Displaced Syrians Long to Return to the Golan Heights

It was 33 years ago, but Ibrahim Ghaleb remembers it as if it was yesterday. He was 27 years old, carrying his 2-year-old son down through the mountains while his wife wrestled with the bag containing the few belongings they had managed to pull together.

They were Syrian Arabs, and they were running--like most of the people of the Golan Heights--from the fast-advancing Israeli Defense Forces that were conquering the strategic highlands in southwestern Syria.

“Do you see the pictures [of refugees] out of Chechnya today? It was the same for us,” recalls Ghaleb, now a retired state inspector living in the low-income Jeramana quarter of Damascus, where many of the displaced Golan residents eventually were settled.

“There were men, boys, old women, donkeys, cars--all leaving.”

Ghaleb’s son later died of cancer. He and his wife since have raised three more boys, but none of them ever got to know their now-deceased grandparents, who stayed behind in their home village of Majdal Shams, in the Golan, less than 50 miles away.

And the desire to return has never left him, Ghaleb says. “Imagine how you would feel if somebody told you that you could never return to the United States.”

Conflicting Demands in Peace Negotiations

Israeli and Syrian leaders have been stumbling toward a peace deal that could restore all of the Golan Heights to Syrian control in exchange for Damascus establishing normal, peaceful relations with Jerusalem and giving Israel security guarantees. The process recently reached an impasse, which President Clinton was unable to surmount during a meeting last Sunday in Geneva with Syrian President Hafez Assad.

Syria is demanding an immediate promise from Israel for full withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Israel is seeking territorial concessions and demanding that Syria rein in Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas who have been striking Israeli troops occupying southern Lebanon and the Israelis’ Lebanese allies.

Ever since the negotiations began, much attention has been paid to the 17,000 Jewish settlers in the Golan, who almost certainly would be forced to move if an agreement were reached.

But the much larger number of Syrian Arabs displaced from the Golan in 1967 consider their plight to be an underappreciated tragedy, often overlooked amid the general tumult of the Arab-Israeli conflict over the last 50 years.

If and when they have the opportunity to return, Syrians will run a “marathon” to get back, according to Ghaleb. “I would walk or crawl if I had to,” he says, smiling.

According to Hamed Halaby, an educator who also was part of the panicked flight from the Golan, all but 7,000 of the 138,000 Syrians living in the area fled or were expelled by Israeli forces during the Middle East War of 1967. Of the 129 Arab villages that existed in the 700-square-mile Golan before the Israeli conquest, only five are still inhabited by Arabs. Traces of the rest have been all but obliterated by military decree, he says.

During the last three decades, the 7,000 Syrians who remained behind, mostly members of the Druze sect of Islam, have swelled to about 17,000. All but a handful have rejected Israeli nationality.

And the families of the original 131,000 refugees who were dispersed to Damascus or other parts of Syria have grown to nearly 500,000.

For Halaby, on a recent visit to the small sliver of the Golan still in Syrian hands, it is almost impossible to contemplate the vagaries of politics that have kept him separated from his 93-year-old father and five sisters.

“It is easier for me to fly to Los Angeles and come back than to see them, and they are only 15 kilometers [nine miles] away from here,” he says, pointing to a two-lane road leading to the Israeli-occupied land. On a ridgeline a few hundred yards away, giant propellers spun in the cold, wintry wind, generating electricity used on the Israeli side of the armistice line.

Communication Is Slowly Improving

Halaby, 53, produces a daily 25-minute educational program for Syrian television--which is easily received in the Israeli-occupied Golan--designed to provide a rudimentary Arabic language and history curriculum for the Arabs living there. He keeps his own appearances to a minimum, he says, because it is emotionally wrenching. He has heard that his sisters kiss their TV sets whenever they see him on the air.

He says his mother’s dying words in 1984 were: “Where is my son Hamed?”

Until recently, divided families could communicate only at the so-called “shouting hill,” near Majdal Shams, where relatives on each side would hail one another across a deep gorge on days when the wind was cooperative.

Since Israel and Jordan signed their 1994 peace treaty however, they have been able to rendezvous in Amman, Jordan. Halaby, his father and sisters had a reunion there in 1998, their first meeting in 31 years. Telephone links have also become possible, thanks to switching services in Cyprus that relay calls between Syria and Israel even though the countries remain officially at war.

There is a deep sense of resentment of Israel by those expelled from the Golan.

Although in Israel and much of the West it is considered a truism that the 1967 war was caused by the Arab world ganging up against beleaguered Israel, Syrians are convinced that Israel wanted the war, and launched it with the aim of expanding its borders.

In contradiction to the prevalent image in the West of Israeli farmers being shelled from the Golan Heights, they cite the conclusion of United Nations peacekeepers who monitored the Syrian-Israeli cease-fire before 1967. Of 176 observed violations of the peace, a U.N. report said, 171 of them were initiated by Israel.

In a rout that humiliates Arabs to this day, Israel within a week had conquered the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt; the West Bank of the Jordan valley, including the Old City of Jerusalem, from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria.

Six years later, Syria and Egypt instigated a surprise war in October 1973 in an attempt to regain lost territory. Syrian forces managed to gain back most of the Golan, including the main town of Quneitra, before being repulsed. In an armistice agreement hammered out by Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, Syria managed to obtain an Israeli withdrawal from Quneitra.

But in an act that the Syrians call “barbaric,” the Israelis dynamited or bulldozed virtually the entire town before leaving. Notable exceptions were the city’s several churches and mosques.

That was in 1974. Assad has opted to leave the city empty and in ruins, partly to show what the Syrians regard as Israel’s brutal war methods and partly because the Syrians consider Quneitra painfully vulnerable, surrounded as it is on three sides by Israeli installations.

Assad has said that Quneitra will be rebuilt only when all of the occupied Golan is restored to Syrian sovereignty.

One of the few Syrians allowed to live amid the rubble is Zohdi Shkai, a 64-year-old gardener who has managed to stay ever since the 1967 war.

He lives in a house that was spared the general destruction in Quneitra because it was then owned by a U.S. citizen, and he hopes that the day is coming soon when the city will be awakened from its slumber.

“I have relations who are ready to come back if, God willing, there is peace,” he says, standing amid his pots and plants. “Quneitra will be alive again. This was a beautiful place before the occupation, and it will be restored even better.”

For the Arabs living under Israeli occupation, it has been a long, difficult struggle to maintain an identity as Syrians in the face of shutdowns of local councils and other institutions, expropriation of land and expulsions, says Bashar Tarabieh, 30, an Arab Golani activist who grew up in Majdal Shams and now is based in the United States.

In a recent article for the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine, he expressed hope for the return of the Golan to Syria to “end the misery and disenfranchisement of the Syrian Golani community.”

“The Israelis tried to dramatically transform our identities into Israelis and non-Syrians,” he said in a telephone interview. “Schools were sites of politicization. They taught the mainline history and identity of Israel, and the families at home taught the opposite.”

The families prevailed, he added: “The Syrian identity is strongly implanted in my generation.”