The Golan Heights: Where Old Meets New
Updated: 2 days ago
Last Tuesday, 25th August, I took a lovely group in a mini-bus through the Bashan, the Biblical Golan, and spent the day moving between memorials, ruins, and a living modern Israeli town.
The thread of the day was Eli Cohen: several memorials to him, and the remains of structures he would have visited while posing as a Syrian insider. His intelligence made the Six-Day War’s Golan campaign faster and less costly. That victory is what made the rest of the day possible: Jews standing again in an old land, and building a new one beside it.
From Mount Bental the plateau falls toward Syria. Bunkers still sit on the ridge. We also came very close to the Jordanian and Syrian borders. Fences and lookouts turn a map into something you feel in your chest.
Then came the hinge of the tour. In the Talmudic Village at Katsrin we walked a reconstructed Jewish settlement of the 4th–6th centuries: basalt houses, an olive press, a synagogue of dark stone. This was the Bashan of the Sages, one village among many that once covered the Heights.
Some time later we were in modern Katsrin, the Golan’s capital, shops and streets on the same ridge. Old next to new. Altneuland, literally: an ancient Jewish place returned to use because the miraculous '67 war made the connection, and because Cohen’s work helped Israel take the Heights without the higher cost of an assault based on less useful intelligence. There was another major historic contribution that Eli made, but that is for another blog article.
Were you on last week's tour? Have you been to any of these places? Please write your thoughts and comments below.
Am Yisroel Chai
Yoni Lemel
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