By Hillel Kuttler
On a recent Sunday afternoon, a group of about 40 tourists filed into Khateb Sweets, a once quiet café in the Golan Heights village of Ghajar. They left after consuming pastries and hot tea spiced with ginger, anise and cinnamon, followed by an Israeli Jewish couple, an Israeli Arab family and three Canadians.
The steady foot traffic typifies the wave of tourism that has hit this northern Israeli community of 2,900 people since last fall.
For decades, Ghajar (pronounced RA-zhar) was virtually cut off from the rest of Israel. Residents came and went, but outsiders could visit only through prior arrangement with the Israel Defense Forces, which considered the village within a closed military area where Lebanon and Israel’s Galilee and Golan Heights regions intersect.
The IDF’s lifting of the restriction without explanation last September led to an immediate rush of visitors eager to explore Ghajar. Approximately 4,000 people visited Ghajar the day the town opened. Another 6,000 visited the following day, briefly tripling the number of people in town. For day three, Ghajar turned a soccer field into a parking lot.
“It’s like a gift that fell from the sky,” said Ahmad Khateb, owner of Khateb Sweets, who is now considering expansion to other locations.
Ghajar possesses a Forbidden City-like mystique for Israelis. “You know why we came here? Because there aren’t a lot of places [in Israel] we haven’t been,” said Shmuel Browns, a Jerusalem-based tour guide. “We wanted to get a sense of what makes this village unique.”
Ghajar is notable as the only Israeli community of Alawites, a Syrian-based ethnic minority best known as the Islamic sect that has ruled that country for the past 52 years. Ghajar has no mosques since, except on holy days, people pray individually at home.
“It’s a way of life,” said Bilal Khatib, Ghajar’s spokesman, said of the Alawite approach to Islam. “We respect people as people. Our religion is to be a good person, love everyone and hold no hatred against anyone, be they Druze, Jew, Christian or Circassian.”
In 1967, Israel captured the Golan Heights, including Ghajar, from Syria during the Six Day War and officially annexed it in 1981. After Israel ended its 18-year war in Lebanon in 2000, the United Nations certified the IDF’s withdrawal and established the two countries’ border going through (rather than around) Ghajar.
Israel later announced plans to withdraw below the U.N. line. That would have split the village into northern and southern sections. Residents protested, preferring to remain under Israeli sovereignty rather than be divided. Ultimately, Israel didn’t erect a barrier inside the village. Ghajar residents tend to see themselves as Syrians holding Israeli citizenship.
According to Jamal Khatib, a physical education teacher at the village’s lone high school, 400 Ghajar residents hold a college degree, making the town far more educated on average than Israeli Arabs overall. He said there are 50 physicians, 30 lawyers, 27 dentists and two professors, most commuting to jobs in the Galilee.
“There’s no profession in Israel that’s not represented here,” Khatib said.
Politically, Ghajar stands out for supporting mostly Jewish-majority parties. In the recent election, Benny Gantz’s centrist party got 24% of the 555 citizens who went to the polls in the village. The Arab party Raam got only 14% of the votes and the rest went to other Jewish lists, including the haredi Orthodox Shas party.
Ghajar puts a premium on livability. Fountains, parks and outdoor sculptures abound, landscaping and building façades are colorful and nary a speck of litter is evident. Homes are large and well-kept, on par with other upscale areas in Israel. Motorcycles and the honking of vehicles’ horns are prohibited.
Visitors may not enter between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m., Jamal Khatib said, adding that Ghajar has long banned hotels and bed-and-breakfast inns and does not plan to change the rules in response to the flood of visitors.
For its part, Ghajar projects respect for the wider society. Street signs and storefronts appear in Hebrew and Arabic. The Park of Peace includes a statue of the Virgin Mary, a sculpture of an open Koran, an Alawite sword symbol and a menorah.
“You and I believe in one God,” Jamal Khatib said. “Your deeds speak as to who you are.”
From Khatib’s back porch, a donkey’s braying could be clearly heard, hundreds of sheep observed and calls to prayer drifted over from a mosque in Aarab el Louaizeh, a Lebanese village perhaps 100 yards away.
In a ravine below, soldiers of the United Nations and the Lebanese army in their separate posts walked outside. The U.N. soldiers entered two vehicles and began their twice-daily patrol of the border. Alongside the border road is the Hatzbani River, where Khatib fished as a young man. At his property line, a separate fence on Ghajar’s northern perimeter is nearly complete.
But the fence wasn’t erected to divide people or demarcate boundaries: It’s to keep boars, jackals and porcupines from scaling the slope and entering the village, Khatib said. He soon received an alert on his phone. “The notification says there are cows on the road,” he explained. “It’s dark. Be careful.”
Hillel Kuttler wrote this article for the JTA global Jewish news source.
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