Over the last three decades, however, this windswept territory of 500 square miles has been transformed into a breadbasket of Israel, giving rise to kumquat and apple groves, spicy cabernets and tangy olive oil, sweet milk chocolate and dainty pastries. There are now artist colonies and multimillion-dollar industries, hot springs and ski slopes, and settlers and soldiers who drink tea and eat falafel at shops owned by local Druze, the thousands of Muslims who live here and still identify as Syrian.
“This place is really heaven,’’ said Tzvi Raish, 31, who has spent the past four years working at the Golan Heights Winery, which is expanding. “Everything here moves at a better pace. It’s quiet and slow. It feels like the definition of peace.’’
I had long read about this small patch of earth from the comfortable distance of New England, where the equation to end the madness of the persisting conflict seemed so simple: Israel should trade much of the Golan Heights for a viable peace agreement with Syria, just as the Jewish state and Egypt did with the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel also occupied in 1967.
But the clarity of such a straightforward formula, a version of which nearly came to fruition during peace talks three years ago, began to dissolve after I spent a few days last month roaming from the serene waters of the Sea of Galilee in the south to the foothills of the snowcapped peaks of Mount Hermon in the north.
In my short time here, it became easier to appreciate how difficult it would be for Israel to cede the valuable high ground to its longtime enemy and how both sides could harbor such an intense attachment to the beauty and bounty of this stark land. About 40,000 people live here, almost evenly split between Jews and Druze.
