Golan Heights (redux and success)

So off we went again...and this time everything went super smoothly. We were old hands afterall.

The only thing was after we accepted a 500 sp offer for the drive around we saw a Japanese fellow walking on the site with his military escort (a dude who may or may not know anything about the city). So apparently the cost is only for the driver and we could have paid even less. Go figure.

But enough of economics. Quenaitra is a city/town (I'm not sure of its exact size, but significant) which was overrun nby Israeli troops, I believe during the 1967 war. (I should mention now that I can access a part of the blogger pages and write these posts, but for some reason can't see my old ones. My apologies if this is a rehash). They went pretty far and then pulled back and Queneitra was one of the spots they momentarily occuppied. Long enough to bulldoze all the houses and shoot up the hospital, etc etc.

It's a pretty strange place. There is a UN observation post there and a lot of flattened structures. The hospital remains, but became a shooting gallery, target practice zone so is pretty messy, the church is intact and the mosque has a giant hole in the minaret...aside from tha, pretty much flat. Some Syrians were picnicing in the rubble (revisiting homes?), but to get there we had to go through an occuppied but unalert UN checkpoint as well as one or two Syrian ones (hence the need for our little piece of paper from the ministry of the interior). A very desolate spot.

Just across the way (we were about 20m from the Israeli border at one point) everything turns very green. Israel was happily growing a lot of whatever right up to the border, looked over by a lot of structures and antennaes on some heights just a little ways off. And this is what, once again it's really all about. The water.

By taking the heights Israel, along with the defensive claims, gets the Sea of Galilee catchment, responsible for about a 1/3 of the country's water. In negotiations with Syria, they want all the Heights back, Israel wants to keep a 200m milkitary buffer on the easter side of the Galilee (I think I got all this from BBC). Politics, religion? BS. It's all about the maayeh (water).

An interesting trip and given the history happening right now in the region I think a better trip than wandering off to see yet another old city. That stuff's not going to change anytime soon.