I've been reading a bit lately about Israel's Prime Minister-elect Tzipi Livni. She says she views Israel's greatest moments as when it struck peace deals with Jordan and Egypt. I assume this means that she will be well-disposed to attaining her own greatness and perhaps forging a peace treaty with Israel's last angry neighbor, Syria -- a deal that would almost certainly involved returning the Golan Heights. I have been there before, and decided to take what might be one last trip.
The Golan Heights are small -- perhaps 30km wide and 50km long. "heights" to me always suggested some kind of plateau, but there's is probably not one square acre of flat land in the whole area -- it's just a bunch of high, scraggy hills jammed together above a fertile valley below. Aside for some nice views of the Galilee, there not really that much to see. That is, except for the monuments. The Golan Heights have been fought over for years, due their "strategic" location. They are astride the main road from Damascus to the sea, and perhaps more importantly, they are within rifle short of the farming settlements below. And within artillery range of Haifa.
At one point, I held in view three monuments. Nimrod's Fortress, a forbidding castle complex built by Saladin's nephew and used alternatively by turks, crusaders and whoever else was coming through for the last thousand years. (At one point the castle was the base for a band of hashish-smoking murders known as hashishin, who's name over time tranformed into assasins...)
Within an arrow's flight from that castle was more modern monument, to an Israeli battalian of Golani troops who nearly massacered themselves trying to storm a Syrian position during the war of 1967 when the Golan was conquered. A few burnt-out tanks and a dozen sign posts testify that the soldiers on the strength of their love for each other and for Israel alone.
Just down the road from there, within shouting range, lies one of the many modern army bases we passed during the day. Tanks guarded by young men with guns testify to the view held by many that the Golani monument is not likely to be the last one built among these rocks and shrubs.
They have been conquered many times over the millennia, and today I was but one member of a new conquering force -- the mass of Israeli domestic tourists taking advantage of the pleasant weather to tour their country, to show it to their children. This is the way that Israel was built -- by drawing a line on a map, or in ones mind, and calling it ours, and then beginning to behave as if it was ours. I read in Tom Segev's excellent book 1967, which paints a vivid portrait of the Israeli character as well as the war, that it was commonly held that the more Israeli vehicles drove over a road, the more Jewish it became. The settlment movement, and indeed the entire Zionist idea, stems from this philosophy of action -- and the many, many tourists I saw this weekend testified to its continuing prevelance.
I suppose if there is a peace deal with Syria, these tourists will all retreat, and with them will go the army bases and the monuments. There are a few towns in the Golan, which I suppose will also pack up. I passed through the region's "capital" of Katzrin looking for a place to eat lunch. The town itself was a small, well-planned affair, consisting of a central commerical district surrounded by a few roads of standard-issue Israeli settler houses, red-roofed as ever. It was clearly built as a settlement in the '70's. As the Golan's started to succumb to some ecconomic growth, mostly in the form of cattle ranching and wine-making, Katzrin has grown. It being the Shabbath, I was only able to find one restaurant open in town, in the new section down the highway from the original settlement. The restaurant, an excellent steak house called Meat Shor, was in a row of warehouses, like what you might find in a hasty suburban development in the States. In contrast to the older settlment, these were buildings built cheaply and quickly, designed to serve for a few years before being replaced.
I'm sure that if Israel does achieve peace with Israel and the Golan is its price, there will be much wailing about the loss of these now-Jewish roads and the vanity of the deaths of those brave soldiers of 1967, and perhaps about the existential danger presented by the very act of withdrawal. All that, and probably worse. But at least in Ketzrin, they are considering the possiblity.
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