A human face on Mideast's severest divide

The students see two different worlds that almost never meet anywhere else. This is the severest divide in the Mideast, yet they are as conversant in Israeli shekels as in Syrian pounds, and speak perfect Hebrew and Arabic.

What do the students tell Syrians about the "enemy"?

"They are people like us, and they have good soldiers," says Farah Farhat, a Druze student from the Golan Heights village of Buqata interviewed in Damascus, where he is studying to be a pharmacist. "But to deal with them is so difficult. They want us to be Israelis, but we refuse, so here they see us as heroes."

"We haven't become Israelis," concurs Iyad Abu Shahin, a twentysomething farmer interviewed separately in Buqata, on the other side of the divide.

He dismisses all assessments among Israelis that the Druze would rather remain part of the Westernized Jewish state than face autocratic rule in Syria.

"It's not a question of where you have better living standards; it's a question of your land," says Mr. Abu Shahin. "It's a spiritual matter. If we were in Syria, we would depend on our fields, not work in Israel."

Agriculture, he says, has been made more difficult because Israel controls the water resources and charges high rates for its use.

While discussing their future at a dusty sidewalk cafe on Buqata's main street, other young men pipe up in agreement. "The feeling here is like a baby returning to its mother, because Syria is where we really belong," says Haitham Suboh.

One-time meetings

One of the few opportunities for limited communal meetings are colorful cross-border weddings, in which a Damascene bride is escorted across the border to the Israeli side by her Golanese husband.

There is a joyful and tearful one-time meeting of the two families in no man's land, then the bride waves to her family for the last time.

Still, there are many drawbacks to their current "in limbo" status, say the students in Damascus. Nobody on the Golan side carries the passport of either nation, only an Israeli identification card, "like what they give a dog crossing a border," says Ata Farhat, a cousin of Farah's, who is studying to be a journalist at the University of Damascus.

"When you tell people you are from the Golan, people here [in Syria] really help you," says Farah Farhat. "I feel like I grew up here."

Even for this young generation, there are memories.

In the Spartan apartment that he shares with other Golan students, Ata Farhat pulls out a photo album and then points to a picture of an older woman: "This is my grandmother, the martyr," he says. Ghalia, the grandmother, was killed during a 1987 pro-Syrian demonstration in their village. Peace will help assuage the memory, Mr. Farhat says.

For former Syria parliament member Faouri, too, there is hope that peace will help him forget the lines of an emotional poem called "My Village" that he wrote in 1970, when three years after the war had felt like a long time:

"I'm looking to reach my village, which shone like a star in the sky," he recites. "I ask myself how it was a theater for the sun and the moon, and now how it has become darkness, darkness, darkness."

*Ilene R. Prusher contributed to this report from Buqata, Golan Heights.

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