Ghada Al Atrash Janbey is a columnist for the Townsman, a newspaper in Cranbrook, BC, Canada. Here she writes about village life in the occupied Golan Heights:
Majdal Shams was captured by Israel in 1967 and has been
under its military occupation ever since. It is one of the few villages
still inhabited in the Golan Heights and whose people insisted on
remaining in the midst of their apple and cherry orchards. Prior to the
occupation, the Golan Heights consisted of 131 villages. Today only
five of these villages remain inhabited, namely: Majdal Shams,
Baq’atha, Ein Qenya, Mas’adeh, and Alghajar…
As depicted in the internationally acclaimed and award-winning film The Syrian Bride
which happens to be filmed in Majdal Shams, when a bride or groom from
the Golan Heights is to wed a Syrian, they immediately lose their right
of return to their country of birth. Consequently, a wedding
celebration is then transformed into a grieving ceremony as parents
have to surrender their daughter or son to a land on which they can
never tread. One means of reuniting family members is by travel to the
neighbouring Jordan, an expensive trip unaffordable for many. Another
means is to line up with bullhorns and binoculars across from one
another on opposite sides of the Israeli / Syrian border separated by
rows of steel wires, at a valley named the Shouting Hill, and to shout
to one another! Here I would like for my readers to take a moment and
reflect upon the fact that a grandparent’s only opportunity to see his
or her grandchildren is through binoculars capturing an image from
kilometres away.My friends recount a tragic story which took
place on March 7, 2008, involving a 24-year-old woman, May Atef Sha’lan,
formerly of Ein Qenya, a village in the occupied Golan Heights. May was one of the
many brides who "immigrated" to Syria after marrying a Syrian. However,
last year May became ill, and heartlessly, she was denied the basic
right to see her mother while on her death bed, after Israeli authority
declined the pleas of May’s mother to be granted a travel permit to
simply be with her dying daughter in Syria. It is told that May was
moaning on her death bed, “I want to see my mother. I am from Ein
Qenya… Take me to see my mother…” But May’s appeals were never
granted, and she died in agony, without her mother and beloved family,
in the midst of helpless, silent tears in Syria.
