Facts on the ground
A anonymous building in Quneitra
Last weekend some friends and I went to Quneitra, the last town under Syrian control before the occupied Golan Heights, which the Syrians regained in 1974 after Israel took the town in the 1967 war, a feat performed essentially without a fight due to a Syrian military error that led to an early withdrawal from the town. When Syria regained Quneitra, it had been destroyed; Israel claimed that the rubble was a result of the intermittent bombings carried out during the Israeli occupation, while Syria says that Israel systematically destroyed the town so as to make it unlivable, and indeed many buildings seem to have been demolished from the inside. The town’s interest today lies in the fact that the Syrian government left the destroyed town essentially as it was when they retook it—officially as a testament to Israeli aggression, but also as a museum of enormous proportions, in which one can walk into the rubble of a former hospital and touch the scarred walls, or climb a still-standing minaret and view the land from its parapet, edging gingerly around the parts where the stone and iron barrier has been torn away. As with any museum, it’s unlikely that what’s presented is a neutral account of history, but it’s impossible to say whether much of a free hand was been employed in re-arranging and presenting evidence. In fact, the whole experience underscored how difficult it would be to research anything other than a nationalist historiography in Syria. We were kept on a short lease during the whole visit, which was perfectly fine with me, but it would have made things considerably more difficult if I’d had serious research in mind.
Inside the Golan Hospital
We had to obtain a permit in advance to visit Quneitra, and although it was a quick and largely formal procedure, this was partly because it was our luck that my friend Suneela’s roommate knew that the exact location of the building from which we could obtain this permit. The British students we traveled there with, by contrast, had visited several different ministries in vain before attempting to travel to the town without a permit and being turned back at the checkpoint that precedes it. When we arrived at the last inhabited town before Quneitra, we entered the barracks (a single room) of several soldiers, who examined our permit and passports. They seemed to be high spirits, joking and laughing excitedly, and I realized that the odd group of tourists coming through might be the some of the only entertainment around for this gangly group of barely-men stationed in a dusty rural town during the two year stint in the army that’s mandatory for all Syrian males, save only sons. They must have been at least 18 to have been serving, but they all had that stretched, slightly awkward look of teenagers who’ve grown too fast, exacerbated by having been stuffed into cheap and ill-fitting uniforms. I’m not sure where Syria gets these uniforms from, actually; unlikely the men whom I presume to be the regular army officers, the kids serving their mandatory duty seem to wear
A destroyed house...or something
one-size-fits-every-country military garb out of some factory in China: instead of actually affixing insignia, they cover paper printouts of the Syrian flag and the pictures of the president, the previous president, and the dead brother of the president in plastic wrap and stick them to the cloth with safety pins. The five cadets checking our passports didn’t seem too bothered by this, however, or by the cramped room they appeared to be sharing; instead they lined us up and took pictures with their cell phones before sending us on our way.
At the last checkpoint before the town of Quneitra, we picked up a polite plainclothes police officer who guided us through the town, an old hand who answered our questions without excessive national proselytizing and without many questions about who we were or why we had come (and when asked why he wasn’t wearing a uniform, he replied that it was uncomfortable). He asked us not to take photographs of military sites, and walked us through the remains of several buildings. Personally, I wasn’t bothered by his presence, since I wasn’t planning to do anything that he might have forbidden me from and I’ve run into problems at borders before, photographing things I later found out weren’t supposed to be recorded on
We tour the inside of Quneitra's mostly-intact church
film; I’d rather know ahead of time exactly what I’m allowed to do in sensitive military areas and what I can’t. He told us that there were still two families living in Quneitra who had never left it, who resolved to stay with their houses even if the structures were shelled and they were buried underneath. Well, their particular houses weren’t shelled, and they survived, and have lived their ever since. Only a few members of each family remain; one, we learned, is a barber in the neighboring town, and another drives a taxi. We didn’t see them; most of the vehicles on the roads as well as the lone jogger belonged to the U.N. peace-keeping force stationed there. At the end of our visit, our police “minder” helped us find a service out of Quneitra and bid us, laconically, adieu.
