The Syrian Golan Heights Under The Israeli Occupation

Visitors to the Golan Heights will see mostly empty area, an expanse of rolling grassland interlaced- if one looks closely- by crumbled stone fences. Occasionally, an Israeli settlement, new and well-tended, will appear at a crossroad.
But a visitor who looks more carefully will see other signs. A line of stone structures on a hilltop, without roofs or windows, a small cluster of stone walls in a grove of trees, or simply an area where the grass is suddenly, rhythmically hummocked.

These are destroyed Syrian Arab villages, where once nearly 130,000 people lived and farmed. They were blown up or razed by Israeli forces, after Israel took over the heights in the war of 1967. Their Arab inhabitants were forced out by the fighting or by orders from the Israeli army. Those who remained were forced by the occupational authorities to leave within the first week after the occupation. Most now live in Syria, separated from their homes and land by the fences and no-man’s-land of the Syrian-Israeli cease -fire line, and by the enduring conflict.
Israel’s invasion. Of these, 134 were systematically destroyed. The vast network of stone fences, which still carves the grassy landscape, marked their pastures, orchards and wheat fields.

Inside Israel, during the1948 war, hundreds of Palestinian villages were similarly demolished, but most are now difficult or impossible to see. In the Golan, far from Israel’s urban centers along the coast, most of the old villages are still visible, in varying degrees of destruction and decay. They stand as monuments to history and to a society erased One hundred and thirty-nine Arab villages flourished in the Golan Heights before by invasion.

The Golan Heights are located in the southwestern part of the Syrian Arab Republic. The region is 1,850 Square kilometers, and includes mountains reaching an altitude of 2,880 meters above sea level. The heights dominate the plains below. The Jordan River, Lake Tiberias and the Hula Valley border the region on the west. To the east is the Raqqad Valley and the south is Yarmok River and valley. The northern boundary of the region is the mountain Jabal al- asaheikh (Mount Hermon), one of the highest in the Middle East. It is a rich agricultural area, traditionally farmed by an Arab society encompassing 108 private farms and 163 villages and towns.

The 1967 War and the Israeli Occupation of the Golan

In six days of war, Israel accomplished the expansionist aims that pre-state diplomatic efforts and previous wars had failed to achieve. The war was a devastating blow to the Arab regimes. In its conquest of the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the remainder of historic Palestine came under Israeli control. Sinai Peninsula was occupied from Eygept. Syria suffered the loss of 1,250 square kilometers of the Golan Heights, including the provincial capital city of Quainter.

Israel could not effect a mass expulsion of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, but it repeated expulsion tactics ,it had used against Palestinians in 1948, against inhabitants of the Golan. Israeli minister of Defense Moshe Dayan ordered his troops to expel the population of the Golan. As of June 10, 1967, only 6,396 of the pre-war population of 130,000 remained. After the war all that remained of the two cities, 139 villages and 61 farms were six villages (Majdal Shams, Masadah, Buqatha, Ain Qinya, Ghajar and S’heita). All of the others had been destroyed. On 1970 S’heita was also destroyed and its population were transferred to Masadah.

Israeli Ambition

Israeli interest in the Golan Heights dates to diligent Zionist efforts, in the 1910s, to have the rich agricultural area included in the new state of Palestine, where the Zionist movement hoped to establish the Jewish state. But Europe’s division of the region in 1919 included the Golan as apart of Syria.

It was not until the Six-Day War in 1967 that Israel succeeded in seizing the Golan, and promptly began a settlement program to affirm its control, establishing the Marom Golan settlement one month after the war’s end. By December1967, the World Zionist Organization had designed a plan to establish 17-22 settlements, with 45,000-50,000 Jewish settlers, within ten years. Due to a lack of settlers, the plan fell short: by 1991, the settlers population was only 11,000 in 30 settlements.
Under the Shamir government, Housing Minister Ariel Sharon announced plans to increase the population to 22,000 by the end of 1992, mostly by settling Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia. By spring 1992, the population had topped 13,000. Nowadays the total number of settlers is estimated to be 18000 in 34 settlements.

Jewish Settlement: The Annexation Strategy

As in the West Blank and Gaza Strip, Israel’s settlement program is an elaborate and effective strategy to annex land through social engineering. Israeli settlements in the Golan are designed to secure Israel’s claim to the land both by boosting the Jewish civilian population and by erasing the indicting evidence of prior Arab habitation.

The Tactic Erasure

Israel’s settlement strategy employs several techniques to veil its nature. The most effective is the placement of Jewish settlements directly over the site of the destroyed Arab villages, often using the stones of Arab homes to construct the new Jewish residences and physically overwhelming the foundation of the original village. The Arab village is erased to all but the best- trained eye, and a visitor would never know it existed.
A second technique is to name such settlements with the Hebrew version of the Arab name, which comes over time to suggest a continuity of the site and to obscure the destruction and displacement of the original Arab community. Many Israeli

maps show only the Hebrew names of such sites, although for the previous thousand or more years they held Arab towns.

A third device is to landscape new settlement construction with shrubbery and trees imported fully-grown from the Jordan Valley, to convey a sense both to residents and visitors that the settlement has been in place for a far longer period. Settlements can be visually transformed from raw construction sites to comfortable, verdant communities within a year.
Expulsion of a People Before the 1967 war, the Golan Heights was administered as the Syrian province of Quneitra, which embraced 1750 square kilometer. In 1966, the Arab population of the province was 147613.
Israel occupied 70 percent (1250 square kilometer) of the Golan Heights in the 1967 war. The area, which Israel seized, contained 61 Arab farms and 139 villages and towns, which had held a population of 130000 Arabs (including 9000 Palestinians who had fled from northern Palestine in the war 1948). Many of these residents were evacuated by the Syrian army or fled during the fighting, but Arab accounts and UN reports also document an Israeli program to expel those who remained, one similar to that conducted in the West Blank:
terror attacks, threats of death, and forced signatures of documents agreeing to the residents’ own expulsion. The program was successful: an Israeli census after the war found only 6296 Arabs, indicating that approximately 124000 Syrian civilians were expelled.
Within three months, the Israeli army, including the city of Quneitra, the provincial seat that had held a population of some 25000, had bulldozed 131 of their villages.
Only five Arab villages in the northern highlands by Mount Hermon remained. With a population of 6392 immediately after the 1967 war, the Arab villages today hold around 18000. The Arabs maintain control over only about 6 percent of the original territory: the rest has been confiscated by Israel for military use or settlement.

Israel extended its civil law and administration to the Golan Heights in 1981. However, the Syrian residents of the Golan have refused annexation, and insist on reunification with Syria. Their resistance has included extensive agricultural projects to secure their land from Israeli confiscation, and they continue to strive to develop their own basic services to compensate for Israeli neglect, like sufficient health care.

Water: The Key to Israel’s Hold?

With Israel’s annual water consumption of nearly two billion cubic meters already depleting local resources, water is one of Israel’s principal interests in the Golan Heights.
The Golan’s territory itself provides one o the water source for Israel; before the war, the total output of Syrian groundwater wells in the Golan was only about 12.5 millions cubic meters (mcm). These days the settler output from the underground water is more than 30 mcm, in addition to more than 45 mcm that they get from artificial water reservoirs. However, the Golan’s relatively high rainfall (averaging 1000 mcm annually) supplies two aquifers, one draining into Lake Tiberius, Israel’s principal reservoir, and the other rising to form the headwaters of the vital Jordan’s headwaters (about 500mcm) from Lake Tiberius south to irrigate settlements in the Negev desert, through a pipeline system known as the National Water Carrier.
This diversion has resulted in both the depletion and the salinization of the Jordan River below Lake Tiberius, with devastating effects on Jordanian agriculture in the Jordan Valley. Jordan has only partly compensated for this loss by diverting part of the Yarmuk River southward via a canal. Other Arab engineering efforts have been forestalled by Israel’s strategic dominance over the Yarmuk, from the proximate bluffs of the Golan Heights.
Israel’s occupation of the Golan also eliminated all Syrian access to Lake Tiberius. Prior to 1967, Israel asserted complete control over the lake, where Syrian Arabs had traditionally fished, by patrolling the northeastern shore of the lake with armored boats and launching occasional raids on nearby Syrian villages.
Israeli control of the Golan Heights therefore gives Israel strategic control over major water sources. Israel is unlikely to relinquish such control; peace negotiations may find the issue is one critical stumbling block.

Discriminatory Policies

Israel has taken several measures to limit the remaining Arabs use of the Golan’s water supply. The Water Law of 1959 made all water resources the property of the state, and all water use subject to government approval. The drilling of pools or artesian wells is forbidden. Rainwater collection tanks, built by the Syrian Arabs in the northern villages for irrigation, were metered and taxed, and further construction forbidden in 1986. Ram Pool, lying in the heart of Arab agricultural land near the village of Mas’ada and holding between two and three mcm annually, is closed to Arab use; its water is piped to Jewish settlements as much as 70 km away.
Israel cannot justify such policies on grounds of general conservation; as in the West Blank and Gaza Strip, Jewish settler water consumption in the Golan Heights has been greatly higher than that allowed to the Golani Arab villagers: as much as 17 times higher per capita.


The Political Power of Suffering

Israeli guides to the Golan Heights will say that the stone ruins which litter the countryside are old Syrian army emplacements, dating from the inter war period between 1948 and 1967. If they admit to the existence of the former Syrian residents, they will say they fled on orders from the Syrian army. They will not admit to knowing the numbers.
Israeli settlers will even claim that, prior to Israel’s invasion in 1967, very few people lived in the Golan Heights. They will say that the land was basically empty and unused, and that the Jewish settlements are filling a void. Syria’s interest in the region, they claim, is purely hostile, a launching point for an attack on Israel, from the Height’s higher elevations overlooking the Galilee.
But the ruined villages bear mute testimony to Israel’s interest in obscuring the truth. They are ruined because they were deliberately destroyed; they are empty because their residents are not allowed to return. The sprinkling of new Jewish settlements have no relation to the stone fences, the organic division of the land effected by centuries of Arab cultivation.
Syria’s interest in the Golan Heights is complex: military strategic concern is a factor, as is the political legitimacy of President Asad in resisting a permanent loss of Syrian territory. But that legitimacy rests not on pride, but on a fundamental issue: popular Syrian concern for the loss of a rich land, which sustained a thriving society. If the inter national community, absorbed by the complexities of the Palestinian problem, tends to forget the Golan Heights, or to imagine it an empty area or a purely strategic issue, this does not erase the memories of the 130000 who lost their homes, their farms and their livelihoods to Israeli bulldozers.

On what basis can they be asked to forget?

Too often, the forces of international diplomacy look over the heads of the people to solutions made of maps and missile agreements. If we have learned any lesson in the last half-century, it is that such oblivion has its bitter costs. Care must be taken with people whose pain and resentment form a smoldering political force in itself, simple compassion aside. Someday, even the political elites must come to redefine real-politic to include the experience of the people on the ground, whose needs have been defined as rights party because of the political power of their suffering.