"Why?" I ask rhetorically. "Why did they do this?"
"Because they are Israel", my Secret Service guide answers with a wistful smile.
My Arabic is woeful, but it's a simple answer to a simple question, and I understand easily enough.
All around us lies the devastated remains of the once-thriving town of Quneitra. I have seen some ruins in my travels, a dizzying array already on this trip, yet nothing compares to what I see before me now. The eerie silence of the deserted streets, the twisted masses of concrete and metal, the glass and rock that lie scattered across the wasted earth; all have a visceral effect that grabs hold of your emotions and twists them from shock, revulsion and incomprehension into anger and hatred. This is what war looks like.
This reaction is by no means unusual, and by no means accidental. When Syria first reclaimed what remained of Quneitra in 1974, their outraged President Hafez al-Assad vowed to rebuild the town as a symbol of his country's stubborn refusal to yield to Israeli oppression. He changed his mind soon enough, reasoning that the pathetic ruins of a town of 40,000 people reduced to rubble would be much more effective as a monument to Zionist belligerence than as a sign of Syrian steadfastness. It was an astute decision.
Quneitra's pathetic ruins sit just a few hundred metres from the Israeli-Syrian border in the hotly-disputed Golan Heights an hour's travel southwest of Damascus. Actually the word "disputed" is somewhat inaccurate: only Israelis dispute the illegality of their occupation of Golan - even the UN Security Council, usually unduly lenient on Zionist misdemeanours as a result of the oft-used US veto, condemns Jerusalem's continued refusal to give back the territory seized in the June War of 1967. UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338 stipulate that Golan, the West Bank and Gaza, were illegally occupied by Israel, and must immediately be returned to their rightful owners, respectively Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Unlike UNSC Resolution 1441, however, which provided the justification for the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, the international community has proved unwilling to enforce these resolutions: Israel retains ownership of all three areas to this day, claiming they are necessary to maintain her security.
Golan is at the heart of Syria's continued immense hostility towards Israel; the two countries remain technically at war and are likely to do so until Jerusalem returns all occupied Syrian territory. Yet beyond the relatively straightforward issue of territory, Quneitra is evidence of something more sinister. After an agreement to station UN peacekeepers in Golan, it was decided to give the town back to Syria in May 1974. Between that decision and the physical handover in June of the same year, the IDF totally destroyed the town in an act of singular barbarity. This gross breach of international law, human rights, and basic morality was roundly condemned by the international community; as usual, however, the widespread wailing and gnashing of teeth were not matched by actions.
As I stroll the devastated streets, pausing to photograph innumerable demolished houses, dynamited hospitals, and forcibly collapsed schools, mosques, churches, banks, restaurants and shops, it's the small details that hit me hardest. The Hebrew graffiti scrawled on walls by gleeful Israeli soldiers, apparently bearing such delightful sentiments as "you want Quneitra, rebuild it first", "there'll be another round, we'll finish you then". The pockmarked walls evidencing the use of the former hospital for target practise. The systematically-gutted Catholic Church, formerly dedicated to Saint Paul, whose conversion on the road to Damascus supposedly took place just outside Quneitra. A deflated football lying sadly in the rubble of a school.
On one of the few walls still standing, a crudely-daubed swastika bears evidence of the maelstrom of hatred the Israelis brought upon themselves with their senseless destruction here. As always, that symbol evokes thoughts of another era, another continent, and other appalling, incomprehensible, reprehensible atrocities. For once, however, the usual revulsion is dimmed by what I've seen this morning. Just as in Gaza and the West Bank, just as in Lebanon, Israel's actions here have more in common with the Nazis than they might care to admit.
As we pause to gaze over the barbed wire fence at the neatly manicured green fields of Israel, I feel real anger for what was done here, real sorrow for the innocent Syrians whose lives were destroyed.
Symbolically, I throw a stone over no man's land. My rather sinister Mukhabarat escort emits the kind of hysterical guffaw I suspect he usually reserves for torturing Zionist sympathisers. "Be careful. Israel fires missiles at people who throw stones."
