Steps descend into a Syrian bunker overlooking the Galilee, Golan Heights
Posted on 09/13/2010 5:36:32 AM PDT by Kaslin
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,” 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 control the ridge now, and they have since they seized it in 1967 during the war against the combined Arab armies of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.
“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 down 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 is an adventure.
Steps descend into a Syrian bunker overlooking the Galilee, Golan Heights
The Sea of Galilee from a Syrian bunker on the Golan Heights
“Nobody came to live on the Golan because it was comfortable or easy,” Hadar said. “I came twenty 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 they had the space. I enjoyed their company as much as I was glad to leave Tel Aviv. The same infernal Eastern Hemisphere heat wave that set Russian forests on fire turned the Mediterranean Sea into a steam bath. The coastal air in Tel Aviv 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 Poland and Germany. His parents were ethnically-cleansed from Libya and can never return.
The Golan Heights doesn’t feel like Israeli-occupied Syria when you’re there. At least it didn’t to me, not compared with the West Bank and Iraq, 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—parts of it feel like occupied territory, and it’s not exactly wrong to describe them that way. Iraq under American military rule felt occupied in a different way. Hadar and Reuven’s house on kibbutz Kfar Haruv just 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. They are an entirely separate ideological species.
“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.
Hadar Sela looks into Syria from atop the Golan Heights
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 actually sound all that left-wing to me, either. She even sounded to the right of Reuven in some ways.
“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 non-violent.”
Syria’s and Egypt’s failure in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, despite their strong performances at the beginning, finally convinced the Arabs 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 very few soft Israeli targets to shoot at. They couldn’t even see the Galilee region, let alone shoot at 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 post-revolutionary 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 Assad did everything he could to help the Iranians out. If the Syrians couldn’t fight Israel from their side of the border, Hezbollah could do it for them in and from Lebanon. The front line then 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, it wasn’t hit all that hard by Hezbollah during the 2006 war. 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 far 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 among the Christians and Druze.
“Have you been to Jezzine?” he asked me.
Hey, we won France from the Germans, twice, but never got to keep it!
< /sarc >
For the best...How many bailouts would France take?
Why would we want to?
when Syria commanded those heights. "If they saw tractors down there," 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 control the ridge now, and they have since they seized it in 1967 during the war against the combined Arab armies of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. "Syria lost it fair and square," she said.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
..................
Soon you’ll have to win it back from Algeria, too. What I call a booby prize. You keep giving it away, and having to win it back.
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