Israel and the Golan Heights

I did not pay much attention to a recent news report quoting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that Israel will never leave the Syrian Golan Heights.

His statement was made on the occasion of holding an Israeli Cabinet meeting on the occupied Syrian territory, as if to articulate further a well-known position of the current rightwing Israeli government.

“I choose to have this festive Cabinet meeting on the Golan Heights to send a clear message: the Golan Heights will forever remain in Israeli hands,” Netanyahu said, adding: “It is time, after 50 years, that the international community finally recognises that the Golan will forever remain under Israeli sovereignty.”

There is nothing new here.

Israel never wanted to give back the Golan Heights or any territory its forces occupied in its 1967 war the many of its subsequent wars of aggression against neighbouring Arab countries.

Israel continues to occupy the entire West Bank of Jordan, including East Jerusalem, which it took in 1967; it has been laying siege to the Gaza Strip, with its 1.8 million people since 2005, when Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon at the time decided, for pure security considerations, to disengage from the densely populated strip, which had been occupied at the same time as the West Bank; and Israel continues to occupy small parts of Lebanon despite repeated UN demands that all such occupations should end.

The Syrian Golan Heights was occupied by Israel when its forces commenced a sudden simultaneous attack on the three fronts of Syria, Egypt and Jordan in June 1967.

Later, in 1981, the Israeli government decided to officially annex the 1,270-square-kilometre large Golan plateau separating Israel from Syria.

Despite dozens of UN Security Council resolutions since then that declare Israeli actions illegal under international law, and despite demands that Israel should end its occupation, the Syrian territory remains under its occupation.

To render Israeli leaders’ repeated claims that the Arab territory that fell under Israel’s control in that war would be returned to those it belonged to once the concerned Arab countries decide to make peace with the Zionist state no more than a worthless tactic, Israel started to immediately build Jewish settlements on all the occupied areas, in Sinai, on the Egyptian side, on the Golan Heights, on the Syrian side, and in the West Bank and Jerusalem — Jerusalem was also officially annexed — on the Jordanian/Palestinian side.

The building of illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land continues until today on the West Bank and the Syrian Heights, despite repeated UN rejection and condemnation.

Apparently, and as would be expected, the Israeli government is being encouraged to fish in the troubled Syrian waters by enlarging its Jewish settler community and by building more illegal settlements on the Golan.

According to a New York Times report of October 2, 2015, an aggressive development goal of adding some 100,000 new settlers across the Golan in five years is being prompted by Israeli senior minister Naftali Bennett, referred to in the report as “one of many Israeli leaders and thinkers seizing on the chaos in Syria to solidify Israel’s hold on the Golan”.

“We’re in a whole new strategic situation, and a new strategic situation requires new strategic responses,” Bennett was quoted by the Times, along with a promise of his to introduce a plan involving “several hundreds of millions of shekels” to create jobs, housing, schools and transportation on the sprawling, green, Golan Heights.

Obviously the Israeli prime minister seems to be inclined to test the waters, believing the opportunity is ripe for consolidating illegal war gains as the Syrian government is under the severe pressure of the current crisis.

The recent Netanyahu statement must be read within that context.

While saying it does not introduce any new elements in Israel’s strategic expansionist thinking, the possible alternative of keeping silent does not, and should not, sustain any hope that Israel has any intention to voluntarily end any of its occupation.

However, in the last three decades, Israel did end some occupation. One was the withdrawal from the Egyptian territory of Sinai, which occurred by agreement, the Camp David peace treaty, but at a very high price for the Egyptian government.

Israel thought at the time that neutralising Egypt would improve its chances to annex the West Bank and Gaza, considered more important for Israel’s long-term purposes.

Sinai was also too vast a territory for Israel to keep under indefinite occupation.

The other withdrawal was from southern Lebanon, in 1883 and 2000, when the Lebanese resistance made that occupation untenable and highly
costly.

The third occupation happened in 2005, when Israel decided to leave the narrow Gaza Strip and dismantle its settlements there.

Israel needed more than 40,000 soldiers to guard, though barely, less than 8,000 settlers on this most densely populated piece of land on Earth. That also proved untenable, so Israel decided to leave.

But Gaza’s population has been kept under siege since, practically occupied in a different way. It turned into a large prison.

There were repeated rounds of negotiations over the Golan with Syria, but contrary to some circulating beliefs, Israel never agreed to return all the occupied Syrian territory or not to attach severe restrictions on what would be abandoned.

This has always been the reality, notwithstanding the Syrian crisis.