Excerpts from DON’T CRY FOR SYRIA
By Avi Davis and Bennett Zimmerman
5/8/01

    The visit to the “ghost town” of Quneitra is a case in point. Described cavalierly by both CNN and NPR as an Arab town deliberately destroyed by the Israelis prior to their evacuation in 1974, their stories, like much reportage from the Middle East, fails to provide the full picture. The town was heavily damaged in 1967 during the Six Day War when the Syrians used it as their command headquarters. From the time Israel occupied Quneitra, following its capture on June 10, 1967 until 1973, the town straddled the border between the two countries. During this period it became a launching pad for incessant cross border terrorist raids into Israel. The Israelis, like any country faced with such a strategic problem, eliminated the buildings that were being used to husband weapons and launch assaults. The town was thereafter ruined further by mortar fire from both Israelis and Syrians during the Yom Kippur War, after a surprise attack launched by Syria. But prior to its repatriation to Syria in 1974, it is unquestionable and a matter of record that the departing Israelis left all standing public buildings such as hospitals, churches, mosques and government facilities, in tact.

    As for the civilian population of Quneitra (who had to leave as result of a war that Syria began and then lost) they are kept from returning not by Israel, but by their own country. Syria controls the town today and chooses to retain it as a museum for propaganda against Israel. Whatever concerns that the world has today, the address for complaints about the town’s condition is quite properly Damascus and not Jerusalem.

    Not content with portraying Syria as some kind of regenerate magic kingdom, the press has gone even further to extend a voice to a testimonial written by a Syrian bishop before the Yom Kippur War. The Greek orthodox prelate allegedly asked the rhetorical question of what kind of sub-humans could reduce churches and mosques to ruins. Perhaps the good Father, assuming he is still able to comment freely about his own government, might want to review the actions of his own leaders in the years leading to the 1967 war and the role of the Syrian military thereafter. For 20 years the Heights were used as a Syrian military camp - its snipers, with the advantage of altitude, being able to indiscriminately pick off Israeli fishermen and agricultural laborers below. Over eighty Israelis died in this way. When Israeli paratroopers finally responded and conquered the Heights in 1967, they found that while the Syrian officers had fled, they had left their own machine-gunners hand -cuffed to their weapons, giving them no opportunity for surrender. In the 1973 war, Israeli prisoners were often found with their hands manacled in barbed wire, shot at close range and with their private parts severed and placed in their mouths. And has everybody forgotten the 1982 massacre of 20,000 civilians by the Syrian military in the town of Hama? Which Syrian museum commemorates them?

Avi Davis is a writer based in Los Angeles whose book Crucible of Conflict: Jews, Arabs and the West Bank Dilemma will appear in the Fall.

Bennett Zimmerman is the Managing Partner of Israel Emerging Growth Fund LP and president of the Friends of the Golan, Los Angeles.

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