Quneitra My Dear

Watch this beautiful haunting video

The town of Quneitra, once a bustling town of 37,000 in the Hadbatu ElJawlan (Golan Heights) lays in ruins, almost 40 years after the new Barbarians of the Middle East were forced out by a UN brokered armistice. In the short month of June 1974, this pastoral town standing since Byzantine times was ransacked and systematically dynamited by Israeli forces. A history spanning well over a millenium came to an abrupt end.

Few Israelis under the age of 60 have heard about the city of Quneitra and the story behind it. Even fewer outside the Middle East have heard this name. It makes sense: not many people have died in Quneitra and no great battles were fought on its premises, which makes it an obscure footnote in the annals of the Zionist-Arab conflict. Obscure that is, if you’re not one of the 37,000 denizens of Quneitra, who forever lost their homes and native land.

The town which was first conquered by Israel in the 1967 six day war (and subsequently colonized with an adjoining Jewish settlement – the M.O. of the Jewish Lebensraum expansion project), was evacuated of its Syrian residents, becoming a ghost town under Israel’s rule. Over 100,000 Palestinians and Syrians were ethnically cleansed in the Golan Heights alone during that short war and dozens of Syrian villages were subsequently razed to the ground by the Israeli army. Quneitra was held by Israel until the 1973 war during which it was briefly recaptured by Syrian forces, only to be taken back by Israeli forces. In 1974 under a UN brokered armistice agreement, Israel was to relinquish control of Quneitra.

Quneitra had survived the Romans, the Arab caliphate, the Seljuks, the Mongols, the Crusaders, the Ottomans and the British Empire, among others. But nothing could have prepared it to the viciousness of the Zionist invader, that which views the people of the Middle East as no more than weeds that need to be removed and its towns and villages as no more than ant colonies. The Zionist project of erasure stretches as far as the Israeli war machine can take it.

In the long list of Israeli war crimes and violations, Quneitra stands unique. It would take a great historian to find a rational explanation for the systematic destruction of Quneitra by retreating Israeli forces. The most often cited explanation is that Israel simply repeated the Nakba war crime of 1947-1949 when it razed to the ground over 400 villages and towns to prevent their residents from returning to their homes. But such an explanation falls short since Israel was evacuating Quneitra and relinquishing it back to Syrian control. Others claim it was a revenge for the Arab affront to Jewish supremacy during the early days of the 1973 war – a war in which Egypt and Syria aimed to reclaim their territory which had been taken by Israel in 1967. But that too fails to explain what sort of revenge should be meted out on an empty pastoral town standing since ancient times. A psychologist would perhaps be better suited to explain this recurring theme of aggression against property and infrastructure, a common practice of Israeli warfare, most recently employed in their second Lebanon war and the Gaza assault.

It was in Quneitra that the Syrians realized that the Zionist invader was unlike any other before him. Yes, they had known about the Nakba, about the massacres, the rape of women by Jewish forces, the execution of POW’s, the cold blooded mass murder of unarmed refugees and peasants, the wholesale destruction of villages and confiscation of property. But the destruction of Quneitra by retreating Israeli forces could not have served any other purpose but a display of sheer malice, a venting of collective bile and hatred. To the new Barbarians, the history of Palestine or the Middle East means nothing as the Zionist narrative is frozen in time like a clock on a sunken ship, some time about 2500 years ago. They were brought up on a mythological tale of a glorious Jewish kingdom and were made to believe that they are the returning rightful owners of the land and all other dwellers are “squatters” who deny them their rightful claim to the entire land.

The Zionists concocted for themselves a narrative of eternal persecution and sufferings and are now ready to dish out revenge on whoever and whatever stands in their way. This perception is augmented by a distorted historical narrative of Palestine which is further reinforced through heavy indoctrination with a made-up national mythology. This is perhaps the most logical psychological explanation for this psychopathic behavior. It is collective deep seated hatred directed at those who in their mind are Hitler’s successors and stand in their way of realizing their God given right to ethnically cleanse the entirety of Palestine and beyond.