Golan Heights Land, Lifestyle Lure Settlers

Rising from the Sea of Galilee to snowcapped Mount Hermon, Golan is a rocky slope of vineyards, cattle ranches, fruit orchards and remnants of conflict. Vast minefields stretch out behind barbed-wire fences, and the overgrown remains of Syrian houses, military barracks and mosques line mostly empty roads. Trenches and earthworks still score the land where the Israeli army has twice fought Syrian forces.

For decades, Israeli military leaders considered Golan an essential high-ground buffer against Syrian invasion and peppered the region with bases. In recent years, though, some Israeli generals have argued that air power has reduced the strategic importance of the heights. It still remains a training ground for the infantry and armored corps.

Perhaps more important, the region provides a third of Israel's drinking water.

"Until the war with Lebanon, there was no talk of giving back the Golan Heights. Most of the focus was on Israel's real problem, which is with the Palestinians," said Eli Malka, 48, the leader of a group of Golan settlements that is using government money to fund the ad blitz. "We're building, we're growing. And I don't see the prospect of any talks with Assad."

Jewish history here is visible in the remains of a 4th-century synagogue, among others found in Golan, that has been turned into a tourist site on the edge of this settlement of 7,500 people. But most of the roughly 100 families moving each year to Katzrin -- the largest of 33 Jewish communities in Golan -- are secular Israelis like Topaz Barkai, a 32-year-old former banker who arrived last month.

Barkai's father was killed in Golan during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war while her mother was pregnant with her. She was born here, then spent much of her adult life studying and working in Tel Aviv, the cosmopolitan coastal city she still visits for professional soccer games and nightclubs. Her new job is to persuade friends to move to Golan, with its skiing, water sports, cattle ranching and boutique wineries.

"We're trying to make this place younger," Barkai said.

A year and a half ago, the Golan lifestyle drew Einbar Pelter and her husband, Tal, an army officer and aspiring vintner. The couple moved with their two young children from a town near the seaside city of Netanya to Merom Golan, a farming collective founded a month after the 1967 war.

Pelter, a landscaper whose front yard is now a mix of grape vines, lavender and herbs, said the promise of free land, a communal setting and wilderness made them set aside qualms about relocating to an occupied region. Pelter Wines now appear on Tel Aviv wine lists.

"Even if it is going to be temporary, we thought it would be worthwhile," said Pelter, 32, who has seen her new neighborhood fill up over the past year. "A community that isn't growing has an expiration date on it."

The population of roughly 7,000 Arabs who remained after the 1967 war has grown to about 20,000. Most of them refused citizenship. Those who accepted are ostracized to this day in the four insular mountain towns where the Druze population is concentrated.

"After almost 60 years, the basic question of whether the Israelis have a right to create a Jewish state is being asked again after this war," said Taiseer Maray, director of Golan for Development, an Arab-rights organization in Majdal Shams. "This shows the stupidity of power. If I were a clever Zionist, the first thing I'd do is seek peace."

In Maray's Israeli travel document, the space beside "Nationality" reads "undefined." It is an apt description of a population that gathers Fridays at an overlook on the edge of the town to shout to relatives across the border with Syria.

The Arabs here are allowed to sell their apples in Syria and study at Damascus University. Hundreds of graduates have returned, many of them working in summer camps, professional clubs and civic groups, the main venues for political organizing.

"The feeling among the people here is that the Syrians could come back any day," said Maray, who has not seen his three brothers in Damascus since the 1967 war. "The settlers now talk about breaking down the boundaries between us with jobs and investment."

Arab grievances here center on the preferential treatment Israeli settlements receive in allocation of water, which is scarce and expensive for many Arab farmers. Meanwhile, civic campaigns for the removal of the Israeli military base on a hill in the center of Majdal Shams have been ignored.

In recent weeks, a group calling itself the Syrian National Alliance has been posting communiques around town calling for a new campaign against the Israeli occupation, including armed operations. "But we really don't know who they are," said Ayman Abu Jabal, 40, a former prisoner who works for Golan for Development. "So far they have not been very convincing."

Abu Jabal, a distant relative of Hail's, has followed that route before. As a member of the now-defunct Syrian Resistance Movement, he spent 12 years in Israeli jails for blowing up an Israeli military warehouse in 1985. No one was injured.

"What we want is for our rights to be the same as theirs," Abu Jabal said. "I'm not against the Jew as a person. But we want the occupation to end and for us to live in peace."