Kinneret Van Meter woke up crying before dawn and told her mother she had had a nightmare that a peace deal with Syria had driven her family from their beloved Kibbutz Afik.
“I had a dream we had to leave and we had nowhere to go, and we had to go from one friend’s house to another friend’s house,” said a weeping Kinneret, 11, whose name is the Israeli name for the Sea of Galilee, which the Golan Heights overlooks. “What’s going to happen to me?”
For 15,000 Israelis who settled in 33 communities on the strategic heights, that question has suddenly become more important with the momentum building in the peace talks between Israel and Syria.
Secretary of State Warren Christopher will embark on a shuttle mission this week to Jerusalem and Damascus to assess progress made during two rounds of U.S.-sponsored peace talks between Israeli and Syrian delegations near Washington, D.C. Unprecedented enthusiasm surrounds the talks though no concrete breakthroughs have yet been announced.
But up here on the windswept Golan, which Israel is considering returning to Syria in exchange for full peace and normalization of relations between the old enemies, Israeli settlers are struggling to come to terms with the realization it may only be a matter of time before they are forced to leave.
“It’s like being a terminal patient,” said an Israeli rancher, surveying his 2,000-acre spread last week during a heavy rain and talking about how Golan residents simply have to go on with their lives despite the uncertainty.
“You know you have three months to live, but you don’t live as if you know you’re dying in three months,” he added, musing about his 300 head of cattle and the house he built with his own hands in a place that feels like the top of the world. “This place is higher than God.”
More Top Picks Best Automatic Litter Boxes For Cats
Elsewhere in Israel, people are already talking about making farewell trips to the heights. And in interviews with Golan residents, the theme of reconciling oneself with fate recurred again and again last week as they listened anxiously to every news report from the peace talks.
Helene Topaz, 36, a Chicago-born social worker who came to the Golan Heights 11 years ago, compared the emotions of residents to the anger and denial associated by psychologists with how people cope with the stages of dying.
“We’ve even started cynical joking about it at breakfast, lunch and dinner,” said Topaz, who lives at Kibbutz Afik in the southern Golan and sits on a kibbutz planning committee wrestling with questions like whether to spend $1.5 million on needed cowsheds.
Families also are making personal decisions amid uncertainty, she said, pointing to her new kitchen cabinet. Rather than remodel the kitchen, she and her Israeli-born husband, Shmuel, 38, bought a large, free-standing cabinet they could move with them.
Like other residents, they point to the Nov. 4 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish zealot as a turning point in their lives. When Shimon Peres succeeded Rabin, Peres revived the stalled talks with Syria, and they fear his pursuit of a quick peace will leave Israel without the Golan and at great risk of a Syrian attack.
Before Israel captured the Golan from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War, Syrian artillery and rockets used to rain down on the Galilee. Unlike the West Bank, where Jewish settlers often moved to claim a biblical birthright to the land of Israel, Golan settlers are generally less ideologically motivated. Many moved here with the blessing of the Israeli government.
People like the Topazes are not prepared to fight Israeli soldiers if their communities are ordered evacuated by the latest Israeli government in the name of a comprehensive regional peace encompassing Syria, Lebanon and other Arab states.
“We’re not revolutionaries,” Shmuel Topaz said. “We won’t take out our guns and shoot.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Helene Topaz lamented. “We have four kids. We’re in our late 30s. We’re losing our homes, our jobs, our friends. We’ll all get up. We’ll be all scattered as a community. Many of us have professions to fall back on. Others have nothing.
“It’s been five years since the Persian Gulf war. They threw bombs at us from Iraq then and hit Tel Aviv. So what happens when they (Syrians) sit on the Golan and throw bombs at us?”
She can’t imagine herself relocating to an area like the Galilee and having to look up at a Syrian-held heights where her home used to be. “I don’t think I could wake up every morning and do that,” she said.
Among the arguments many residents give for holding on to the Golan are that its waterways feed the Sea of Galilee, reservoir to nearly one-third of Israel’s water resources; that Syria held the heights historically less time than Israel has now held them, and that Israeli forces situated on the heights have ensured the peace for 29 years.
Marla Van Meter, 38, the Kibbutz Afik mother who consoled Kinneret during her 4:30 a.m. nightmare last week and the spokeswoman for the Golan Residents Committee, puts it more personally:
“Just imagine if someone walked into Skokie and told the people: `This used to be Indian land and you have to leave.’ Just imagine what the people of Skokie would say,” she said “You’re talking about destroying their reality.”
She acknowledged she could not tell Kinneret everything would be all right. And Kinneret, whose insecurities are shared by most adults, says: “Peres is doing everything so quickly. With Rabin, it felt like a fair fight. Now it feels like everyone is against us.”
Marc Miller, 50, a fruit grower who has twice served as secretary of Kibbutz Afik, tries to keep his fellow residents working and building for the future, even though it may be a short one.
“I’m planting. I’m building. I’m investing and functioning as though I’m going to be here forever. I don’t know any other way to operate,” the former New Yorker said. “If they’re going to do this, they should evacuate us now.”
Miller’s concern is that the present government is “going to sell us too cheaply” for an insecure peace. “It’s quite clear to me that 15,000 Jews on the Golan Heights, even 15,000 tragedies, are small potatoes vis-a-vis the larger geopolitical question.”
But he questions how reliable a partner in peace Syrian President Hafez Assad can be, calling him “a minority dictator who keeps control by the strength of his army and who will have serious problem with demilitarization.”
In the nearby collective farm of Ma’aleh Gamla, farmer Yigal Kipnis, 46, with four children and a spacious, modern house, is hedging his bets.
Kipnis, whose farm raises turkeys and grows mangoes, bananas and grapefruit, is a founder of a new political group called The Way To Peace, the purpose of which, he says, is to unite those Golan residents who support the peace process and whose voices have not been heard until now.
They don’t want to leave, but they are ready to go if that is the price of a solid peace, and Kipnis believes they may represent a majority of Golan residents. He criticizes those opponents of a deal with Syria as potentially “harming the interests of the state by tying the government’s hands.”
Down the road at Kibbutz Mevo Hamma, Phil and Lynn Michaelson are trying to keep their lives business as usual. Their kibbutz is in the process of investing $4 million in its factory, which makes polypropylene (plastic) sheeting and products.
“We’re planning on enlarging our members’ homes in 1996 and building 25 new units,” said Phil Michaelson, 47, an industrial engineer originally from London. “We can’t live as if we’re leaving.”
The Michaelsons say they are buffeted by conflicting emotions.
More Top Picks Fire Pits Wood
“On the one hand there’s excitement, a chance to start over again (with proper compensation). On the other there’s deep sorrow to leave something you’ve built from scratch, a place where you’ve lived for 25 years,” said Phil Michaelson.
Lynn Michaelson, 43, a nurse who is originally from Kansas City, Mo., adds “There’s also a kind of defensiveness against what other people think. We are being portrayed as an obstacle to peace or as money-grubbing leeches, and at the same time there are people who ask you how you could sell out your life for any price.
“It’s terrible in your early 40s to talk about your life in the past tense, to know that the most productive years of your life are behind you,” she added. “But we’re better off than most. We have professions. There are other people here who have spent 26 years working in the laundry. There are people in their 50s who will never work again.”