(Still running a few days behind ~~ writing about 12/18 here)

After we left Tzvat on Monday afternoon, we drove to the Golan Heights. A disconcerting length of the drive was within sight of Lebanon, clearly visible across a forbidding and impregnable border.

When we got to the village where we were having dinner with a Druze family and staying in a B&B we could see Syria, across a similar unbridgeable closeness. The Druze village we were staying in in Israel was matched by a Druze village in Syria on a neighboring hill. There are people in our village who have family members who had gone to visit family on the other side and gotten stuck on the wrong side of the civil war. They used to try to shout to each other from hill to hill but, mostly, they are separate now.

That happened to our hostess, Fauzia (which…