Luigi Vaccarella, graduated in 2009 at “Scuola Romana di Fotografia” (Roman School of Photography) I am currently based in Rome working as a travel and landscape photographer for Sime Photo Agency, and I am also following several personal project involving ethnic minorities and traditional lifestyle around the world (China, Yemen, Africa).
This work from the Golan Heights is part of an ongoing long-term project about the relationship between the Men and the Landscape, and how his actions (such as over-exploitation or war) effect and modify the land they live in.
A Stolen Land – The Golan Heights
In 1967 the Israeli army sent an offensive against the bordering states of Jordan, Syria and Egypt which would have been remembered as the “Six days war” and ended with the occupation of Sinai and the Golan Heights.
The place knows as Golan (al-Jawlan in Arabic) represents an area of geo-strategic importance for the Hebrew state, from the military point of view, since his dominant position on the South of Lebanon, Syria and also Northern Israel, and is also very important from the agricultural point of view for the fertile soils but most of all for the big water-resources of which the region disposes. For these reasons instead of the Sinai (given back to Egypt in 1982 for the accords of Camp David) there have never been peace interviews that really foresees the restitution of this area, and instead Israel in 1981 decided to include the Golan Heights in his territory as part of the state.
Since the first week of occupation the Israeli army carried out an extensive ethnic cleansing operation, forcing the majority of the Arab population to emigrate in Syria (about 132.000 people against the 6.000 remained) and also destroying their villages.
Subsequently the government adopted numerous politics in order to control and contain the Syrian population, moving various families from their homes, dividing in an unfair way the water resources, shaving to the ground farms and villages, preventing the towns remained to expand and dispossessing private and public ownership.
Nowadays in the Golan live about 17.000 Jewish farmers scattered in 33 settlements, most of all built on the ruins of the Arab villages, and about 20.000 Syrians against the 500.000 native of the region forced to live outside there, separated from their families and friends; in the Golan there are also 60 military training camps and basis, some of them inside Arab cities like Majdal Shams (the biggest one), to keep under control the population, and 76 mined fields, in addition to an indeterminate number of unexploded devices that since the beginning of the occupation have already caused the death of 37 people and 76 wounded.
This photographic project intends to shows the reality of a peaceful land of great beauty transformed and stunned by the war, and travels trough the most significant places of this problematic region, the villages shaved to the ground, once full of life and now abandoned and reduced to pastures for livestock, and shows all the signs left behind by the conflict that forever modify the aspect of the land and effects the life of the people today, like the trenches, the mined fields, the military posting and the commemorative places of the Israeli victory, all symbolic sceneries of a situation that will have to be solved in order to obtain a long-lasting peace.
Tags: Golan Heights, Israel 
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