Stephen Farrell -
Talk of Middle East peace is in the air again, as politicians are set to gather in Bahrain to launch the latest in a long line of initiatives to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Thousands of words and millions of dollars will likely be expended at the US-led conference on June 25-26 aimed at boosting the Palestinian economy, as the first phase of President Donald Trump’s long-delayed peace plan gets under way.
Bearing witness to the difficulty of the task are the scars left by wars past across the landscape of Israel, the Palestinian Territories and the Golan Heights. Ancient ruins and medieval castles bear witness to the fact that conflict between the peoples of the Levant is nothing new.
Since the end of British Mandate rule and the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, invasions, wars, armistices, treaties, uprisings, barriers, checkpoints and civil wars have shifted the boundaries of who can travel — and live — where. Yet on the ground there remain fragments of who came and went before.
In the far north, on the western edge of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, a decades-old rusting Syrian tank can still be seen lying upside down in a whitewater stream. It lies in what used to be a demilitarised zone that separated the Syrian and Israeli armies from 1949 until the Six Day War of 1967, when Israel captured most of the mountainous plateau from Syria, occupying and later annexing it.
Today, Israeli tourists carve graffiti into the metal of the tank while dangling their feet in the foaming water below.
“It’s surrealistic,” said Daniel Alonim, 54, as his friends played Scrabble atop the hulk. “Like it fell from space.” It did fall, but not from space. Amiram Efrati, from nearby Kibbutz Dan, fought in a June 1967 battle against half a dozen Syrian tanks that had advanced on Israeli positions from the then Syrian-held Golan. One of the tanks opened fire in a dry wheat field, he recalls.
“The fire caught up to the tank tracks and metal chains and they started to retreat,” said Efrati, now 82. “One of the tanks went too close to the edge, it was too heavy for that kind of terrain and it fell down. It’s still there.”
Fifty-two years later he has little confidence that peace efforts will succeed. “I don’t believe it, not in the Middle East.” Across the Golan are other reminders of the 1967 and 1973 wars between Israel and Syria: minefields, foxholes and abandoned armour. One former Syrian building bears Arabic graffiti reading “The Syrian army passed by here”.
It is not the only army to have passed through. The British army arrived in 1917 and left in 1948, when British rule ended. As they departed, neighbouring Arab countries invaded, and Jordanian forces captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem. — Reuters
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