Photos by Stewart Innes
From the precipices of Gadara, perched high above Jordan’s northern frontier, a haunted, divided landscape shimmers into the hazy distance. Strait across a deep valley, high ranges, like a rampart, topped by discreet guard-posts, run. North-east, the blue of a teardrop lake catches the light, beyond a lush green, intensely irrigated plain. Here, in the compass of a single glance, the most contested real estate in the Middle East lies revealed.
The Golan Heights, a sandy-brown escarpment looking over the Jordan River Valley and Lake Galilee, was captured by Israel from neighbouring Syria in the Six-Day War of 1967, and has formed the undisputed key element of Israel’s northern defences ever since. Or at least until earlier this month, when Israel’s military Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Moshe Yaalon, in an interview, made a startling judgement on the Golan: “Mindful of Israel’s military needs, an accord with Syria can be attained which leads to Israel’s withdrawal from the Golan. The army is capable of defending Israel’s borders wherever they are”. Yaalon, who stressed he was speaking “theoretically,” had conceded what some critical military observers have argued for years: that weapons technology has advanced so far the mere possession of dominant terrain by Israel cannot guarantee security.
But the vital place of the Golan Heights in Israel’s calculations comes not only from their defensive value: control of this narrow belt of country puts Israeli tanks a mere 40 kms from the Syrian capital, Damascus. And this advance position has long been seen in Jerusalem as a crucial deterrent, protecting Israel from Syrian attack.
To look out over the Golan, though, is to grasp another point about regional geography: territories of very different kinds lie almost within touching distance here. The north edge of the Palestinian-populated West Bank snakes round towards the Jordan River close by, while across Lake Galilee, on the far horizon, lie the southern valleys of Lebanon, held under Israeli suzerainity until 2000 as a security buffer zone. Across the Golan Heights is the part-ruined town of Quneitra, which the Syrian Government has left as a memento of the 6-Day War.
The locals have long since despaired of diplomatic progress. Olive oil producer and small farmer Abu Mohammed, who lives right above Jordan’s border with the Golan, believes the situation is “so complex, so inter-related that it’s beyond human help - it needs the hand of God.”
But a flurry of unexpected developments has been taking place in the shadows, and the long-term outcome may change the atmosphere in this border country, and the tone of relations between the three very different states whose frontiers abut here: Israel, Jordan and Syria.
A taut meeting between the Syrian and Jordanian governments unfolded this week in Damascus: Although the surface contact was smooth, the deeper agenda was made public by the Jordanians. Prime Minister Faisal al-Fayez had talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his key ministers. The Jordanians wanted the Syrians to stop the passage of weapons and drugs across their shared border. This has been a key demand ever since a chemical weapons attack being planned in the Jordanian capital by an Al-Qaeda cell, which included a Syrian national, was foiled in April this year.
Meanwhile, the Syrians have been eager to improve relations with the United States. Washington has made no secret of its suspicion of Damascus, which it views as a main sponsor of terrorism and a supporter of the Iraqi insurgency. The US also wants Syria to remove its 16,000 troops from neighouring Lebanon, a country in which Damascus exerts an almost praetorian authority. Syria, as a security state, conducts its international politics on several levels, and is currently placing fierce pressure on Israel by allowing a flow of missiles to Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shia Muslim movement in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is one of Israel’s most ardent foes, and its fighters eyeball Israeli troops directly across the Israel-Lebanon border. But reports are circulating of Syrian attempts to redefine the parameters of its stand-off with Israel over the Golan. The two states remain without diplomatic relations - and yet rumours have been current inside Israel that some concession to Damascus over the Golan Heights may be under early consideration.
Those rumours, and Lieutenant-General Yaalon’s comments on the Golan, may point to a new phase in the quest for a durable settlement in the Middle East. For with Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon preparing the way for withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, a fresh dispensation is also looming for the West Bank. Syria, an enemy for four decades, is the final, improbable target of Israeli diplomacy. And if the Golan Heights are in play at last, then the first contours of a regional peace deal could begin to take form.
But of all this, the Golan frontier today betrays nothing. The barbed-wire border swings round the twisting line of the Yarmuk Gorge, skirting close by the wrecked remains of a railway bridge. Arab tourists come here, to the ruins of biblical Gadara, to gaze out across one of the region’s grandest belvederes, where religions, nations and cultures edge into one another. More than ever, it is an uncertain stretch of terrain.
(Copyright © 2003 Stewart Innes. All rights reserved)