Jordan: Springtime at a controversial junction

Local girls pick flowers at a site overlooking the disputed territory. Photo / Jill Worrall

Jill is back in New Zealand for a few months but she's planning on heading to Iran later in the year and will resume her blogs then...

For more than a thousand years the Roman city of Umm Quais (in present day Jordan) was a thriving place thanks to its location at the meeting point of north-south and east-west trading routes. Even its name is thought to be derived from the Arabic word for junction.

There was no possible way for the person who decided on this name to have known just how appropriate it was to prove nearly two millennia later. But it is eerily so.

Stand today on the massive black basalt blocks that once formed part of the city and the view is over one of the most sensitive, the most controversial and most combustible "junctions" to be found on the planet.

The sun was setting when I reached this vantage point. To my left, the light was turning the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberius) in Israel into a shimmering sliver of mercury. Directly ahead shadows were deepening among the gentle folds of the Golan Heights.

"That is Syria," my Jordanian guide said firmly.

"But the Israelis have occupied it since the 1967 war."

I could see a road snaking its way up the southern flank of the Golan, which in geographic terms is part of the Jebel Druze (Jebel Mountains). There were no other signs of life but further to the north in settlements throughout the Golan are reported to be more than 15,000 Israeli settlers and about the same number of Syrian, mostly Druze, inhabitants (the Druze trace their origins back to a 10th century Iranian mystic and are an offshoot of the Shia Ismaili sect but Shia and Sunni Muslims regard them today as heretics).

There are now peace agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan. But it is this relatively unremarkable parcel of land that remains the stumbling block to a similar treaty between Syria and Israel.

This in turn means the Golan is one of the key factors in any kind of long-term solution to Israeli-Middle Eastern conflict and thus a lessening a tension between Israel and the entire Islamic world.

My first reaction is how crazy we humans are. These hills, now showing a flush of spring green after welcome rain and melting snow, seem so insignificant, so undramatic to have become such a festering sore in the Middle East.

So, why won't Israel give back the Golan Heights to Syria? (Incidentally the UN Security Council declared Israel's annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights as "null and void" under international law in 1981. It made the same declaration over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. It's interesting to note that one of these was actioned by Western forces but not the other).

Although the Golan Heights look, at least to New Zealanders accustomed to the snowy heights of the Southern Alps, to be no more strategic that then Port Hills, they do have two physical features of note, especially to the Israelis. They are part of the catchment for Lake Tiberius (which in turn provides vital fresh water for Israel) and from them it is possible to see Damascus).

Apparently Israeli archaeologists are busy on the ground trying to prove that the Golan was originally part of biblical Israel, while the Syrians contest that Semitic Arabs had been there even earlier, in the 3rd millennia BC.

So Israel refuses to budge, Syria won't make peace with Israel without the return of the Heights and the UN maintains a presence along a buffer zone separating the two.

Beside us, also gazing out across troubled waters and mountains of tension, are several groups of locals. My guide listens to their accents carefully and says some are Palestinian.

There are thousands of Palestinian refugees living in Syria. Many come here often - not to study the Roman ruins of Umm Quais but to stare out across what was once their home... so near and yet so impossibly far away.

I know, rock is rock. But even when I first encountered black basalt ruins in southern Syria at the ancient town of Bosra I found them oppressive.

There's always a sense of poignancy attached to ruins - that sense of faded glory, even the futility of grandiose endeavour - but when they are fashioned from limestone or marble they seem to retain a lightness and a memory of a fleeting blaze of grandeur. Black basalt seems to sit less gracefully in its place in history. It sucks up the light, I find it slightly sinister.

I might be fanciful but it seems entirely appropriate on this sad spot. Those stolid slabs of black seem to epitomise political intransigence; their ruinous appearance a reminder how ultimately petty and futile are our human disagreements.

- Jill Worrall

Click here for photos

Pictured above: Local girls pick flowers at a site overlooking the disputed territory. Photo / Jill Worrall