The Golan Heights: a volcanic plateau, vineyards and borders in view

The Golan Heights is a basalt plateau tilted up above the Sea of Galilee, and everything about it follows from that: black stone in the field walls, cones of extinct volcanoes along the skyline, red soil that holds water, and air ten degrees cooler than the lake below. In winter it snows. Mount Hermon closes the northern horizon, the country's only ski slopes on its shoulder and its snowmelt feeding the springs that become the River Jordan. Two of those springs make some of the finest walking in Israel. At Tel Dan, cold water runs through woodland past a Canaanite mudbrick gateway nearly four thousand years old and the Israelite gate where the Tel Dan Stele was found — the earliest mention of the House of David outside the Bible. And at Banias, a spring bursts from the foot of a vast cliff below the niches of a sanctuary of Pan, in the district the Romans called Caesarea Philippi, where Jesus told Simon that he was Peter — the rock — and that on this rock he would build his church. The Banias waterfall lies a short walk downstream.

The plateau is full of ruins because it was always worth holding. Gamla sits on a ridge shaped like a camel's hump, a Jewish town besieged by Vespasian in 67 CE and never rebuilt; it is also the best place in the country to watch griffon vultures, which nest in the cliffs and hang almost motionless on the warm air rising off the rock face below the viewpoint. The Gamla waterfall, the tallest in Israel at just over fifty metres, drops into the gorge nearby. At Umm el-Kanatir — Ein Keshatot, "the mother of arches" — a Byzantine synagogue flattened by the earthquake of 749 has been put back up stone by stone, every block chipped, catalogued and lifted into its original place by crane, a project of fifteen years finished in 2018. Hippos-Susita, one of the ten cities of the Decapolis, looks down at the lake from the western rim, and above Banias stands Nimrod Fortress, begun by the Ayyubids in the 1220s and enlarged by the Mamluks into the largest castle of the Crusader period in the region — though no Crusader ever held it. Today the plateau is farms, orchards, cattle and vineyards; volcanic soil and altitude have made it Israel's best wine country, at the Golan Heights Winery in Katzrin, Château Golan at Moshav Eliad and Pelter at Kibbutz Ein Zivan.

Four Druze villages sit beneath Hermon — Majdal Shams, Buq'ata, Mas'ada and Ein Qiniyye — where most residents have kept their Syrian identity through decades of Israeli rule; around them lie some thirty Israeli farming communities, and between them the plateau holds far more than any single day can take in. If borders and how they come to be are what interest you, the Golan Heights repays a whole day on its own. There is no other place in the country where the geography does so much of the explaining. From the old outpost on Mount Bental, its trenches and bunkers still in place and a café at the summit called Coffee Anan — a joke about clouds and a Secretary-General at once — you look down on the Valley of Tears, where Syrian armour was held in October 1973 with Jordanian and Iraqi units in the fight; on the ruins of Quneitra; on the ceasefire line, and on the Syrian positions beyond it. Standing there, 1967 and 1973 stop being dates in a book. The same view raises everything else: the annexation of 1981 and how it is regarded abroad, the position of the Druze villages, water, and the arguments Zionism has had with itself from the beginning about what this country should be. These are questions on which serious people disagree, and I can set out the sequence of events, the vocabulary each side uses, and the range of interpretations that exist. What you conclude is entirely your own.

What we will see

• Nimrod Fortress — The largest surviving castle in Israel, built against the crusaders above the road from Damascus.
• Banias — a source of the Jordan — The spring, a Greek sanctuary to the god Pan and the most abundant waterfall in the country.
• Caesarea Philippi — Where, according to the gospels, Peter declared Jesus to be the Messiah.
• Mount Bental — Bunkers and trenches on the Syrian border, overlooking the Valley of Tears and, in clear weather, Damascus.
• Gamla — The “Masada of the north” — a town that fell in the revolt against Rome, today a griffon vulture colony.
• Katzrin — the Talmudic village — A reconstructed village from the Talmudic period, with dwellings and a synagogue.
• The Golan wineries — Basalt soil and cool nights — the wines of the Golan are among the best in Israel.