No future: Last Arab-Christians struggle to survive in Israeli occupied Golan Heights

Only two isolated Christian families remain in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, captured from Syria in 1967.

A recent mass in the small Maronite church at Ein Qiniye saw a turnout of hundreds, but such an attendance is normally rare.

The church opens infrequently and mostly caters to families from the cities of Haifa and Nazareth who visit in solidarity.

"We come from Nazareth to support the Christian presence in Ein Qiniye," Suriya Samaane, 72, from the Galilee, told AFP outside the building after attending mass.

Before Israel's occupation of the strategic plateau overlooking the Sea of Galilee, where Christians believe Jesus walked on water, around 600 Christians and 300 Druze lived in Ein Qiniye.

As war broke out in 1967, most Christians fled westwards to the Shebaa farms area along the Lebanese-Israeli border, a disputed territory annexed by Israel but claimed by Lebanon.

Assaf Adib, 57, is a member of the last remaining Christian family in Ein Qiniye. After 1967, some of his close relatives moved north to the Golan Druze town of Majdal Shams

"My father and my uncle followed the Druze families and went to take refuge in Majdal Shams."

While his relatives returned to Ein Qiniye with the Druze after the war, many other families were unable to get back home and remain in Syria or Lebanon.

'No future for Arabs’

In Majdal Shams, Orthodox Christian Ibrahim Nasrallah, 80, recalls the time before the war, when "no one spoke of Christian, Muslim or Druze: we were all Arabs first and then Syrians," he told AFP.

"Thirdly we were Christians."

"Before 1967 Christians left Majdal Shams to work in Quneitra," he said, referring to the nearby once-prosperous provincial capital in southern Syria now torn apart by the civil war there.

"The most educated went to Damascus," Nasrallah said, adding that two of his children have resettled inside Syria but he will remain where he is.

"Outside Majdal Shams I am like a fish out of water. I will not leave until I die."

Before Israel's occupation, Christians accounted for 12 percent of the population of the Golan, which then had 340 villages and 150,000 inhabitants, according to researcher Salmane Fakhreddine. 

Today, about 22,000 Syrian Druze live on the Israeli-controlled side of the Heights as well as 25,000 Israeli settlers who moved in after 1967.

In Majdal Shams, the only church is closed and has long since fallen into disrepair.

"When my father died the priest had to come to our house to perform the funeral mass," Nasrallah said.

He was then laid to rest in a cemetery shared by Druze and Christians among pine trees.

"In 1984 when we had my son Iyass baptised we got the Israeli authorities to open the Banias church," south of Majdal Shams, Nasrallah added.

Iyass worked in Haifa for a time but eventually moved to Germany.

Back home for a visit, he is convinced he made the right decision in leaving the region.

"There is no future for the Arabs," he said.