In an interview broadcast on one of Lebanon’s satellite channels, following Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 and amid what had afflicted some with a certain “national indigestion”, former Lebanese Defence Minister Albert Mansour took aim at the inhabitants of the occupied Syrian Golan, who numbered at the time no more than twenty thousand souls and had chosen the path of peaceful resistance against the Israeli occupation, asking with derision: “Why don’t these people resist the Israeli occupation?” Many of Hezbollah’s mouthpieces and loyalists did the same, sparing the Golan’s inhabitants none of their repeated barbs over what they called a deviation from the principle “where there is occupation, there is resistance”, as though resistance could only manifest itself through rockets and projectiles, oblivious to the fact that the highest form of patriotism and resistance lies in clinging to the land, in refusing to surrender it as easy prey to the occupiers, and in preserving a heritage, a culture and an identity. This is precisely what the Golanis accomplished, within the limits of their modest and limited means, and in the most exemplary fashion. It was this state of affairs that compelled the author of these lines to publish, in January 2001, two detailed consecutive studies in the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir under the title “And They Ask You: When Will You Fight Israel?”, then to follow them with another article in “Qadaya An-Nahar” on 29 November 2005, entitled “A Letter to Hezbollah from the Occupied Golan”, in which he invited the organisation unreservedly to neutralise Lebanon and relieve its front from the burden of the conflict with Israel, now that the Lebanese had paid their share of the price.