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SYRIA-QUNEITRA Aug-19-2008 (830 words) With photos and map. xxxi
Syrians who lived in Golan Heights still hope to return home
By Brooke Anderson
Catholic News Service
DAMASCUS, Syria (CNS) -- In a small house near the gates to the Christian quarter of Damascus' Old City is the office of the Christian Society of El Quneitra, a strategic plateau captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.
"The Christian residents of El Quneitra come here to get their birth certificates, their wedding certificates and do other business. They can get these things done with the governorate of Damascus, but they like to come here because they know us," said the head of the society, 76-year-old George Faris, a Catholic whose former home is now part of Israel and whose former church is now abandoned in what has become a ghost town.
The clean-cut, formally dressed man gets to work at his Damascus office every morning to serve the people of El Quneitra, a former political jurisdiction of Syria. Although the office is often empty, he never misses a day of work, even to visit the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, as the plateau is now known.
After more than 40 years away from his home, Faris still holds out hope that one day he'll be able to return. The disputed land has been the site of attacks and battles. In 1981, Israel annexed the territory, and some 20,000 Jewish settlers live there. The United Nations considers it occupied territory.
"The key questions in a peace settlement are what the Israelis would expect, what the Syrians would expect, and what each would give up to get what they want," said Ronald Stockton, professor of political science who specializes in Arab-Israeli relations at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. "What Syria wants is very straightforward. They want the Golan back. (Former) President Hafez al Assad put the Syrian position very clearly: Total peace for total withdrawal. They have not changed much over the decades."
With the current ongoing, Turkish-led, indirect peace talks between Syria and Israel, Faris said many El Quneitra natives are more hopeful than ever that they will see their land again when a land-for-peace deal is achieved.
"After three or four wars, that's it. There has to be peace," said Rashed Jebara, who was 7 years old when he and his family fled from the city of El Quneitra to Damascus with whatever belongings they could fit in their car.
"We thought we'd return in about two years. Instead, we returned six years later, and everything was destroyed," Jebara recalled.
Every year, Jebara, now 48, makes the journey from Damascus to the Israeli border to visit his childhood home.
"It's very hard when I go," he said. "That's our house, but there's no house.
"We still believe we'll return," he added. "It's our home."
Jebara still can remember the first few years of his childhood in what is now the Golan Heights, a place where every house had its own vegetable garden and people of different religions and ethnic backgrounds lived together. The fresh air, lush forests and snow-capped mountains made the region the gem of Syria.
"It was even more beautiful than Maaloula or Saydnaya because it was greener," said Salim Touma, secretary of the Christian Society of El Quneitra.
At the time, locals nicknamed the area "the Kuwait of Syria" because everyone wanted to live and work there.
"No one went to the West to do business. Everyone wanted to go to El Quneitra," Touma said.
Now, when Touma visits the destroyed city, officers at Syrian checkpoints ask for identification.
Touma's birthplace is a ghost town. He walks through a gutted Greek Orthodox church, one of the sites Pope John Paul II visited during his 2001 trip to Syria.
There are still homes in the area, but there appears to be little business these days in the once-thriving community. A building marked Golan Real Estate Office looks abandoned. The only cars that seem to drive around with any sense of purpose are the U.N. vehicles patrolling the area.
On the other side of the mountains, the Golan Heights is one of Israel's most scenic spots. It is home to Israel's only ski resort, a booming wine industry and a popular hiking trail.
But for many Syrians, and especially those from El Quneitra, all those economic developments in Israel mean nothing permanent.
"My impression is that the Syrian public would welcome a settlement that would recover their land and would agree to a symbolic recognition of Israel to get it," said Stockton. "But the sense that the Israelis are brutal is very strong."
Back at the El Quneitra society in Damascus, Faris takes out a carefully folded map from a dusty file folder he has kept with him in his Damascus office for decades.
Without hesitation, he quickly points out the churches, the schools and the hospital -- as though no time has passed.
He smiled and said: "Nothing is impossible. Even after 100 years, we have to go back."
END
Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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