Israel,” Yehuda said.
“This is a marvelous place to bring up your children,” Hadar said. “My kids grew up completely free here. They didn’t have to worry about anything dangerous.”
“A 4-year-old girl can walk at night to her friend’s house,” Yehuda said.
“Nobody is going to attack children here,” Hadar said. “Nothing bad is going to happen. My own children know Britain well, having visited family there often and spent time there themselves after their army service. Recently they said, ‘Mother, thank you, thank you for bringing us up on the Golan and not anywhere else.’ When they saw what life in the U.K. is like, they knew they had the best childhood possible.”
“And remember,” Yehuda said, “there are no Palestinians here. More than half the people in Israel want to withdraw from the West Bank. Israelis don’t want to occupy people. We are against occupation. Today nobody believes a withdrawal will bring peace, but we are still against occupying another people. But there’s no occupation here like the one in the West Bank. There is no occupation of people.”
That’s sort of true but not entirely true. It depends on how you look at it.
There are no Palestinians on the Golan, but there are about 20,000 Druze in the north. Unlike the Alawites who lived on the Golan before the 1967 war, the Druze didn’t flee when Israel took it. Most live on the back side of Mount Hermon. Unlike the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, the Druze of the Golan can take Israeli citizenship if they want it. They have the same political rights as Israeli Druze, and the same political rights as Israeli Jews.
The Druze, like the Alawites, are not Muslims. Both religions grew out of Islam—as Islam emerged in its own way from Christianity and Judaism—but then became something else.
There are only about 800,000 Druze in the entire Middle East, so they take an extremely cautious approach to politics. Everywhere they live—in Lebanon, Syria, Israel and on the Golan—they’re loyal to whoever’s in charge. Syrian Druze at the time were with Assad and the Baath Party. Israeli Druze side with the Zionists. Lebanese Druze adjust their alliances constantly in an ever mutating environment. The Druze of the Golan have little choice but to divide their loyalty between Jerusalem and Damascus. Most won’t take Israeli citizenship even though it’s available, and they won’t serve in the army. They self-identify as Syrians, not Israelis. But unlike most Syrians, they say they like Israel. They obey Israeli law, and they don’t sign on with the reactionary Arab movements that yearn for the country’s destruction.
“Let me tell you something that’s not very nice,” Yehuda said. “There were almost 100,000 Syrians here on the Golan Heights before 1967. And they’re not here now. Israel won’t let them come back. They live in refugee camps near Damascus.”
“Where did they live?” I said. “Is there an empty city up here somewhere? I know about Quneitra, but it was given back to the Syrians.”
“They refuse to rebuild it,” he said. “Twenty-thousand people used to live there. The rest lived in small settlements. So while the West Bank is like South Africa in some ways, the Golan Heights is like America. America and South Africa have bad histories, but today there is complete equality. It’s the same on the Golan Heights. No one under the age of 40 even remembers the Syrians being here. You didn’t know there were 100 small Syrian settlements here until I told you about them.”
“So what’s the future of this place?” I said.
“I don’t know anything about the future,” he said. “Nobody does. Not even the CIA knows anything. They didn’t know the Soviet Union was going to collapse a week in advance. So how can I know? I can do my best to keep the Golan Heights in Israel and that’s it. When people want to know about the future, I send them to a woman named Eva in Jaffa. You can take coffee with her and then she’ll tell you your future.” He laughed. “She’s much cheaper than the CIA and no worse. She costs 50 shekels.”
“Okay,” I said, “so let me ask you this. What if there was an offer on the table from the Syrian government—not this government, a different, moderate, and less hostile government, run by a guy like Anwar Sadat who says, ‘Okay, we’re going to have real peace and normal relations. No more support for Hamas or Hezbollah. You give us back the Golan, and we’ll be as good a neighbor for you as Jordan.’ Would you take the deal?”
“Let me tell you,” Yehuda said. “What a Syrian leader says doesn’t mean anything. It means nothing to me. I would tell him that if Syria is to be governed as a normal country, like Sweden or Canada, then the Syrian government shouldn’t mind if I stay on the Golan. Right? I could stay in Canada if I wanted. If they don’t want me to stay, then they aren’t offering a real peace.”
“But what about Jordan?” I said. “You can’t live in Jordan. Jews can’t even own property there. But the Jordanian government isn’t causing any problems for Israel. The Jordanians aren’t shooting at you anymore, and they cooperate in a serious way on security.”
“At the moment, yes,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen later. No one knew Yugoslavia would destroy itself. It was one state. It was quiet. People were friends. Then it exploded. Here we are sur
rounded by Sunnis and the Muslim Brotherhood. Not in Lebanon but everywhere else. And they are very dangerous. In the Middle Ages, Islam had the most advanced culture in the entire world. Then something happened. We aren’t confident the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan will last. We all saw what happened in Iran in 1979. And look what’s happening now in Turkey. What will Turkey look like next year? Maybe it will look like Ataturk’s country again, and maybe it will look like Iran. Nobody knows.”
“What will happen in Egypt when Mubarak dies?” Hadar said.
“This is why I don’t know what will happen in the future,” Yehuda said. “And I don’t trust people who say that they do. It’s a bad idea to deal with an uncertainty by creating a certainty. If we give back the Golan, we will have no idea what might happen next.”
* * *
Hardly anyone ever hears about the tens of thousands of people who live under Israeli occupation on the Golan. Few outside the Middle East even know they exist. Their plight is not taught in schools. No activists rally on their behalf. Hardly anyone in the world demands with passion that they be liberated.
“We have an undefined nationality,” said Faiz Safd, one of the Druze of the Golan, while sipping from a cup of thick Turkish coffee.
He agreed to meet me and Hadar and explain what he and the people in his community think of Israel’s occupation. He’s is in his mid-30s and, like me, wasn’t yet born when Syria lost the territory. Israel has been in charge of it during his entire life, but if the 1967 war had never happened—or if Israel had returned the Golan to Syria for peace in the meantime—his nationality would not be ambiguous. He would be Syrian.
“How do you travel out of the country if you have an undefined nationality?” Hadar said.
“It isn’t easy,” Faiz said. “We can’t get Syrian or Israeli passports, and Syria won’t let us visit or move there. They want us to stay here on the Golan so we can help them get it back.” They can get Israeli passports, actually, if they accept Israeli citizenship, but most haven’t done so. That would be dangerous.
Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa Page 11