KATZRIN, ISRAEL — For Israelis living on the Golan Heights, the muted sounds of explosions just across the border in Syria have become a daily reality, as stray mortars from the brutal six-year-old civil war land on this side of the border.
But the war has become a lot more real for residents here in recent days.
On Saturday Israel, for the first time, employed its “Iron Dome” rocket-defense system to intercept projectiles fired from Syria. While the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said afterwards it was clear the projectiles would have landed in Syria if not intercepted, the preemptive strike shows a higher diligence on the side of the military, as internal fighting in Syria threatens to spill over onto the Israeli side. Israel’s military has also struck several Syrian government sites on the other side of the border as a warning against further escalation.
The Iron Dome batteries have mostly been used in the center of the country and the south, deployed to intercept hundreds of rockets fired by Hamas in the Gaza Strip during 2014’s Operation Protective Edge. Whether the surge in launches from Syria represents a worrying new trend remains unclear.
Just hours before Secretary of State John F. Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov finally struck a cease-fire deal trying to halt the brutal Syrian civil war Sept. 10, Jabhat Fateh el-Sham (JFS), the Islamist group formerly known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, issued a communique announcing plans for a new offensive against the Syrian regime in the Quneitra region, adjacent to the 42-year-old cease-fire line between Israel and Syria.
While other countries around the region have been drawn into the fight, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have stated that they are staying out of the Syrian conflict unless it directly threatens Israel and its citizens. The potential threat includes, but is not limited to, weapons transfers to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and errant mortar strikes that hit Israeli territory.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday acknowledged Sunday that Israeli officials are closely watching the rising tensions in the Golan Heights.
“Our eyes are on the north,” Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of his Cabinet. “We will not allow an additional front to be opened against the State of Israel on the Golan Heights — not there and not anywhere else.”
Katzrin residents say there has been a noticeable uptick in hostilities in the second week of September. At least five mortars fell on the northern Golan Heights over two days, although no injuries were reported. At times Israelis in border communities said that the explosions were so close they could feel the reverberations in their bodies.
The Israel Air Force responded, targeting Syrian regime artillery positions. But in a surprise move overnight on Sept. 13, the Syrian army struck back, raising the question of whether an emboldened Syrian President Bashar Assad was seeking to escalate the fight.
“Overnight, two surface-to-air missiles were launched from Syria after the mission overnight to target Syrian artillery positions,” an IDF spokesman wrote in a message to journalists. “At no point was the safety of IDF aircraft compromised.” The last part of the message challenged reports in state-controlled media in Syria that the regime succeeded in downing Israeli aircraft.
For Dalia Amos, spokeswoman for the Golan Heights regional council, the most worrying aspect of the SAM missile attacks is not what damage they did, but what they might represent: a growing confidence by Mr. Assad and his military.
“We feel that Assad feels very strong now because he’s winning,” Ms. Amos said. “He’s less concerned [about retaliation] from Israel, so he allows himself to do things that he didn’t do before.”
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, UNDOF — the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force — set up a buffer zone between the two sides. For 42 years U.N. peacekeepers patrolled both sides of the border. But since 2014, when rebel forces in Syria kidnapped 45 U.N. peacekeepers, releasing them only after two weeks of negotiations, U.N. forces are present only on the Israeli side.
The Golan Heights is sometimes referred to as Israel’s “Tuscany” for its abundance of wineries and agriculture. About 40,000 people — Jews, Arabs, Druze, and a small Alawite population — live in this bountiful and strategically located land, which stretches from the Sea of Galilee to Mount Hermon, over 9,000 feet above sea level.
During the break last week for the Islamic observance of Eid, groups of Muslims traveled to the Golan to enjoy its numerous hiking trails. During the autumn months, traffic jams build up behind tractors pulling cases of apples. Soon thousands of Israeli Jews will arrive for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, and the weeklong festival of Sukkot.
“It’s a holiday month,” Ms. Amos said. “Usually [at] this time, the Golan is full of thousands of people who want to travel.”
Anna Hild, a 27-year-old visitor from Germany, said that while aware of the international tensions, she had also heard from friends about the beauty and varied nature of the Golan Heights.
“I ended up staying much longer than I had planned,” she said. “Hiking and having delicious food every day. I never felt threatened or scared, although we could clearly hear there was something going on just 30 kilometers away. I especially remember one afternoon, there was a really big boom, like a plane breaking the sound barrier, but even louder, and we saw a vapor trail. It felt somehow unreal, because the area in itself is so calm and peaceful.”
War tourism
Ms. Amos said that, over the past few years, people are also visiting the Golan for a type of “war tourism.”
“A lot of people come to see the north of the Golan and what happens in Syria. You can look and see without binoculars, can stand and see how they fight each other. For us it feels weird. Most of the time it’s very quiet if you live here. For tourists, they drink good wine here, they eat good meat, and a few meters from us, it is a terrible war.”
The fighting in the small, southwest territory of Syria can be viewed as a microcosm of the larger civil war, a multifaceted fight with a bewildering array of players and constantly shifting agendas.
The Syrian regime, supported by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, is battling the U.S.-backed anti-Assad Syrian rebels in one area. Some of those same rebel factions, however, are also allied with the Islamist factions like JFS and a similar Salafist group, Ahrar al-Sham. At the tail end of the Quneitra region, both the regime and rebels are fighting against or limiting land grabs by Islamic State.
With the proposed U.S.-Russian cease-fire deal, the regime and rebels are expected to suspend hostilities for seven days. If both sides stick to their promises, the deal then proposes a joint task force, JIC, set up to target Islamic State and JFS. In the Quneitra region, where U.S.-back rebels are openly aligned with JFS, it is unclear if this region will be targeted by the coalition.
Jonathan Spyer, the director of the Rubin Center at the IDC Herzliya and a regular contributor to The Jerusalem Post and Jerusalem Report, said that while it’s possible the coalition will target the Islamic State in the small area it controls east of Quneitra, it is more likely that the rebels will push them out.
However, he adds that it is unclear how the coalition will treat JFS in this region.
“The fact of the matter is that everyone knows that you can’t separate Nusra [JFS] from [the] rest of [the] rebellion. If [the coalition] takes seriously bombing Nusra, they will bomb the rebellion. I find it difficult to believe that the U.S. coalition will do that because it is contrary to their interests, which [are] pro-rebellion.”
Mr. Spyer called the fighting in the southwest region a “sideshow,” adding that it is unlikely that the Assad regime will launch a major offensive to retake the border area.
“For the regime to launch an offensive and conquer all of southwest Syria is a big thing, and they won’t be doing that,” he said. “It’s not really a prospect for the regime to fight for the border; it won’t happen in the context of the cease-fire. The regime is only touching the border in a couple of points [mostly] controlled by rebels.”
Mr. Spyer said Mr. Netanyahu’s government will undoubtedly be on the highest alert, continuing to hold the Assad regime responsible for any cross-border fire. But, as evidenced by the SAM missiles, Israelis will need to keep an eye on the signs of growing confidence in Damascus, which sees the civil war finally turning clearly in its favor.
“Israel won’t allow the targeting of its planes,” he predicted. “Pilots and planners will now have to anticipate Syrian air defenses.”
On Mount Bental, an empty Israeli bunker doubles as a war memorial and tourist attraction. Visitors can traverse the snaking concrete paths of the lookout post, walking down into the belly of the base, emerging at protected viewpoints. From the dormant volcano’s vantage point 3,800 feet above sea level, visitors can see directly into neighboring Syria. U.N. peacekeepers — in keeping with their stated mission of patrolling the cease-fire line — take up positions at one of the observation points, peering through cameras with long-range zoom lenses and powerful binoculars.
In the distance, the rumbling of multiple explosions travels through the air. “Is it a thunderstorm?” a tourist asks, approaching the peacekeepers.
“Yeah,” the U.N. observer answers sarcastically, “a big thunderstorm.”
It hasn’t rained in five months.
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