Israel holds the cards, controlling the territory and possessing a mightier army than Syria. It is therefore mind-boggling that Israel is doing all the giving. The Jewish State´s lone gain would be a tenuous Syrian promise not to start another war. However, this frigid non-belligerence already exists! By contrast, Syria´s gain would be monumental: the return of the elevated land it covets as part of Greater Syria. Why Israel would consider this lopsided treaty is beyond comprehension. The Golan has an obscure air about it, so that its importance and the blood that went into securing it are sometimes not appreciated. David Bedein, a veteran journalist, delivers a personal report, focusing on the Golan´s human component.

At a time when the Golan Heights and Israel’s overall security lie in the balance, I am drawn to my diary, wherein this hallowed ground becomes a human experience rather than a piece of real estate. The following notes are distilled from the “Golan” section of the diary I have kept since my aliyah to Israel in 1970.

Kibbutz Merom HaGolan, Summer 1971. My friend Shaul Weber, a founder of the kibbutz, invited me to join him there for a few weeks. After each day in the field, Shaul took me through the abandoned Syrian army camp in Kuneitra, adjacent to the nascent kibbutz. We rode from bunker to bunker in the kibbutz jeep, viewing a landscape that still looked like the war zone it had been.

An improvised gal-ed memorial for three IDF soldiers killed in the Israeli counterattack on the Golan in the Yom Kippur War. According to Jewish law, the site where a soldier falls in battle in a war for the Land of Israel is consecrated with a gal-ed, which literally means “mound of witness.”

My first night on the kibbutz was also my longest, since I was treated to my first artillery barrage. Shaul was up in a guard post somewhere. I will never forget passing the time listening to the Israeli record “Ish Chassid Hayah,” sitting with Shaul’s wife Yael and their three little kids. Yael, who had grown up in the Galilee in the shadow of the Golan, told me that in her youth she had listened to chassidic records in the shelter whenever the Syrians shelled her kibbutz. Now, Yael told me, her kibbutz “down there” was out of range, while Merom HaGolan was in range. Until the cease-fire that Israel signed with Syria in the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Merom HaGolan remained within Syrian artillery reach.

On my last day there, Yehudah Fichtman, the kibbutz secretary, explained why he had come to live in the Golan Heights. What Yehudah said to me has remained with me ever since. He explained that he had fought for the Golan, and that he wanted to raise a family in the place where he had risked his life. “We fought for it. Now we will live for it.”

Yehudah was killed in an artillery barrage while working in the fields a few months after I left. His wife and three children never left Merom HaGolan. His grandchildren now serve on the Golan in the Israel Defense Forces.

The sudden attack on the Golan Heights in 1973 hit home for me in a strange way. I had been having terrible stomach problems my first few years in Israel, always quite nervous about the country’s precarious position.

On the first day of the Yom Kippur War, the man whom I called my “tummy doctor,” Dr. Moshe Ramon, lost his oldest son. Never again would I feel the stomach pains. I said to myself, instinctively, that Moshe now had more pain than I ever would.

The Golan Heights lend a commanding view of Israel’s Hula Valley and the Sea of Galilee, offering a strategic military advantage.

At the shivah, Moshe’s son’s friends described the sudden attack — how the Syrian soldiers had scaled the fence of their settlement and mowed down the young, surprised Israeli soldiers with automatic machine gun fire, snuffing out fifteen lives in a matter of minutes.

After the initial cease-fire, I hitched up to the Golan to file a news story and witnessed the enormity of the Syrian advance. Rows of enemy tanks and other vehicles were stopped in their tracks, strafed and bombed. The Syrians had come so close to conquering the Golan Heights. Yet they had mysteriously stopped pushing forward.

Soon I became privy to the outside force that was on our side. After visiting the Golan, I spent a few days in the mystical city of Safed. There I met a Rabbi HaLevi, who told me that upon hearing of the Syrian attack, he had organized a group of women to recite Psalms. Specifically, they invoked the merit of a woman and her seven sons who martyred themselves rather than apostatize. By legend, the woman, commonly called Chanah but identified in the Midrash as Miriam, and her sons are buried on a slope just below Safed’s old city.

In Israel’s War of Independence, in 1948, Rabbi HaLevi had convened a group of women to pray for Safed, when its 2,000 Jews were under siege by an Arab army of 12,000 men. The army withdrew for no rational reason, but Rabbi HaLevi thought he knew why. A quarter-century later, the women had prayed again. And once again for no rational reason, an Arab army stopped in its tracks. This military blunder remains an enigma, and is studied in war colleges around the globe.

In February 1974, I was assigned by the Jewish Student Press Service to write about the spirit of the people who returned to the Golan Heights after the Yom Kippur War. Kibbutz Ramat Magshimim, on the southern tip of the Golan, was the first kibbutz overrun by Syrian troops. It was a logical starting point for me.

I arrived on a Friday morning and was welcomed by the family of Moshe Ben-Tzvi. During the Shabbat meal, two of the four children began to cry. Moshe said that they had cried almost constantly every Shabbat since that terrible Yom Kippur, which also fell on Shabbat, when in the middle of the night they had been forced to abandon the kibbutz because of the sudden Syrian attack. After the war, the family had returned to a badly damaged home, and the kids were still disoriented.

A reservist holds a menorah during Chanukah on the Golan in 1973.

Possibly my best moments at Ramat Magshimim were spent at an improvised mo’adon (nightclub) after Shabbat. The children sang popular Israeli folk songs at the top of their lungs, accompanied on the accordion by a young mother, Esther Ben David. Esther had told me that she was determined to wipe the tears from every nervous child on the kibbutz. I left on the bus back to Bar-Ilan University, where I was studying, the next morning with a song in my heart, so to speak.

On Monday morning, following a class, I walked by the Bar-Ilan cafeteria and heard the lunchtime news on the radio. An artillery bombardment had suddenly hit Kibbutz Ramat Magshimim. After the dust had cleared, Esther Ben David was found dead in a ditch near the baby clinic, where she had been getting medicine for her baby boy, whom she was clutching in her hands.

Esther suffered a direct hit, yet had the presence of mind to hold the boy so that no harm would befall him. Esther, who brought so much happiness to the children in her kibbutz, had saved the life of her little boy in those terrible seconds of an artillery barrage. The boy was unharmed, and he married a neighbor of mine last year.

Eshkoli, now 88, a four-time Galilee regional mayor, has been suffering from heart disease for twenty years, yet he speaks with vivid recall about his mission to Eshkol. With the future of the Golan on the agenda, he is eager to relate the events of 1967.

By the fourth day of the war, Israel had resoundingly defeated Jordan and Egypt. That left Syria, which had been raining rockets into the Hula Valley, in the northern Galilee. The residents of the Upper Galilee’s thirty-one settlements had spent the war in underground bunkers, glued to their transistor radios. Eshkoli remembers feeling that his region was burning while the rest of the country was dancing in the streets at news of the army’s victories.

Eshkoli and other regional kibbutz leaders were given five minutes to speak to the Israeli cabinet: “the longest five minutes in my life.” He reminded Prime Minister Eshkol that he and every Israeli leader who had visited the Upper Galilee after Syrian rocket attacks had promised that if there were ever another war, the opportunity would be used to permanently defuse the Syrian threat.

Only Moshe Dayan, the Defense Minister, was opposed to opening the Syrian front. Dayan had forbidden General David “Dado” Elazar, the IDF northern regional commander, to attack, “lest this cost us 30,000 dead and risk a war with the Soviet Union,” the latter having just engineered a cease-fire call by the United Nations Security Council. Dayan, hero of the 1956 Sinai campaign, had a tremendous popular following and carried great weight among his fellow cabinet members.

A child investigates the ruins of an ancient synagogue near Katzrin, the central Jewish city in the Golan Heights.

The latter sentiment carried the day, and Eshkoli made a threat, which he insists that he meant with all his heart. He declared that if the IDF did not remove the Syrians from the Golan, he would recommend that members of all kibbutzim in the line of fire pack their bags and leave.

Silence followed Eshkoli’s emotional appeal. As he turned to leave, Levi Eshkol grabbed his hand and proclaimed, “The words of Eshkoli have entered the heart of Levi Eshkol, and they will play a crucial role in what we decide to do on the Golan Heights.”

As he left, Eshkoli wondered if he had succeeded. Would his words hold greater weight than those of Moshe Dayan?

Heading back north, Eshkoli stopped off at the bunker of the IDF’s northern regional command. By then it was five a.m. Dado Elazar was slumped over his desk next to a bottle of half-empty whiskey. Eshkoli reported to Dado on his encounter with the cabinet. While they were talking, Dado received a call from the Defense Ministry. Moshe Dayan’s resonant voice was on the line with an order: “Take the Golan and succeed.”

Despite giving the order, Dayan had voted against the Golan operation, and he never forgave Eshkoli for besting him. Eshkoli showed me a yellowed news clipping from 1976, in which Dayan recalled Eshkoli and his delegation with resentment. Dayan characterized them as “Dado’s agents,” claiming that “the provocations of the Galilee farmers and fishermen in no-man’s land were the cause of the Syrian shellings.”

Scoffs Eshkoli: “Right, my thirty-one communities provoked the Syrians from our shelters. Our provocation against the Syrians is that we live and prosper here in the Galilee, which the Syrians see as a province of their country!”

Asked about the prospect of the Syrians returning to the Golan Heights, Eshkoli raises a trembling hand and points to those hills that look down upon his kibbutz: “To bring back the Syrians would be suicide for us!”

Returning on the bus to Jerusalem, I met Muki Tzur, a kibbutz leader from Ein Gev, which lies on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, mere meters from land that may be returned to Syria. Muki reached into his briefcase and showed me an article that he had written in Kibbutz, the monthly publication of the collective movement. He writes that no decision on the Golan can be made due to the pressure of an immediate desire for peace. The price of a mistake would be Syrian guns on the Golan, trained on the Hula Valley. Those guns are the reason that the Golan was taken and the reason why thirty-three Israeli settlements replaced fifteen Syrian army camps on the Heights. Vague assurances of peace are not reason enough to contemplate coming down from the Golan.

Americans should know better. The West Virginia Chamber of Commerce took us to visit the Civil War battlefield of Antitem, where 25,000 soldiers died in one day of fighting. That land is rendered “hallow ground” by the U.S. National Parks Authority and is viewed with reverence by every American citizen who visits there. Americans paid for Antitem with the blood of those who fell there.

That is precisely how many of us in Israel feel about the Golan. It is the place where IDF soldiers fell in two wars to protect Israel’s northern region. And it is the place where Yehudah Fichtman and Esther Ben David fell while they were raising their families.

There is an Israeli lullaby that was written in 1967 for the children of the Upper Galilee, who for most of their youth slept in shelters. That soothing song goes: “Rest, my children, rest and relax. The flickering lights that you see on the Golan now are our lights.”

On the plane home to Israel from the Shepherdstown talks, I read a sensitive and touching feature in Newsday about children of the Golan and the psychological crises they may endure if they have to leave their homes as the result of an Israeli pullout.

To this we add: What kind of psychological crisis will the children of the Galilee face if they are forced to live under the Syrian gun once again?

Or as I asked the guide of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce, “Would you trade the Blue Ridge Mountains for peace?”

David Bedein is the Bureau Chief of the Israel Resource News Center in Jerusalem. He wrote “Words and Deeds in Arafat’s PA” in the June 1999 issue of The Jewish Homemaker.