For the past five years, I have found myself walking and photographing the paths of the State of Israel. On my last stop, I walked the Golan Path, a route that took me through the Syrian territories occupied since 1967, from the top of Mount Hermon to the point where Lake Tiberias gives rise to the lower reaches of the Jordan River.
Walking is a very important aspect of Israeli culture and has been a very important aspect of Zionism. According to the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, when a society does not have sovereignty or possession of a territory, it can still exercise its presence there, and the easiest way is just to walk. It must be kept in mind that for the traditional Jewish religion, the return to Israel would only take place under the leadership of the Messiah, a Jewish king who would bring salvation not only to the Jews but to all mankind, marking the beginning of a new era. By the end of the 19th century, Jews knew the geography of Israel through the sacred texts and walking was the easiest way for the first settlers to transform a historical and imagined land into a real one and has been a fundamental part of Israeli education ever since.
The route winds through a steppe plateau, in a windswept moonscape dotted with small volcanoes and solitary oaks. On every rise, as a reminder of the climate of tension that pervades the region, abandoned or destroyed military bases and tanks. Endless stretches of minefields, to deter a new invasion, stretch as far as the eye can see.
The Golan has always been the easiest way to get from Damascus to the Mediterranean, and since the time of the great civilisations of the Middle East until the advent of Islam, the Crusades and more recent times, it has been a battleground. Taken from Syria and conquered by Israel in 1967 during the Six-Day War, it was de facto annexed to Israel in 1981 without the consent of the international community. Although the Golan was never part of British Mandate Palestine, the Israelis consider it essential to the security of the state, not only militarily but also in terms of water, since the main water sources are located there. The Syrians left after losing the war but to this day the elders of Damascus remember the merchants selling fresh fish from Lake Tiberias while the Israeli kibbutzim remember Syrian sniper fire in the fields along the border. The only inhabitants who have continued to live here uninterruptedly are the Druze, an ethno-religious group who practise a secret and esoteric cult but who, having no nationalist leanings, are not seen by Israel as a problem. For a few days we walk along the Syrian border, now protected by a fence, given the numerous encroachments at the beginning of the civil war in Syria, and it is strange to see a few kilometres away the ruins of Quneitra, which until a few years ago was occupied by ISIS.
As early as 1968, a few months after the conquest of the heights during the Six-Day War, schools organised the first hikes in the Golan despite the danger of largely unmapped minefields. The numerous incidents did not deter from the hikes, but even prompted the army to participate in the preparation and marking of some paths. Even before the Yom Kippur War, in 1973 when Syria attempted to reconquer the Golan, 19 new settlements had been founded on the Heights. Walking in the Golan was a novelty, one could explore new lands and landscapes completely different from those the Israelis were used to, rural and sparsely inhabited. Today there are 33 communities and 14,000 Jews live on the Heights. The Golan Path was only inaugurated in 2007, linking Druze towns, ruins of Syrian villages, ancient synagogues and memorial sites of Israeli battles; according to some scholars, the presence of the path is part of the process of normalisation of this disputed territory. In 2010, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that in order to ensure the long-term existence of the Jewish state, the practice of teaching young people to identify with the national territory must be continued: “The easiest and most original way,” he said, “is to connect these young people through their feet to their homeland, to get to know their nation and to travel it by walking.”
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