HAPPILY OCCUPPIED:

No battles, no bombs … just the silent war: A sedate way of life in the Golan Heights masks the dispute over Israeli occupation. (Robert Tait, 11/23/03, Sunday Herald)

Unlike the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the atmosphere here is sedate. But true peace it is not. For the Golan Heights is the site of Israel’s silent occupation, the one the world rarely hears about.

No suicide bombers leave from here. There is no violent resistance from the indigenous Arab population. Israeli F16s do not carry out assassination strikes. Road blocks and checkpoints are not a feature. [...]

Unlike their Palestinian counterparts, the mainly Druze Arabs of the Golan Heights are quiescent. In contrast to the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, the Golan Heights Arabs have benefited from higher living standards. Yet many express a yearning to be a part of Syria once again.

In Majdal Shams, a town whose main square features a memorial to local leaders of a popular uprising against the French colonial rulers of Syria in 1925, Abu Jabil, 60, said he would never accept Israeli rule.

“We still feel like we are living in Syria,” said Jabil, a ring-leader of a local rebellion in 1981 against a government attempt to impose Israeli identity cards on local people.

But why does this national yearning not explode into the open? “The Palestinians are fighting to build a country,” Jabil said. “We have a nation, Syria, already. We are just waiting for this part to be given back.”

The desire of local Druze to be reunited with their kinsmen in Syria is expressed at the “screaming hill”. Here, twice a year, people on either side of the border gather, microphones in hand, to shout their family news to relatives across the international frontier.

But in nearby Massade a different view was expressed.

Israeli soldiers relax at the Restaurant Nidal, a scene unthinkable in the West Bank. “It’s good for us here,” said the restaurant owner, Khaled Hassan, 30. “ People are scared that, one day, they will be returned to the Syrians.

Would you want to be ruled by the Assads?

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 24, 2003 9:14 AM