Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (13 page)

“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 north 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.”

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.