Innocence and War

by Ian Strathcarron

  ***

  Damascus is now is a wonderful combination of the old, the very old and the downright ancient. Today we are just adding another layer of activity on to all the other layers already there: writing as they wrote since writing was invented just across the valley, waking to the sounds of a holy man, washing in the ever running water, worshipping in a temple of whichever god is revered, walking the ever crooked streets - even the one called Straight, eating at a roadside stall, haggling in the souk, sleeping in the afternoon heat, promenading in the evening cool, bathing in the baths and sleeping high and open to catch the breeze.

  While the rest of the world may be Dunkin’ Donuts or Enjoyin’ Pepsi, Damascus is still homogeneously Syrian; the increasingly standardized rest of the world has yet to seep through. The perception of its politics has kept the mass of visitors at bay and anyway the father and son dictatorships have not wanted the outside world with its fancy ideas encroaching too deeply into their domain. Tourism is still not actively encouraged as it is elsewhere, which means that those who do jump through the visa hoops and find a way around the transportation glitches will find a country where hosts and guests are still delighted to see each other. One day, when the rest of the world discovers Syria too, the inevitable overexposure to less sympathetic guests may well dent the famous Syrian hospitality, but for now it’s a delightful pocket of resistance, a throwback to the days when traveling meant meeting the unexpected and living largely on your wits.

  ***

  After only a day and a half in Damascus the caravanserai left at noon on Monday 16 September, heading up and over the Golan Heights and down to the New Testament Holy Land. They headed south back into the searing heat, heat so hot that “the sun-flames shot down like the shafts of fire that stream out before a blow-pipe barren scrub”. On their and our right, to the west, lie the barely populated foothills of Mount Hermon, with its soaring ten thousand-foot peak known locally as El Sheikh, the Old Man, because the peak is always covered in snow.

  Next we come across one of Christianity’s most important sites, the spot at which St. Paul was converted on the road to Damascus, yet here on the ground it is one of the least proclaimed. Mark Twain only says, “Three or four hours out from Damascus we passed the spot where Saul was so abruptly converted” before adding longingly, “and from this place we looked back over the scorching desert, and had our last glimpse of beautiful Damascus, decked in its robes of shining green.” One can be sure that if there had been anything there more than “a spot” he would have written it up.

  ***

  Nevertheless it is in search of this spot that I now repair. Time to summon up a Ferguson and a very fine one he proves to be too. In fact he’s so good we soon decide he should be promoted to the friendlier Fergy. As usual the British Embassy comes up trumps, this time in form of Samir, a Druze widower and a part-time driver for the British Council.

  Part of the problem in finding St. Paul’s spot, unless one knows Arabic, is that the transliteration from Arabic to English contains versions of the frequently-confused “K” and “Q” sounds and the “B” and “V” sound, as well as the optional prefix “Tal” and/or “El”. Modern maps and Google Earth are as dumbfounded as the rest of us. Lonely Planet gives the spot as being in Darayya, which is actually several miles away. In case anyone is interested in finding it I shall give it the spelling in the only English sign for it: “Kawkab”. Samir asks for “Tal Kawkab”. (In ten years driving foreigners around Samir has never been asked to go there before.) It is signposted in the town of Al Kiswah, some nine miles south-west of Damascus, and is half a mile to the east of that. Al Kiswah is on the main road from Damascus to Quneitra, now in the United Nations-controlled Golan Heights, to where the Excursionists were heading then, and to where Samir is taking us now.

  Following the sign from Al Kiswah one crests a small hill and sees ahead a forceful-looking church, about forty years old, clean to the point of pristine, not too hideous in the scheme of things, encircled by twelve asymmetrical arches - as Gillian presumes, one for each disciple. The stonework is gleaming white, the cross on the cupola is Syrian Orthodox, yet the writing on the gate is in Arabic and Greek. Samir translates: “Welcome to the Abbey of St. Paul the Messenger.” The site is surrounded by newly painted bright green railings, and at the entrance one looks through them on to a fifty-yard drive leading up to steps below the entrance. It is deserted and seems to be locked. I press the buzzer on the off-chance. After a minute, as we are on the verge of heading off to Quneitra, a wizened old retainer with a lived-in face sandwiched between a cowboy check shirt and John Deere baseball cap shuffles out of the gate house a few feet away. He is so old I’m tempted to ask if he had witnessed the conversion himself. With a cheery and toothless smile and crumpled dimples he waves us in.

  The gardens either side of the drive are immaculately kept and well watered; white and pink roses, origanum shrubs, fig, sycamore and olive trees. The drive itself is swept clean, no small feat in this sandswept landscape. There is not a soul in sight; it is becoming more and more mysterious. Skip up the steps and into the tiny chapel and one sees a small semi-circular room, unable to seat more than thirty-five, with no obvious Christian overtones on the walls. On plain wooden benches are Gideon’s Bibles19 in Greek, all virtually as new although, presumably, forty years old too. The floor is expensively inlaid with geometric - almost Islamic - motifs in marble, incongruous to the plainness of the rest of the space. Half a dozen plastic flowers sit in half a dozen plastic vases; touchingly there is real wobbly water in the vases. There is a visitors’ book: the last entry, a Mr.& Mrs. Kellerman from Utrecht in Holland had a “beautiful experience”; I add my own “please keep it as a mission to find”.

  As we are leaving I tell Samir that I can’t believe there aren’t tour buses lined up outside, engines pouring out even hotter air for the a/c, rows of shops selling replica replicas and hosts of touts touting general tourist tat. This is after all, in terms of Christian significance, pretty much the Holy of Holies, the point from where you could draw a straight line to the Christianity of today as it has evolved from Christ’s message to the Jews to Paul’s message to the Gentiles. Samir replies that while we’ve been busy with notebook and camera he has spent the last half hour in the gatehouse taking tea with the old retainer and a young Orthodox novice. The novice had told Samir all about the conversion and the church. We head back to the gatehouse.

  Samir translates: the road outside is the old road from Jerusalem to Damascus, the route on which Saul was travelling - and we saw a survey map later showing this to be the old trunk road; we know from the Bible that the conversion was near Damascus, and this is the first view of Damascus on the old road - again true as a look outside the gatehouse confirms; lastly, before laying foundations for the new church archaeologists found evidence of a first-century church and second-century liturgy; these are on display in the National Museum in Damascus. Two last questions: why is there Syrian Orthodox symbolism on a Greek Orthodox Church20? “Now here co-opera- tion”; and who pays for all this, and why? “The government asks the different churches.” And they can’t say no? The three Syrians look at each other like I’m mad. Well, well, witness to three miracles in one day. We thank them and leave, and I for one am converted on the road to Damascus from outright skepticism about the conversion to open-mindedness.

  The New Pilgrims pressed on from there and three or four hours later would have passed through what is now the massive inconvenience of no-man’s- land, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) area that separates Syria from Israel. It is the intention of this book to retrace Mark Twain’s tour of the Holy Land as faithfully as possible, but the simplicity of travel in the Ottoman Empire has given way to the political realities of actual and disputed borders today - as we have already found at Sirghaya on the Lebanese/Syrian border. Quneitra on the Syria/Israel UNDOF border is the ultimate dead end. We can see
two hundred yards away, past the large Israeli flags, the road on which we will be traveling in a couple of weeks - knowing it will take us all that time to reach there, looking down at where we are looking up to now, almost in hailing distance.

  Quneitra now is a horrible place. Destroyed by Israel in 1973 after the Yom Kippur War21 to provide Israel with a buffer zone, it is now merely a selection of flattened buildings as though an even more than usually gigantic giant had walked across it playing hop, skip and jump as he went. In the cracks in the giant’s pavement are burned out and rusted armored cars and de-tracked tanks. To go there one needs special permission from the Ministry of the Interior in Damascus - not the work of a moment. They had never heard of Mark Twain, which is fair enough, and view all histo- rians as open to Zionist bias, again fair enough. And having been there I can see their underlying thought: why on earth would anyone want to visit a shelled out monument to Syrian defeat, and one under the humiliation of United Nations protection, unless to add to that humiliation by gloat- reporting?

  ***

  I thought it best not to mention to the Minister’s assistant that Quneitra sounded so grim when Mark Twain camped there that the Israeli-flattened scene of devastation might well be an improvement. Mark Twain’s view was that:

  [Quneitra] is a hive of huts one story high and as square as a dry-goods box; it is mud-plastered all over, flat roof and all, and generally whitewashed after a fashion. The same roof often extends over half the town, covering many of the streets, which are generally about a yard wide.

  When you [arrive] you first meet a melancholy dog, that looks up at you and silently begs that you won’t run over him, but he does not offer to get out of the way; next you meet a young boy without any clothes on, and he holds out his hand and says “Bucksheesh!” - he don’t really expect a cent, but then he learned to say that before he learned to say mother, and now he cannot break himself of it; next you meet a woman with a black veil drawn closely over her face, and her bust exposed; finally, you come to several sore-eyed children and children in all stages of mutilation and decay; and sitting humbly in the dust, and all fringed with filthy rags, is a poor devil whose arms and legs are gnarled and twisted like grape-vines.

  These are all the people you are likely to see. The balance of the population are asleep within doors, or abroad tending goats in the plains and on the hill- sides. The village is built on some consumptive little water-course, and about it is a little fresh-looking vegetation. Beyond this charmed circle, for miles on every side, stretches a weary desert of sand and gravel, which produces a gray bunchy shrub like sage-brush. A Syrian village is the sorriest sight in the world, and its surroundings are eminently in keeping with it.

  The New Pilgrims toyed with the idea that Quneitra might be the burial place of “Nimrod, the Mighty Hunter of Scriptural notoriety. Like Homer, he is said to be buried in many other places, but this is the only true and genuine place his ashes inhabit... When the original tribes were dispersed Nimrod and a large party settled where the great city of Babylon afterwards stood. Nimrod built that city. He also began to build the famous Tower of Babel. He ran it up eight stories high, however, and two of them still stand, at this day - a colossal mass of brickwork, rent down the center by earthquakes, and seared and vitrified by the lightnings of an angry God. But the vast ruin will still stand for ages, to shame the puny labors of these modern generations of men. Its huge compartments are tenanted by owls and lions, and old Nimrod lies neglected in this wretched village, far from the scene of his grand enterprise.”

  One senses that even Mark Twain’s most devout fellow travelers thought this an unlikely tale, and indeed it is. Biblical scholars now see Nimrod as a figure who changed from composite to concrete as the tradition changed from Babylonian oral to the written form of Genesis.

  As an aside, Mark Twain was a Freemason and Nimrod is mentioned in Freemasonry. In the Craft in the Old Constitutions we can find: “At ye making of ye toure of Babell there was a Masonrie first much esteemed of, and the King of Babilon called Nimrod was a Mason himself and loved well Masons.” One presumes the Masonic reference to Nimrod while he was camping at Quneitra must have rung a bell or two with him. As a further aside, and I know are in danger of falling off the book, he was a reluctant Freemason, suspended for non-payment of dues two months before the Holy Land Excursion started and kicked out altogether a month after camping out that night in Quneitra. No great loss either way, he may well have concluded.

  ***

  The most remarkable site at Quneitra now is a brand new hotel right by the UNDOF barracks and watchtower on the barricaded road into Israel. A bit like the dancing poodle being remarkable for being able to dance at all, the remarkable thing about the Faradeis (Paradise) Hotel is not that it has been built so attractively but that it has been built at all. It stands proudly in a lush garden, no mean feat in itself, a two story building in the Mamaluk style with yellow and black layers. The hotel may well have been built on free land and with a sizable subsidy, but still it took a fair amount of determination and, as they would say a few hundred yards away, chutzpah.

  Samir, Gillian and I have a soothing yoghurt shake and a bracing Turkish coffee.We wander over to the balcony and see Israel two hundred yards away behind the razor wire rolled loosely on the land. Behind us all is brush and scrub and collapsed buildings; ahead of us is lush farmed fields in harvest, wind farms twirling enthusiastically, military lookouts looking out from the Golan peaks and a busy main road with new vehicles speeding along purposively; above us the occasional sound of sonic booms as supersonic Israeli warplanes patrol the airspace above - and to make a point as there’s no need to waste resources flying supersonically except to demoralize their opponents.

  Soon we are joined by a jowly and brusque Arabic man who intro- duces himself and hands me his business card: “Welcome, my name is Walid al-Muallim, owner of the Faradeis Hotel. I have another one in Damascus, and one in Tartous. How do you find it?”

  “It’s remarkable. In style and opulence, and that it’s here at all.”

  He wastes no time in coming to the point. “Look at that,” he gestures towards the lush green Golan hills opposite, “the Israelis have stolen our land, our Golan Heights.”

  Now I always find this retrospective victimhood annoying. “You,” I want to say but don’t, “you started the war. War is war, soldiers fighting to the death.

  There’s no point in moaning about the unpleasantness of it all from the luxury of peace, you shouldn’t start the damn things in the first place.” But instead I ask:

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” al-Muallim replies.

  “Why did the Israelis take the land, the Golan Heights?”

  “Israelis always take land. Take land, steal, take land. We must have our land returned or there is no peace.”

  I don’t know why I’m getting into an argument about this, but find myself saying “We have a saying: To the victor the spoils. Syria was the aggressor against Israel. Twice. Had been harassing Israel from the Golan Heights for years before that too. Israel didn’t wake up one morning and say to itself: ‘I rather like the look of those Golan Heights, think I’ll steal them.’ You fired first, they fired second, you lost, they won. That’s war. If you don’t like it don’t start it.”

  Al-Muallim now becomes rather angry. “That is your interpretation. You read the Zionist papers and believe the Zionist lies.”

  There’s not a lot of point in continuing and we both drift off, me to Samir’s car and he to his glass enclosed air-conditioned office with its masochistic panoramic views of Israel’s wartime and peacetime achievements and corresponding myopic view of Syria’s failures and humiliation.

  Quite often after an impromptu argument one rehearses in one’s head what one would like to have said. “Now look here, al-Muallid,” I would like to have said, “much as I love Syria you need to ha
ve face a few facts. In 1967, in the Cold War days, Syria was Russia’s client state in the Middle East, as was Israel America’s. With Soviet prompting Syria joined a war pact with Egypt to attack Israel, or as your Air Force Chief-of-Staff and future dictator Hafez al-Assad put it, “to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland”. A reluctant Jordan was roped in to completely surround Israel. For reasons still unclear the Russians gave Egypt and Syria false intelligence that Israel was about to attack them, and this led directly to a massive build-up of force along the Arab side of Israel’s borders.

  “While Israel quickly and pre-emptively put the Egyptians to flight on the southern flank, in the north Syrian warplanes bombed civilian targets in northern Israel while Syrian emplacements on the Golan Heights shelled targets around the Sea of Galilee. The Israelis fought back as ferociously as one would expect and repelled the Syrian attack while leaving the Golan Heights neutralized.

  “Then the great powers intervened again. The US noted that while Egypt had been humiliated, and Jordan appeared to have lost (theWest Bank) disproportionately, Syria appeared to have escaped fairly lightly. It would not do to give the impression that a Soviet ally was to be treated leniently - it might encourage others to seek Russian protection. Thus encouraged by the US, Israel pressed on, well into Syrian territory and on the road to Damascus. The Syrians, hoping to attract Russian intervention, exaggerated the Israel advance. On hearing this the already demoralized Syrian forces deserted en masse; perhaps fighting for an unwanted minority dictatorship gave less weight to the endeavor than fighting for one’s very future and one’s homeland.”