The Tree of the Doves. Christopher Merrill

      PROLOGUE

      I take my bearings on the Golan Heights, between an Israeli observation post and a UN peacekeeping base. Israel captured this strategic plateau in the Six Days’ War in 1967, and through the haze of an autumn afternoon, beyond a line of bunkers and a vineyard, I can see the road to Damascus, forty kilometers away. Beirut is a little farther off, over Mount Hermon—one of the sites traditionally ascribed to the Transfiguration, where Jesus appeared to his disciples in a new light. When Peter, James, and John saw their rabbi in a radiant white robe alongside the prophets Moses and Elijah, they recognized him as the Messiah. Out of a cloud came the voice of God: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!” Jesus told his disciples to keep his metamorphosis secret until after he rose from the grave, then continued his ministry in the communities around the Sea of Galilee, at the base of the Golan Heights. It was there that he revealed his plan to build a church destined to reshape the course of history, first in the Roman Empire and then around the world—a religious movement that became inseparable from politics. It started with Jesus demanding a change of heart from his followers, and twenty centuries later I began to reflect on some of the changes wrought by another revolution in political thinking: the “war on terror” declared by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC.

      Terror is always with us—a fact borne out by countless examples from daily life: the heart racing on a turbulent flight, the dread felt before the diagnosis is delivered. But a lookout on the Golan is a particularly good place to consider the consequences of living in fear. This is disputed land, in the sights of military planners and observers, politicians and diplomats, clerics and poets; and even on a quiet day it is hard to escape the sensation that all hell could break loose at any moment. Syrian claims on this land, which provides Israel with a crucial supply of fresh water, have for forty years added new threads to a tangled history, which periodically unravels in a spectacular fashion; hence the peacekeepers, more than a thousand strong, who patrol a zone of separation between the two countries, maintaining the cease-fire negotiated after Syria’s failed invasion of the southern Golan in the Yom Kippur War of 1973. A Security Council resolution regards the Golan as Israelioccupied territory; any settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which dates back more than a century, must thus resolve the matter of the Golan, which for the Jewish state forms a critical bulwark against Arab attacks.

      The story of living in the presence of fear belongs to the ages. Terror’s leading role in the history of the region that gave rise to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reminds us that much religious discourse is predicated on questions rooted in fear—particularly of the unknown: Where do we come from? Where are we going? What shall we do? Such was the drift of my thinking on the drive up the escarpment, along a narrow, twisting road past fenced-off minefields, olive groves, and Druze villages carved into hillsides. At the sight of a police station surrounded by barbed wire my Arab guide told me that most Druze are waiting for Syria to regain the Golan, either through negotiations or force, although they keep silent about this in public