I spent the day in the Golan Heights, in a ruined Syrian town, Quneitra, absolutely destroyed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War between the Syrians and Israelis. Before the Israeli army withdrew after the 1973 ceasefire, the Israelis evacuated the 37,000 Arabs living there and destroyed the town, stripping buildings of windows, doors, anything that could be carted off: this was sold to Israeli contractors, and then bulldozers and tractors moved in and knocked down most of the stripped buildings, now mangled slabs of concrete and rebar. It was odd, disturbingly odd, to see a herd of cows here and there, birdsong everywhere, the remains of the town overgrown, even a garden full of roses run wild in what used to be somebody's front yard.

The village is now kept as a shrine/memorial by the Syrian government, which of course uses it for propaganda purposes as well. The hospital, which is only an empty shell of long cinderblock corridors, was pocked all over by what looked like 20 millimeter shell holes. At the axis of the hospital, you could look down the corridor at the empty concrete window frames and see the green countryside stretching away to neat lines of olive trees planted on the slopes of the Heights. Swallows swooped in and out of the building, and the floor in some of the rooms was deep in powdered concrete.

In a church there was graffiti written in Arabic on the walls: "Let fever make Sharon sweat." From the empty shells of the windows you could see Syrian checkpoints, white-washed buildings where some teenagers were kidding around with the soldier on duty, and in front of the church, I could see slabs of gray, weathered concrete from the ruined houses cantilevered at crazy angles.

I then went to the border of Syria and Israel: we drove through the narrow strip of the UN demilitarized zone, talked to the UN soldiers, some Irish soldiers (we spoke of Guinness, what else? as a focal point of civilization), one from Cork, one from Dublin, some Austrian UN soldiers, and some from India. One of the Syrian soldiers, a young man who was part of the local police force, spoke a beautifully inflected Hollywood English, full of tough-guy slang. When I told him I was writing an article, he said I should call it, "Free Guides," referring to all the armed personnel that we were surrounded by as we joked with them about the best bars in Damascus. The Israeli flag was flying over what everybody calls, half humorously, Checkpoint Charlie, about 50 yards away.

And then we drove to a Palestinian refugee camp in the Golan, which of course is much more than a mountain—in fact, it's some of the most fertile land in the region. We were looking for someone to talk to, and went into a carpenter's shop. People began to gather, and soon we were talking with a man in his sixties, who took us into his home, served us coffee, soft drinks that looked like wine, and talked to us for about two hours. His house was modest, but comfortable, unlike the homes in Lebanon, which are truly miserable, and really deserve the word, "camps." In his living room, we sat on cushions on the concrete floor. A ceiling fan hung down, the floor was carpeted in industrial-style brown carpet, there was a large hutch with family pictures and crockery neatly stacked, plastic roses in a wall sconce, and even a modest chandelier.

He told us he was a retired teacher who had basically been an exile since he was three years old: He went to preparatory school in the village he ended up in after his family was expelled, then went to Damascus for high school, and ended up spending 38 years in Saudi Arabia as a teacher. He was dressed in a white gown, and wore a red checkerboard headdress. He said there was no sanitary drinking water, no central sewer, and that he thought the lack of these things contributed to the many cases of diarrhea. He told us his views about the Palestinian camp near Tripoli where Al-Fatah was challenging the Lebanese government, and said that the situation was the result of a political vacuum. He said dialogue was the one way to resolve the conflict, but that a political vacuum develops when you resort to indiscriminate shelling.

As he talked about his past, at one point he asked if we'd like to see the deed to his family's holdings in Golan. And when he said that the deed was covered in his brother's blood that the Israeli soldiers had killed back in 1948, I thought he was making a metaphor, since he'd just said that living as a refugee in a tent when he was a child was like "living in a spider web in the heart of a well." And that the life of an exile was a life "in desert places that resembled the life of a slave." So when he said that seeing his mother killed, his four brothers killed when the Israeli's attacked was like a "lake of blood, and that the deed was stained with blood," I assumed again his reference to the deed was just a metaphor. But then he asked us again if we'd like to see the deed, and he called his nephew on the cell phone, and the nephew came with the deeds to his family's property (I learned later that many Palestinians have the keys to their old homes) and yes, the deed was literally stained with blood, the legalese obscured by three long brown, faded stains. He said the deed was found when his uncle and cousin came over to the house after the soldiers dynamited it, which he also said he witnessed...as well as seeing one of his brothers, still a baby, sucking at his dead mother's breast.

As we drove out of the village for a meeting later that evening with the Under Secretary of State of Syria, and a former ambassador to the UN, a man who had written a dissertation on the novels of Graham Greene, and whose daughter is majoring in English at Hunter College in New York City, which, weirdly, is where I teach, we saw a slogan written on the Syrian side of the UN zone: "Peace Is Our Target; The Peace Which Retrieves Our Occupied Syrian Golan."

The president of Syria, who is running unopposed, looks as if he will overwhelmingly win the current presidential referendum.

-- Tom Sleigh
May 25, 2007