From Damascus to Haifa: 300 days in Israel, author: Khairy Al-Dhahabi

These are unique diaries, written based on scraps and papers placed by their author in an attempt to recover a time that has now become part of a past that does not want to pass. It is a time of a nationalist party's takeover, saturated with socialist ideas infused with a nationalist tendency that had nothing lacking until it turned into one of the worst epidemics in the world and the bloodiest. It is the Ba'athist past that persists to this day, even if in the form of ruins of values, ideas, and people. And despite the singular voice of the writer of these diaries, which continuously seems to be a solitary and isolated voice, it simultaneously expresses the pains, tragedies, and mockeries that have accompanied the lives of Syrians since the Ba'ath tanks moved to seize control of Damascus, the capital of the Arab East, and plunged the country into a terrible calamity. Through these diaries, part of which takes place on Syrian land and the other part in occupied Palestine, and in a generally military space, we observe how an individual can lose his voice and no longer have any personal value amid nightmarish transformations that led Syrians from the newly independent state and the dream of a parliamentary model deserving a civilized civil society, to a herd state controlled by secret security agencies and led by a mafia gang and a sick head with the idea of minority domination over a betrayed and broken majority. A Damascus university graduate's diaries, driven by personal fate, lead him to reside in different parts of Syria, ending up as a liaison officer with the international force on the ceasefire line with Israel in the Golan Heights, and as a prisoner of the Israeli army for 300 days. For this, the well-known novelist Khairy Al-Dhahabi received the Ibn Battuta Award for Diary Literature. Number of pages: 240