A quiet weekend in the country is often not quite that in this part of the Middle East.  A couple of days in the northern Golan Heights left me with plenty to reflect on, about land and people, borders and sovereignty, war and peace.

The picture on the left shows, in the middle, the southern end of the Shebaa Farms, the few square miles at the centre of possibly the knottiest territorial dispute in a region with no shortage of same.  Is it Lebanese? Or Syrian? In any case it is occupied by Israel. All three countries converge here, while neither Lebanon nor Syria recognise Israel, seeing instead Palestine across their border. In the foreground of the picture, taken from near the 13th-century Crusader-era Nimrod Castle, lie the Golan Heights, Syrian territory seized by Israel in 1967 and held in another war six years later. In the distance, lie the Hezbollah strongholds that saw heavy fighting in the 2006 war with Israel.

At a time when there is renewed, if desultory, talk of talks between Israel and its northern neighbours, my colleague Alistair Lyon’s reporting from Shebaa and the Golan last summer is worthwhile reading. For a technical reflection on what’s at stake in the apparently insignificant Shebaa Farms, Asher Kaufman’s essay from before the war in the Palestine Israel Journal is thought provoking. We might blame shoddy French colonial map-making back in the 1920s, when Paris and London were carving up the collapsed Ottoman empire after World War One. Though plenty has happened since then to complicate it further.

On a weekend trip to the southern slopes of Mount Hermon, I visited Druze villages where locals still consider themselves Syrian citizens and refuse to accept Israel’s occupation and, later, annexation of the Golan. Among other visitors was a party of Palestinians from Jerusalem and the West Bank, curious about this other part of Israeli-occupied territory and about its inhabitants, members of the religious community that is an offshoot of Islam and is scattered across Israel, Lebanon and Syria.  Both Druze and Palestinians were keen to assert their common Arab culture, and rue the border-drawing governments that have divided and re-divided the land of the Middle East over the past century.

On the edge of the village of Majdal Shams, amid minefields lining the border, is the “Shouting Fence”, where families divided by the sealed border once exchanged news, and marriage proposals, by loudhailer. Thank the Internet and advances in international telephony for making that less common now. For all their rejection of Israel, however, most of the signs over shops and restaurants lining Majdal Shams’s main street are in Hebrew. Israeli tourists heading for the nearby ski slopes and mountain walking trails are by far the biggest drivers of a prosperous looking local economy.

Aside from exquisite fresh cherries, just in season, and rich cuisine with its own variations on Middle Eastern standards, the Golan offers a study in history. One stop on the tour is Mount Bental, where an Israeli trench and bunker system, complete with tank turrets buried in the earth, is now open to tourists. They can look down to the east on the UN peacekeeping forces camp and the site of the town of Quneitra, destroyed in the wars. A short drive away, lies Nimrod Castle, its impressive stone towers dominating the western side of the Golan plateau as it has done for 800 years. It was originally built by rulers in Damascus to defend against attackers from Jerusalem. 

So, the political faultlines that lie in and around the Golan are not new. Nonetheless, for many of the people living on the various sides of the various borders, with little chance of crossing them, there is a common irritation with their modern incarnation. Recalling Arab anger with the Sykes-Picot Agreement struck secretly by France and Britain during World War One which divided the region into spheres of influence, one Palestinian visitor declared, with not altogether intended irony: “This is a land without borders. Originally.”

(PICTURE: Alastair Macdonald)