and they proposed the Israeli identity card to everyone who was more than 18 years old.

So I remember I was in the 7th grade at that year.

And when my father refused to get the identity card, they arrested him as hundreds of the men of the village and they turned the schools into jails

so after two weeks when they left all the people gathered in the main squares they put all the

identity card and burned them in a symbolic act that we are refusing to change our identity.

We will stay Arab Syrians and our political belonging is to the Syrian state.

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Magdisi Street podcast.

Today we're going to talk about this really interesting and complex question of the Syrian Syria,

and in particular Syria is Golan Heights, occupied Golan.

The occupied Syrian Golan is a mountainous region in southwest Syria that borders Lebanon to the north,

of course, and Jordan to the south and the Israelis to the west. During the 1967 Arab-Israeli

war, Israel occupied two-thirds of the Syrian Golan. And I think over 100,000 or so Syrians were

forcibly transferred or perhaps ethnically cleansed,

we might be able to say, and displaced.

And then since the fall of the Assad regime last December, the rest of the Golan has been

now occupied by the Israelis, along with several other districts in south of Syria.

We're really happy today and very pleased to discuss all of this

with our guest, Waal Tarbeye, who is an artist and activist in the occupied Golan Heights. He's a project

manager with Al-Marsat, the Arab Human Rights Center in the Golan Heights, where he leads this program

on economic and social

and cultural rights. He's worked with fellow artists and cultural activists on developing the

local artistic and cultural space in the occupied Syrian Golan and has sought to link its democratic

...