southern Golan Heights, courtesy Wikipedia |
In Biblical
times, the ancient territory of Bashan, which lies to the east of the Jordan, formed the bulk of the
eastern half of the Israelite tribal territory of Menasheh. Today, about half
of the territory consists of Israel’s Golan Heights with its “capital” being
the revived ancient town of Qatzrin,
and the other half in, what is today, the southern half of Arab-occupied Syria
but with a large Druze population.
After the
Biblical period, this area continued to contain an ancient Jewish community. In
the 7th century, while various Arab clans migrated here, the
indigenous Jews were joined by Jewish refugees from Khaibar in Arabia, who were
expelled by Mohammed, especially the tribes of Kainuka and Wuld Ali, who
settled among the native Jews in Edrei,
which became a rabbinic center in the Middle Ages. Today, Edrei is known as Deraa,
an Arab-occupied town in Arab-occupied southern Syria.
Around the
same time, Bashan became home to groups a Druze and Circassians, who came in
peace. In time, the Druze became the majority and several settlements including
that of Majdal Shams, the ancient Migdal
Shemesh, became their main population centers. During the 11th
century, there was also a relatively large Jewish community in Banias. They were referred to a Baniasites
who were frequently mentioned in the documents of the Cairo Geniza. Eventually,
Babylonian Jews as well as a number of Karaites had also settled in Banias,
causing the community to divide into Palestinians, Babylonians, and Karaites,
who differed in their version of prayers. During the period of Crusader rule, in
the early 12th century, the famous proselyte Obadiah the Norman
passed through the town and wrote of a Karaite pseudo-messiah Solomon haKohen
who would preach of the coming redemption. But in c. 1170, Benjamin of Tudela
mentions no Jews at all and it is possible that the community ceased to exist by
then. Later however, Banias was re-inhabited by Jews as were some of the other
villages in the Bashan area.
By the
early 14th century, Jews inhabited three main areas in Bashan – Banias,
Edrei, and Salkhad, and questions
arose as to whether these areas, as well as others immediately to the east of
the Jordan, were halachically part of the Land of Israel. After constant
debate, which lasted for over two centuries, during which time, the Jews of Edrei
were forced to leave due to Arab depredations, it was decided in the
affirmative, and the area was officially recognized as part of the Land of
Israel. During the early Ottoman period, Banias still had a Jewish population
as attested by a document from 1624 which mentions the murder of a Jewish
physician, Elijah haKohen, by an Arab sheikh. During the 18th and 19th
centuries, Druze tribes from Lebanon migrated to the eastern part of Bashan and
mainly concentrated in and around the mountain which eventually became known as
Djebel Druze. It remains their
stronghold til today.
By the 19th
century, there were, once again, no Jews left in all of Bashan. It was in fact
only sparsely inhabited and the land was largely uncultivated. In 1880,
Laurence Oliphant published “Eretz haGilad” (The Land of Gilead), which
described a plan for large-scale Jewish settlement in the Golan, but the Turks
snubbed the scheme. In 1886, native born Jews from Safed formed the Bnei Yehuda
Society and purchased 14,000 dunams of land near the Circassian village of Ramthaniya in the central Golan on
which, they attempted to establish the village of Golan b’Bashan. But due to financial hardships and the long wait
for a kushan (Ottoman land deed), the village was abandoned after a year. Soon
afterwards, the Society regrouped and purchased land next to the Bedouin
village of Bir Shaqum in the
southern Golan. And thus, the village of Bnei
Yehuda was established. Between 1891 and 1894, Baron Edmond James de
Rothschild purchase nearly 30 sq. miles of land consisting of 16 villages in
the eastern Bashan for Jewish settlement. Most of the land straddled both sides
of the Nahr el Allan. Today, this
land lies just a few miles from the 1967 lines, inside Syria where Jews are
forbidden to live. Also in the 1890s, the Russian Agudat Achim Association
acquired land in several locations in the districts
of Fiq and Deraa and at Jillin where
a farm was built and extensive eucalyptus groves were planted. Other tracts of
land were acquired by Jewish organizations based in Romania, Bulgaria, the United
States, and England, but Jewish settlement in the area remained slow and
tenuous. Meanwhile, Jews had managed to build a road stretching from Lake Huleh
to Muzayrib and by the mid-1890s
most of the Golan had become owned and cultivated by a variety of peoples. A Jewish
village called Tiferet Binyamin was
set up on lands at Saham el-Jolan by
the Shavei Zion Association based in New York, but the project was abandoned
after a year when the Turks issued an edict in 1896 evicting the residents on
the grounds that they were not Ottoman citizens. A later attempt to resettle
the land with Syrian Jews who were Ottoman citizens also failed.
In 1899,
the pasha of Damascus expelled the Jews from all of the Rothschild’s estates.
Between 1904 and 1908, a group of Crimean Jews settled in the Bethsaida Valley, initially as tenants
of a Kurdish proprietor with the prospects of purchasing the land, but the
arrangement faltered and most of the Jewish settlements in the region were abandoned
over time either due to Arab hostility and Turkish bureaucracy, diseases, or
economic difficulties. Bnei Yehuda was the sole exception.
1920
witnessed the first of a series of Arab pogroms which raged throughout the
country resulting the massacres and expulsions of Palestinian Jews whether they
were immigrants or not. Bnei Yehuda was one such victim community following an Arab
attack. But the land itself was still owned by Jews. Meanwhile, the Palestine Jewish
Colonization Association obtained the deeds to the Rothschild lands and
continued to manage it, collecting rents from the Arab peasants living there. In
the 1920s, the British, who now occupied Palestine succeeding the Ottoman
Empire after World War I, began a policy of dividing Palestine among Arab
groups. In 1922, the Golan Heights were given over to the newly-formed Arab
country of Syria, under French rule, and the rest of eastern Palestine was
created into the Hashemite Arab Kingdom of Transjordan, under British rule.
Western Palestine became more difficult to divide. Meanwhile, along the eastern
shore of the Sea of Galilee, which remained
part of western Palestine, Ein Gev
and Shaar Hagolan were established
in 1937. In 1947, the (largely Arab) Syrian Land Settlement Campaign refused to
recognize the PJCA as the legal owner of any land in Syria, and the Syrian
government confiscated it without compensation on the grounds that “it was
contrary to Syrian policy to allow Jews to own land in Syria.”
In the
late 1950s, the PJCA transferred the Golan/Syrian landholding to the Jewish
National Fund. Today, the JNF still lay claim to the land. In the period
between Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 and the Six Day War in 1967, Syria
occupied the Golan Heights and Syrian Arabs constantly harassed Israeli border communities
by firing artillery shells from their dominant positions there. In October 1966
Israel brought the matter up before the United Nations. Five nations sponsored
a resolution criticizing Syria for its actions but it failed to pass due to a Soviet
veto. Aside from this little charade, the Israeli government refused to do anything
about the situation. One of the laziest and pathetic of Israel’s officials, Golda
Meir, summed up life in Israel’s border communities:
The Syrians
seemed bent on an escalation of the conflict; they kept up an endless
bombardment of Israeli settlements below the Golan Heights, and Israeli
fishermen and farmers faced what was sometimes virtually daily attacks by snipers.
I used to visit the settlements occasionally and watch the settlers go about
their work as though there’s nothing at all unusual in plowing with a military escort
or putting children to sleep – every single night – in underground air raid
shelters.
In 1967,
Israel uncharacteristically finally decided to do something. After the Six Day War
broke out in June, Syria’s shelling greatly intensified. The war on the
northern front ended when the Israeli army managed to reunite the Golan with
the rest of Israel. Jewish re-settlement in the Golan began soon after the war
with the establishment of Merom Golan the
following month. By 1970 there were 12 such communities. Today, the area is
well developed and consists of many sites: Mount
Hermon, the highest point in Israel at around 9000 feet, its Ski Resort and Nature Reserve, the Hermon
Stream Nature Reserve, the ruins of Gamla known as the Masada of the north,
and its ancient synagogue, the Odem Forest,
Nimrod Fortress National Park, the Banias Waterfalls, Hermonit Mountain Reserve,
Avital Mountain Reserve, Qatzrin Forest and Park including an ancient synagogue, Nahal Mehsushim Nature Reserve,
Betzaida Zachi Reserve, Jordan Park, Magrase Nature Reserve, Yarmouk Nature Reserve
(today located in the Kingdom of Jordan) and the River of the same name which forms part of the border between Israel and Jordan, the ancient town of Hamat Gader and its ancient synagogue, al Quneitra
(today in the demilitarized zone between Israel and Syria but under Syrian Arab
control), and the ancient synagogues of En
Nashut, Dabura, Dabiyye, Assaliyye, Zumeimira, Dikkeh, Kanaf, and Qanatir.
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