- The Media Line - https://themedialine.org -

A Village Claimed by Three Countries

Residents are livid as Israel mulls yet again dividing a village straddling the border between Lebanon and the Golan Heights.

[Ghajar, Golan Heights] The road to Ghajar is long, rugged and somewhat bewildering.

Military radar stations sit atop gorgeous, green hills and imposing mountains.

The entire area surrounding the village is a closed military zone, and any journalist asking questions of local residents sparks a cauldron of military Jeeps to rush down the mountains.

Ghajar, a 2000-strong village which straddles the border between Lebanon and the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, is a territory claimed by three countries: Lebanon, Israel and Syria.

Recent talk of splitting the village between Israel and Lebanon has villagers incensed and taking to the streets.

"Nobody wants this," Najib Khatib, a village leader, tells The Media Line. "It’s not enough that we are essentially living within a prison, now they want to put a fence right in the middle."

"They are going to divide families, take mothers from their kids," he says. "Yet the government is not updating us, not including us in the decisions, and not even informing us. Nobody cares about us, they treat us like animals and we hear about the future of the village from the media."

"We have no problem if Israel wants to return the entire village to Lebanon," Khatib adds. "But not as refugees without our lands. We are one united village. The entire village is one big family and we won’t let the U.N. come in just to divide us."

"We have a serious problem here," Naser Mustafa, a contractor in the village, tells The Media Line. "It’s become a huge issue. I am building on the northern side of the village but now I’ve stopped and I’m not sure if I should keep building."

The modern history of Ghajar, as the legend goes, began with a horse.

A tiny riverside village straddling the modern border, Ghajar was originally known as Tanjeh.

Kurdish invaders seized the village during the Ottoman Empire, forced it’s residents to sell the land and renamed the village Ghajar.

That all changed, the local legend has it, when the Kurdish governor of Ghajar tried to prance through the village on his horse to visit the tomb of Sheikh al-Arba’in, a local religious figure.

First the horse refused to go anywhere near the sheikh’s tomb, and the following day a major fire broke out in the village, destroying the governor’s sword and shield.

The Kurds assumed the sheikh was taking revenge, read the writing on the wall, fled the village and quickly sold all the land back to its original owners.

But life has not gotten any simpler for the residents of Ghajar since those inauspicious Ottoman days.

Shortly after the fall of the Ottoman empire the village was given a choice of joining Lebanon or Syria. Most village residents are Alawites, a sect of Shi’ah Islam and a powerful minority religious group in Syria, and the villagers voted overwhelmingly to join Syria, a status the village retained for decades.

In 1967, Israel captured the Golan Heights, a large Syrian territory which included Ghajar. For over two months the village was considered a no-man’s land until the villagers successfully petitioned Israeli authorities to include the village in the newly captured territory.

Israel annexed the Golan Heights in 1981 and most of Ghajar’s residents accepted Israeli citizenship.

Meanwhile, following a 1978 Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon, Israel handed over the territory to the Israel-friendly South Lebanon Army and began a "Good Fence" policy. That allowed Ghajar residents to begin building on the villages northern lands in modern Lebanon, essentially encompassing the smaller Lebanese village of Wazzani as part of Ghajar.

But when Israel withdrew completely from southern Lebanon in 2000, the United Nations demarcated a final border between the two countries, known as the ‘Blue Line.’ The northern part of Ghajar fell on the Lebanese side of the Blue Line, while the southern part of the village remained in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.

The decision was based on maps of the area produced prior to the 1967 war which had conflicting data, with some placing Ghajar in Syria and others indicating the village was in Lebanon.

The villagers, who consider themselves Syrian, didn’t appreciate the UN’s decision.

"The U.N. made a huge mistake when they demarcated the Blue Line," Khatib says. "They based it on maps from 1923, way before Israel even existed. This is a Syrian village."

In the years following the demarcation of the Blue Line, Hezbollah, the Shi’ite paramilitary organisation which controls much of southern Lebanon, made a series of attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers in the Ghajar area.

Tensions between Hezbollah and Israel came to ahead in 2006 with the outbreak of the Second Lebanon War, which ended in Israel re-occupying the northern half of Ghajar.

Ever since Israel has been under international pressure to return the northern half of the village to Lebanon in the hope that a resolution to Ghajar’s status will weaken Hezbollah.

Israeli officials, however, see Ghajar as an excuse Hezbollah uses to justify continued armed resistance against Israel. Giving part of Ghajar to Lebanon, the Israeli logic goes, will just embolden the Hezbollah.

The resulting stalemate has left Ghajar as an ostensibly Israeli village, full of Israeli citizens, but surrounded entirely by a fence, with the only way in and out through an Israeli army checkpoint.

"When you leave you are searched, when you enter you are searched," Mustafa says. "It’s humiliating to have a dog search your car as you drive into the village you live in."

"The problem is we can’t invite friends or anything," says one teenager, who asked not to be identified.

"They never let in anyone except doctors and people like that," his friend adds.

The checkpoint guards at the village entrance say they are just doing their job.

"The checkpoint is just to check for arms and drugs," one guard tells The Media Line on the condition of anonymity, as he is unauthorized to speak to the media. "Since Ghajar is a built up area, it’s easier for them to smuggle things into Israel."

Some residents say the Israeli authorities treat them well.

"They don’t give us problems," says a local school teacher, who also asked not to be named in this article. "We are Israeli citizens and we can go in and out as we like. The problem is they keep changing their minds about the village’s status."