Three wars, no peace, and the one piece of ground Israel will not trade away: the Golan Heights. Damascus never signed a treaty, never recognised Israel, and instead became the highway Iran used to arm Hezbollah, until the regime that ran it collapsed.
Egypt and Jordan made peace. Syria never did. It has been technically at war with Israel since 1948, and for two decades it used the heights above the Galilee to shell the farms below. Israel took those heights in self-defence and has held them ever since, through a near-fatal surprise attack in 1973, fifty years of an uneasy quiet, and the rise and fall of the Assad dynasty that turned Syria into Iran's land bridge.
Why Israel holds the Golan is no mystery to anyone who lived in the valley beneath it. For nineteen years, that high ground was a gun pointed at their homes.
1948 · The War of Independence
Syria invades from the northeast alongside the other Arab armies, seeking to strangle the new state. It is pushed back, but the war never formally ends; the two countries remain in a state of war to this day.
1949–1967 · The guns on the heights
From the commanding Golan Heights, Syria shells the Israeli farms and fishing boats in the Galilee below, year after year, and tries to divert the Jordan River headwaters to choke Israel's water. Life in the northern valley is lived under the sights of Syrian artillery.
June 1967 · The Six-Day War
In the war's final days, after the shelling, Israel storms the heights and takes the western Golan. The guns above the Galilee fall silent for the first time in a generation.
October 1973 · The Yom Kippur War
Syria joins Egypt's surprise attack on Yom Kippur, pouring tanks across the Golan and nearly breaking through to the Galilee. A handful of Israeli tanks hold the line in the "Valley of Tears"; Israel recovers and drives to within artillery range of Damascus. The high ground is what stopped a catastrophe.
1974 · Disengagement
A US-brokered disengagement agreement draws the Purple Line, returns the town of Quneitra to Syria, and posts UN observers (UNDOF) in a buffer. For nearly fifty years it makes the Golan Israel's quietest frontier, not from peace, but from a dictator's caution.
Israel applied its law to the Golan in 1981, and in 2019 the United States recognised Israeli sovereignty over it. The reason is not greed; it is the valley's memory. The heights are vital high ground overlooking northern Israel, the people below were shelled from them for nineteen years, and in 1973 they were nearly the road to Israel's destruction. With no peace partner in Damascus for half a century, and now no settled government at all, the one thing Israel will not do is hand that ground back to whoever rules Syria next.
The quiet of the Golan never meant friendship. While the border stayed still, Syria became the road Iran drove its war on.
2011–2024 · The land bridge
Through Syria's civil war, Iran entrenched itself and used the country as the overland supply route to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel fought a quiet "war between wars," hundreds of airstrikes on Iranian weapons convoys and bases, to keep advanced missiles out of Hezbollah's hands. Iran's ring of fire →
8 December 2024 · Assad falls
The Assad regime collapses. With the army that held the 1974 line gone, Israel moves into the buffer zone and onto the summit of Mount Hermon, and strikes Syrian heavy weapons to keep them from jihadist hands. Israel calls the old disengagement void; what replaces it is still unwritten.