For Golan's divided families, dreams of reunion

MAJDAL SHAMS, Golan Heights -- Three years ago, Mai Abu Zeid donned a wedding dress and walked across the no-man's land from Syria to the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights on the arm of her father, Faris. She was going to his native land to marry a cousin, to live in a place she knew only from her father's wistful tales of stone houses and apple orchards.

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Abu Zeid knew she could never go home to Damascus, the Syrian capital. Since then, father and daughter have met only once, in Jordan. Since Israel captured the Golan in the 1967 war, about 17,000 Syrians have lived there in a kind of limbo, most refusing an offer of Israeli citizenship, yet barred from visiting Syria by both countries because they remain in a state of war.

``It was as if my father wanted to send me here, because part of him wanted to return," Abu Zeid, 29, said last week, sitting on the porch of her house overlooking the patchwork fields and minarets of the Syrian plain. ``I am part of him."

The monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah has put the Golan Heights back on the political agenda on both sides of the border, because Syria has a potentially powerful influence over how long the fragile cease-fire in southern Lebanon will last.

Syria could help Hezbollah rearm and rebuild, continuing to supply it with weapons, and allow Iranian arms to flow through its borders to the militia. Or it could ease off its support for Hezbollah, something it's not likely to do -- unless, perhaps, Israel and the United States offer new hope of getting back the Golan.

Riding a surge of Arab support for Hezbollah, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria declared last week that if Israel won't negotiate, Syrian ``resistance" will win the terrritory back. Israel's internal security minister, Avi Dichter, sparked heated debate Monday by saying that the only path to lasting stability in Lebanon is to hand back the strategic heights.

The 450-square-mile territory towers over the border region, giving it strategic military importance, and it is a key source of water that flows into the Sea of Galilee.

There's little sign that the United States -- an essential player in any talks -- will rethink its policy of isolating Syria and instead offer incentives to rein in Hezbollah. A chorus of left-leaning Israeli columnists hope for a shift from Washington: Columnist Ben Caspit wrote Tuesday in the daily newspaper Ma'ariv that US officials, looking at the ``smoking embers" of their Middle East policy, had informally asked former US ambassador to Syria Edward Djerejian to test the waters on reopening dialogue with Syria.

``There's a possibility of reviewing" the policy, Djerejian said in a telephone interview while traveling in Europe. But he declined to say whether he had been asked to open channels with Syria, and a State Department spokesman said there were no plans to name a special envoy to the country.

In the long run, Djerejian said, there will be no lasting peace on the Lebanese-Israeli border ``unless all the parties are brought into the equation. . . . I don't think that can be done without the Syrians."

The recent talk doesn't bring the Abu Zeids much hope. To them, the noisiest opponents of Israel -- Syria, Iran, Hezbollah -- offer little help toward reuniting the Golan with Syria. And they fear the recent conflict has only hardened all sides against a solution.

Faris Abu Zeid, lonely now in the tidy, sunlit apartment where Mai grew up, consoles himself with the thought that she's now in the village he hasn't seen since 1967, when he left to study in Damascus days before the war and he got stuck on the wrong side of the new border.

``She is in her land," he said.

Sitting in his living room with his nephew, an official in the Syrian Cabinet office that deals with the Golan, Abu Zeid was careful to praise Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, whom the Syrian government hails as a hero for surviving the Israeli military barrage and as a religious man who's good at ``resistance."

But, politics, he said, is another matter, and he doesn't think Hezbollah can help Syria win back the Golan.

``Israel wants the Golan forever. If they offer it back they will have political conditions that will be impossible to meet," he said.

Meanwhile, he said, Iran has growing regional clout but probably won't make the Golan a priority.

In Majdal Shams, his daughter and her husband speak more freely.

``I do not see any hope even after this war in Lebanon," said Mai Abu Zeid. Reunification by war is ``unlikely," she said, and when it comes to peaceful means, ``Syria is not ready."

``Without strength, there is no peace," added her husband, Riyadh, a construction worker. ``I mean economic strength, I mean good rule, a government that serves its own people. Syria does not have this strength. Syria should give its own people freedom before liberating the Golan Heights."

Israel's prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said Monday that he would talk with Syria only if it stops supporting Palestinian militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad and supplying Hezbollah with weapons like the anti tank missiles that killed many Israeli soldiers during the conflict.

Privately, Syrian officials and analysts say the country would like to repair relations with the West in return for progress on the Golan.

But the spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry, Mark Regev, said Assad's decision to ally himself more and more closely with Iran, which has called for Israel's destruction, disqualifies Assad from talks. Regev contrasted the Syrian president to his late father, Hafez al-Assad, whom the Israelis engaged several times in ``tough" negotiations, trying but failing to work out a deal as recently as 2000. In 2002, Bashar Assad offered to restart talks, but was rebuffed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

``He was Syrian first . . . not letting Iranians dictate," Regev said of the elder Assad. ``Same with Hezbollah. They were like a dog on a leash -- he turned them on and off when he wanted."

Israel annexed the Golan in 1981, but United Nations resolutions define it as occupied territory. Israel has built lucrative wine-growing, bottled water, and tourism industries on its green slopes, along with a ski resort on Mount Hermon and communities where 18,000 Israelis live.

Sixty-four percent of Israelis oppose Dichter's proposal of negotiations with Syria, according to poll commissioned Wednesday by Israel Radio, while 27 percent said they approve of it.

But in conversations, many hold a more complex view.

Tai Amlani, 47, lives in northern Israeli within sight of the towering Golan Heights, on a kibbutz recently hit by Hezbollah missiles.

But for a real peace that would bring economic benefits, an end to Syrian rhetoric against Israel, and a demilitarized zone on the border -- things he believe would take years -- he would be willing to give up the Golan.

``The Syrians don't threaten us at all. I was much more scared of Hezbollah," he said.

In the Golan, the Syrians, most of them Druze, a sect that many Muslims consider heretical, also have mixed feelings. Young people have absorbed some of Israeli culture, working in Israeli towns, speaking Hebrew, shunning traditional clothes.

They can go to Syria only to study or to marry. Mai met Riyadh when he came to study at Damascus University. Seeing him, she recalled, was like seeing the face of her father's village.

Her father didn't want to let her go, but the two were in love. ``It was a humanitarian issue!" he jokes.

They received permission to cross the border with two days' notice. Mai hurried to buy a wedding dress.

Just 16 people were allowed to cross into no-man's land for the wedding ceremony at the border post.

There, Faris had to turn back as Mai went on.

Anne Barnard reported from Damascus; Sa'id Ghazali reported from the Golan Heights. Correspondent Matthew Kalman contributed from Jerusalem, and Farah Stockman of the Globe staff contributed from Washington, D.C.