Ed. The saddest thing about the Golan is that the Syrians insisted after their loss in creating no mans land on their side of the border. One could walk up to the edge and look down on desolate v9llages .. maintained that way be Syria. Whatever the injustice of the Israeli occupation, Syria’s strategy served more to perpetuate war by arms than to grow an economic entity that could .. as Reagan said, bring this wall down.
March 2011, by Emma LeBlanc and Phil SandsLong before the low green hills of the Golan Heights became synonymous with the worn images of modern occupation, of houses bomb-shattered, fields tank-trampled, families divided, these lands had proven irresistible to conquerors – Roman, Byzantine, Persian – over thousands of years.
The Golan has long attracted invasion, as a region of abundant water amidst the parched deserts of Syria, Jordan and Israel; a land of moderate climate, heavy rainfall and pastures suited well to both agriculture and animal grazing; an important crossroads for imperial expansion in the many different names of god and country. And always the people of the Golan, the shepherds and farmers and local sheikhs, have paid the price, in their lives and livelihoods, for the greed and vanity of their conquerors.
And now the Golan Heights has become a central point for one of the modern world’s most intractable conflicts. Large parts of the Golan were seized from Syria by Israel in the Six Day war of 1967 and were then illegally annexed by Israel after the 1973 Yom Kippur war. This latest occupation has had huge repercussions for the region and the wider world, fuelling the Arab-Israeli conflict, and perpetually threatening to ignite the Middle East in all-out war.
At a local level, the Israeli occupation has been devastating for the people of the Golan. Many became refugees, fleeing their homes for the safety of Damascus. Others suddenly found themselves living as unwelcome foreigners under Israeli rule. As the dispute dragged on, those who remained in the immediate vicinity of the de facto border, on the Syrian side, suffered in the direct shadow of the conflict: the local economy collapsed, unemployment and poverty rose, and the stringent security measures of a military frontier zone hampered day-to-day affairs.
While peace remains elusive – Israel has never agreed to return the seized land, in full, as Syria insists – there are signs that, after decades of stagnation, a regeneration is at last underway in the Syrian-controlled Golan Heights as its people struggle to carve out their lives amidst the threats, promises and scars of occupation. A new highway promises to bring jobs the region and people are moving back to the land, a sign perhaps of optimism that the shadow of war will not linger forever.