BASHAN / GOLAN HEIGHTS

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 7^th 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 11^th 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 12^th 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 14^th 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 18^th and 19^th 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 19^th 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.