10-09 The Golan

This morning we drove north and east toward the Golan Heights, the disputed mountainous region that separates Israel from Syria. We first stopped at Tel Dan Nature Reserve. A tel is a hill that over several millennia is created by a series of towns or cities being built one on top of the other. The earliest findings here are abut 4000 B.C.E., and the earliest city was from the early Canaanite Period, around 2500 B.C.E. The city, Laish, was captured by the Jewish tribe of Dan and was inhabited until the Roman period. Several layers of ruins are visible here, including the northern temple that was built after the Kingdom of Israel split into Judea in the south and the Northern Kingdom in the north. This necessitated Jeraboam, the king of the northern kingdom to build his own temple in order to prevent his subjects from traveling to Jerusalem to worship.

We were picked up by jeep for our visit to the Golan Heights by Elan, a Jewish cowboy (no lie). As we climbed up the Golan Heights, we quickly began to understand Israel’s security concerns. We passed several old Syrian outposts that were directly above Israeli kibbutzim. Prior to the Six Day War, one particular kibbutz was shelled daily for about 15 years from a gun emplacement that was no more than ½ mile away. From atop the Golan, one can see the Lebanese border town from which katusha rockets have been fired at the large town of Qiryat Shimona no more than 3 or 4 miles away! No wonder Israel is concerned about safe, defensible borders. Although it was pretty warm at the start of the day,

In the evening, we visited a high-tech dairy farm in the moshav of Bet Hillel near the Lebanese border. The farm was started three generations ago by holocaust survivors from Transylvania. They started with one cow, ½ horse (shared with someone else), and some chickens given to them by the Jewish Agency in 1949, and 61 years later, they have a herd of 450 cows that are constantly watched using electronic transmitters that send all sorts of information to the farmers and are milked robotically with the milk produced constantly monitored for volume, pH, and specific gravity to maintain the highest quality milk. We all got to try our hands at milking the old fashion way and also had a chance to feed some young calves. After milking, we had straight out of the cow milk, which was quite tasty and also helped us sleep well.