Before sunrise this week, I stood alone among the basalt ruins of Deir Aziz, an ancient synagogue in the southern Golan Heights, five days into our second Jerusalem Post Magazine deep dive into the region, a companion piece to our ongoing wellness and healing tourism series, and more proof of a plateau so layered with history, culture, hospitality, and small businesses quietly rebuilding that it keeps pulling us back.
I had driven five minutes from the edge of Moshav Kanaf to this fourth-century synagogue and waited as the first light climbed toward its standing pillars and arched entrance, glowing green bee-eaters circling overhead. It was in that light that I recited the words every Jewish child learns to whisper, Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad, spoken on this ground centuries before the United Nations, the modern Syrian state, or any argument over lines on a map.
That argument was very much alive this week. UN Secretary-General António Guterres landed in Damascus, the first visit by a UN chief to Syria since 2009, addressed Syria’s new parliament, and called the Golan Heights Syrian territory under international law, saying Israel’s presence there must end.
Claims to the Golan Heights
Syria’s president, the same commander who ran an al-Qaeda-linked faction before trading fatigues for a suit, told Al Jazeera that Damascus and Jerusalem were quietly working toward a security arrangement, one he cast as a possible gateway to peace, all while making clear Syria’s claim to the plateau stays intact. Guterres was not alone.
Three weeks earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron had flown to Damascus, shaken Ahmed al-Sharaa’s hand at the People’s Palace, and restored full French-Syrian ties, even as Damascus repeated the same Golan line Guterres echoed. Western leaders seem willing to look past exactly who they are shaking hands with, so long as he signs reconstruction deals, while Israel’s hold on ground it has held since 1967 stays the outstanding violation.
Washington has added pressure of its own: US President Donald Trump reportedly told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in mid-July that Israel should pull troops back from southern Syria and Lebanon, giving up buffer zone posts the IDF took after Bashar al-Assad fell, the same high ground that lets Israel spot trouble before it reaches a border town.
October 7 taught this country what happens when you wait for the enemy to reach the fence. Holding these hills is that lesson, applied to the next border over.
Set those moments side by side, and the imbalance is hard to miss. A country still climbing out of five decades of dictatorship and civil war, its government not yet two years old, is welcomed with mosque tours and parliamentary addresses. Meanwhile, a Jewish presence built on a spring, a study hall, and a synagogue predating that state by 16 centuries stays the subject of condemnation. Stand in the ruins themselves, and that case gets a lot harder to dismiss.
An ancient synagogue
Archaeologists date the Deir Aziz synagogue to the early fourth century CE, and its layout sets it apart from almost every other synagogue in the Golan. Most face south toward Jerusalem, but this one runs east to west, its entrance and Torah ark apse suggesting a design carried north by Jewish migrants from the Hebron Hills.
A series of earthquakes from the late fourth century on damaged the ark niche and forced new doorways into the west wall, until a final quake in 749 CE brought the roof down for good.
Even so, the site never went silent. Within a century, the fallen columns went back up, and the building was repurposed again, perhaps as a church, then as storage and a divided residence, right up until the Six Day War.
Elsewhere on the plateau, the more familiar pattern holds: Archaeologists confirmed this past year a second buried synagogue directly beneath the abandoned Syrian village of Yehudiya, its stones reused in village houses for generations before anyone knew what lay underneath. Roughly 30 ancient synagogues have now been mapped across the Golan.
For years, Israelis have leaned on security and international law to defend our hold on the Golan, and both carry weight in this neighborhood. But leaning on them alone concedes something we should not: that our claim needs modern justification. It began earlier, with families who cut terraces into these hillsides, carved lions and bulls into the synagogue’s stone, and prayed facing Jerusalem, generations before Zionism had a name.
Standing at Deir Aziz, the debates in faraway capitals felt distant. A basalt column does not read UN statements. A spring does not know what a Security Council resolution says. The record in the ground persists, indifferent to whoever is arguing about it this month.
Zionism, at its foundation, is the return of an indigenous people to the hills, springs, and sacred sites that shaped its civilization long before anyone called it a nation-state. The State of Israel is the latest chapter in that story, not its beginning.
Watching the sun climb over Deir Aziz, I thought about how many empires had come and gone from this hillside since 749 CE, how many borders had shifted, how many flags had changed. And still, this week, a Jew stood among these stones at dawn and said the same words his ancestors said here. That continuity needs no permission from Damascus or the UN. It has already outlasted both.
The writer is a travel photojournalist mapping Israel’s landscapes of wellness, healing, and resilience in The Journey for Healing Israel.