Mideast Clashes Threaten a Village Dream

Remaining together as a village is a never-ending struggle for the 1,700 historically Syrian residents here, who have lived on Lebanon’s edge for decades amid battles and border disputes.

They willingly accepted Israeli citizenship en masse to ensure that their community stayed together after it was seized from Syria during the 1967 Middle East War. They poured onto their narrow streets in June to protest a United Nations plan to divide the village and its lands between Israel and Lebanon.

They have waited patiently, year after year, for an international agreement returning the whitewashed buildings and brightly colored gardens to their native country.

“Our life is our land,” explained Ade Shamaly, a middle-school teacher who, like his neighbors, is sure his centuries-old village will reunite with Syria someday. “If anyone takes this, it would kill us.”

Clashes between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israeli border troops over possession of barren terrain a mile from here threaten to carve up what Shamaly and others have spent a lifetime trying to preserve. Israel has begun work on a border fence to curb incursions by Hezbollah guerrillas into Israeli territory. The barrier, which follows a border drawn by the U.N. in June, will separate the villagers from more than 1,100 acres of their farmland now designated as part of Lebanon.

“If they create this line, we will lose those [acres],” said Hussein Khatib, the Ghajar village council secretary. “We do not want this to happen.”

Nor does Israel, an army spokesman said. But the Israelis insist they have no choice now that their troops have withdrawn from southern Lebanon, ending a 22-year occupation, and Hezbollah has taken control of the other side of the border.

In the past two months, members of the Iranian-backed Islamic group have killed an Israeli soldier with a roadside bomb, kidnapped three others and, according to the army, tried to cross the border to attack an Israeli collective farm.

For Israeli officials, the escalation along the border is especially infuriating given that they believe they fulfilled their part of the bargain by withdrawing from southern Lebanon in May. The United Nations agrees that the withdrawal should have eliminated any pretext for cross-border attacks by Hezbollah.

Instead, the guerrilla group has massed men and weapons just inside Lebanon, posing a serious threat to Israeli positions, senior Israeli army officers say.

Hezbollah says it is attacking Israel to make it relinquish control over hilly terrain that Arabs call Shabaa Farms and Jews refer to as Har Dov. The U.N. recognizes the area as part of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Lebanese leaders, on the other hand, insist it is their territory.

Syria’s silence over Lebanon’s refusal to send troops to the border and challenge Hezbollah’s presence compounds Ghajar’s dilemma, said a U.S. official in Israel, because Lebanese politicians take their direction from their powerful Arab neighbor. The Syrians “obviously don’t care what happens to this village,” the official said.

Ghajar residents, however, dispute such interpretations. They believe “Mother Syria” wants them back as much as they want her.

“We want Ghajar to be returned to Syria. It’s Syrian territory, not Lebanese,” said Khatib, the council secretary, adding that the village is working to create a Web site that will “inform the world about Ghajar and the situation here.”

Shamaly is helping in that endeavor. A teacher of Hebrew whose two eldest children attend Israeli universities, he nevertheless speaks of Syrian President Bashar Assad in hushed tones, referring to him as “the lion of lions.”

“His father was like a father to us,” said Shamaly, whose spotless living room is adorned with pictures of the late leader Hafez Assad, who died in June. Like the Assads, the villagers are Alawites, members of a Muslim sect.

Though Shamaly, 42, hasn’t been to Syria proper since he was a child, he said he regularly calls relatives living in Damascus, the capital, only about 40 miles to the northeast.

He was 9 when the 1967 war broke out. Israeli soldiers took over Ghajar, then withdrew, leaving the village cut off on all sides. The villagers, though bearing Syrian papers, could not enter their homeland while the Israeli army blocked the crossing. It was then that residents asked the Israelis to take over their village and accepted Israeli citizenship.

Shamaly’s 18-year-old daughter, Dalia, looks more like an Israeli teen than an Arab one, in a form-hugging sweater and sleek ankle-length skirt. Yet she too yearns to see Ghajar handed back to Syria, a country she’s never seen.

“Our mother country will return to us,” her father said, displaying an unwavering trust echoed by many here.

Other residents fear it won’t be soon enough.

On a recent afternoon, Noaf Rasash, 25, and his grandfather, Abdallah Ramadan, trudged across their wheat fields, which will soon be cut off by the new fence.

“It’s a bad situation,” Rasash said. He has a job as a day laborer, but his grandfather, who has tilled this land for most of his 80 years, will be left with nothing if the barrier is erected, Rasash added.

Their adopted country is sympathetic to such concerns. Israeli officials are working with the world body on alternate proposals, including the placement of U.N. forces north of the village in Lebanon to stave off Hezbollah attacks, according to the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. Nonetheless, work on the barrier continues.

The section of fence through their farmland is not the only one proving uncomfortable to Ghajar’s residents. The creek on the western edge of town where village residents once swam, Shamaly said, is also being cut off.

A Hezbollah outpost sits on the hillside next to the creek, a potential hot spot only a few hundred feet from the village.

Even Ghajar’s lone restaurant was in danger of being partially ceded to Lebanon by the U.N. in June, until the villagers’ protest put a stop to the plan, said owner Mosa Wanoos. Patrons would have had to eat their meals in the Golan Heights and pay in Lebanon if the U.N. had had its way, Shamaly joked.

But the 40% drop in business since the front moved closer is no laughing matter, Wanoos complained. He added, “No tourists come to Ghajar anymore.”