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PHOTOGRAPHY | SYRIA
Majdal Shams and the Golan Heights
A brief visit the Saturday before October 7
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From Palestine’s northernmost tip, the bus crosses the Banyas bridge into Syria. Named after Pan, the god of nature, music, and revelry, the pristine natural spring bubbles oblivious of its future, where it will join the other sources of the Jordan River into a dead-end descent to the Dead Sea. We climb for a half-hour round mountain roads, passing Nimrod’s castle, celebrating a character whose very name symbolizes defiance. We climb and climb.
Nestled on the slopes of Jabal al-Sheikh (Mt. Hermon) we find Majdal Shams — the high place of the Sun, a typical stone-built town no different than the Palestinian towns of the Galilee. As I wander peeking between buildings for a good view of the mountain, an elderly local resident joins our party.
“See that barbed-wire fence in the valley below?” He nods at the clear line demarcating the houses from the wilderness.
“We are Syrians. We have families, long-separated, living way over there,” he points to the right and across the fence.
Immediately, I recall the statue in the town square, a memorial to the “martyrs of the Great Syrian Revolt” (of 1925), still intact and well-kept.
“This space beyond the fence is the demilitarized zone. For decades, our families used to cross it to talk to us through this fence.”
His words bring back images I have seen in news reports from the 1990s.
