FROM MOUNT HERMON TO LAKE TIBERIADE

"For five years I have found myself walking and photographing the paths of the State of Israel. During 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."
Says Jacob Balzani Loov, photographer, journalist and Aku Ambassador

Walking is a very important aspect of Israeli culture and was 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 simplest way is to walk. It must be taken into account that for the traditional Jewish religion the return to Israel would have occurred only under the guidance of the Messiah, a Jewish king who would have brought salvation not only to the Jews but to all humanity, marking the beginning of a new era. At the end of the 19th century, Jews knew the geography of Israel through sacred texts and walking was the simplest way in which the first settlers transformed a historical and imagined land into a real figure and has since been a fundamental part of Israeli education.

The route winds across a steppe plateau, in a windswept lunar landscape, dotted with small volcanoes and solitary oak trees. On every hill, as a reminder of the climate of tension that pervades the region, military bases and tanks abandoned or destroyed. Endless expanses of minefields still stretch out as far as the eye can see, to discourage a new invasion.

The Golan has always been the simplest road to move from Damascus to the Mediterranean and since the times of the great civilizations of the Middle East up to the advent of Islam, the Crusades and more recent times it has been a battleground. Subtracted from Syria and conquered by Israel in 1967, during the Six Day War, it was effectively annexed to Israel in 1981 without the consent of the international community. Even though the Golan was never part of British mandate Palestine, the Israelis consider it essential for the security of the state not only from a military point of view but also from a water point of view given that the main water sources are located there. The Syrians left after losing the war but even today the elderly of Damascus remember the merchants who sold fresh fish from Lake Tiberias while the Israeli kibbutzim remember the shots of Syrian snipers in the fields along the border. The only inhabitants who have continued to live here uninterruptedly are the Druze, an ethno-religious group who practice a secret and esoteric cult but who, having no nationalist impulses, 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 trespassers at the beginning of the civil war in Syria and it is strange to see the ruins of Quneitra a few kilometers away 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 organized the first hikes in the Golan despite the danger of mostly unmapped minefields. The numerous incidents did not deter the hikes but rather prompted even the army to participate in preparing and marking some of the paths. Even before the Yom Kippur War, in 1973 when Syria attempted to retake the Golan, 19 new settlements had been established on the Heights. Walking in the Golan was a novelty, one could explore new lands and landscapes completely different from what 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 opened only in 2007, joining Druze towns, ruins of Syrian villages, ancient synagogues and memorial sites of Israeli battles, according to some scholars the presence of a path is part of the process of normalization of this disputed territory. In 2010, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that in order to secure 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 says, ’is to connect these young people through their feet to their homeland, to get acquainted with their nation and travel it by walking.”