Young nations—like young people—sometimes do crazy things. The Syrian Republic was 28 years old when the Golan Heights were occupied in 1967. Young, passionate, spirited—and foolish—it dragged itself, and everybody around it, into a imbalanced war with Israel. The rest is history. Six days later, Israel occupied the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and Jerusalem. Today, 41 years later, the scar and its permanent distortion of the Arab psyche remain strongly imprinted in the Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian mindsets.

The Syrians did go to war in 1948 or 1967 for the Golan Heights. They went to war for Palestine. Many long years have since passed, and four generations have grown up, hearing of the Golan. We still speak nostalgically about it—certain that it is going to be restored at some point in our lifetime, through a peace process that was started at Madrid after the Gulf War. We have written thousands of poems, authored hundreds of books, produced dozens of documentaries, and named endless projects, factories, and monuments, after the Golan. This week, hopes were raised, for the first time in years, that the Golan was on its way to being restored to Syria. Damascus, Tel Aviv, and Ankara announced, within an interval of no more than five minutes, that peace talks were underway between Syria and Israel, under patronage of the Turks.

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