Golan residents fear losing calm home

KATZRIN, Golan Heights | Life has suddenly become very uncertain for the residents of the 32 Israeli communities in these highlands captured from Syria in 1967.

Recent peace overtures with Syria have put their homes on the trading block, raising the prospect that they could be evicted in scenes reminiscent of the evacuation of the Gaza Strip in 2005.

But the Golan occupies a very different place in the Israeli national psyche from Gaza or the West Bank, where ideologically driven settlers live in tense proximity to a Palestinian majority.

A movie screened at a two-year-old tourist center in this Jewish settlement recasts the strategic plateau not as a potential conflict zone but as an exotic and enticing vacation spot.

Airborne cameras sweep over emerald grazing fields that have replaced the minefields left when the Golan was captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. Surround-sound speakers thunder with galloping horse hooves instead of the tanks that once rumbled across the plateau.

Israelis feel more at home in the Golan than in the West Bank and even Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods. Now that the Golan is back on the bargaining table, Israeli residents there bristle at comparisons with the religious nationalist settlers of the West Bank and the former Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip.

“We’re not missionaries. This is not a cult,” said tourist center owner and Golan resident Haim Ohayon, explaining why the tourist film makes almost no mention of politics or history.

“The public in the Gaza Strip disengaged from the people before the disengagement. We want to connect to the people.”

Since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the Golan Heights’ border between Israel and Syria has been the calmest of any border zone. Despite the ubiquitous presence of military vehicles on the roads, residents ask rhetorically why a treaty with Syria is necessary when the Golan is more tranquil and more secure than Tel Aviv.

With a mostly quiescent Arab population of just 18,000 Druze villagers, there is none of the fear for personal safety that existed throughout the West Bank and Gaza after the start of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

That allows Israelis to feel at home making day trips to the ski slopes on the Hermon Mountain range, visiting cherry orchards just a few hundred yards from the Syrian border fence or patronizing restaurants in Druze villages.

It also enabled Israel to pass legislation in 1981 that extended Israeli laws to the Golan in place of the military regime - a de facto annexation similar to the inclusion of East Jerusalem into Israel immediately after the 1967 war.

“Even more than the West Bank, people have grown up thinking of the Golan as part of Israel,” said Gershom Gorenberg, the author of a book on the settlers titled “The Accidental Empire.”

Ironically, Mr. Gorenberg said, the Golan is recognized by the international community as belonging to Syria, while there’s never been an official sovereign over the West Bank.

“It’s not dangerous to live there. The population of non-Israelis there is small, it’s not a demographic issue. The whole set of images associated with the West Bank is not there.”

Story Continues →