All of a sudden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the international community to recognise Syria’s Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the 1967 War, as belonging to Israel.
During his recent visit to Moscow he apparently asked Russian President Vladimir Putin not to sign off on any peace deal that included the future status of the occupied Golan Heights.
“We are not going back to the days when rockets were fired at our communities and our children from the top of the Golan . . . and so, with an agreement or without, the Golan Heights will remain part of Israel’s sovereign territory,” he vowed, according to the Times of Israel. He referred to attempts to wrest the area from Israeli control as “a red line.”
His reasoning is that holding the rocky plateau has a strategic advantage, but the fact is any permanent annexation would contravene international law and paragraph four of the United Nations Charter; not that such a minor detail keeps him awake at night. After all, Israel has powerful friends that ensure its de facto immunity from having to answer for its transgressions and crimes.
Suspicious timing
However, the timing of Netanyahu’s announcement is highly suspicious. Why is he putting his foot down at this juncture when it was generally accepted that the occupied Golan Heights, which have long provided Israel with over 33 percent of its water and up to 50 percent of its vegetables and fruit, would one day be returned to their rightful owner?
Indeed, in 2008, Israel and Syria held talks, brokered by Turkey, when by all accounts then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed to cede the Golan Heights to Syria’s control while President Bashar Al Assad revealed that the two sides were in “touching distance” of clinching a deal. Direct talks were on the cards but failed to manifest following Israeli strikes on Gaza that created a rift between Tel Aviv and Ankara.
Then defence minister Ehud Barak was later to refute that the Golan issue was ever on the table. That said, he earlier revealed that during Netanyahu’s first stint as prime minister, when Hafez Al Assad still ruled Syria, he would have handed over the Golan. The sticking point was Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), which serves as Israel’s largest source of potable water.
Evidently, over the decades, Netanyahu has had a change of mind, which he explains away as being based on security concerns. But he gives the game away with his insistence that the Golan Heights will remain part of Israel forever—with forever being the operative word. Had he argued the point that Israel will hang on to it unless there is a peace agreement at some point down the road, his argument wouldn’t have sounded so spurious or reeking of greed.
Oil discovery drives up value
It so happens that the occupied Golan Heights’ value to the Jewish state increased by leaps and bounds last autumn with the discovery of large reserves of black gold in the form of shale oil capable of producing billions of barrels, which together with three major gasfields discovered within Israel’s territorial waters, could render the country energy self-sufficient once the commercial viability of extraction is determined.
What Netanyahu is proposing is nothing short of theft. A resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 20, 2006, acknowledges the “permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including [occupied] east Jerusalem and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources.” Anything less is considered by international law as “pillage.”
The West is making appropriate noises in response. A spokesman for the US State Department said: “Those territories are not part of Israel” and their status “should be determined through negotiations.” Germany has taken the same line.
But as we witnessed when Moscow annexed Crimea, the US and its European allies are impotent to redress the wrongs, apart from slapping offenders with token or largely ineffective economic sanctions. Unlike Russia, Israel doesn’t risk seeing its economy dented because no American president would green light anything considered detrimental to its favoured Middle East ally.
In short, Netanyahu is exploiting the turmoil in Syria to force a land grab which is likely to be rubber-stamped in the event the next US commander-in-chief is a Republican. The Syrian people have a lot more on their minds right now. Survival is uppermost. But Israel’s theft of the Golan Heights will hamper efforts towards a comprehensive regional peace perhaps for generations to come.
Linda S. Heard is an award-winning British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.
RSS
No prizes for guessing Netanyahu’s plans
Posted on April 28, 2016 by Linda S. Heard
All of a sudden, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the international community to recognise Syria’s Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the 1967 War, as belonging to Israel.
During his recent visit to Moscow he apparently asked Russian President Vladimir Putin not to sign off on any peace deal that included the future status of the occupied Golan Heights.
“We are not going back to the days when rockets were fired at our communities and our children from the top of the Golan . . . and so, with an agreement or without, the Golan Heights will remain part of Israel’s sovereign territory,” he vowed, according to the Times of Israel. He referred to attempts to wrest the area from Israeli control as “a red line.”
His reasoning is that holding the rocky plateau has a strategic advantage, but the fact is any permanent annexation would contravene international law and paragraph four of the United Nations Charter; not that such a minor detail keeps him awake at night. After all, Israel has powerful friends that ensure its de facto immunity from having to answer for its transgressions and crimes.
Suspicious timing
However, the timing of Netanyahu’s announcement is highly suspicious. Why is he putting his foot down at this juncture when it was generally accepted that the occupied Golan Heights, which have long provided Israel with over 33 percent of its water and up to 50 percent of its vegetables and fruit, would one day be returned to their rightful owner?
Indeed, in 2008, Israel and Syria held talks, brokered by Turkey, when by all accounts then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed to cede the Golan Heights to Syria’s control while President Bashar Al Assad revealed that the two sides were in “touching distance” of clinching a deal. Direct talks were on the cards but failed to manifest following Israeli strikes on Gaza that created a rift between Tel Aviv and Ankara.
Then defence minister Ehud Barak was later to refute that the Golan issue was ever on the table. That said, he earlier revealed that during Netanyahu’s first stint as prime minister, when Hafez Al Assad still ruled Syria, he would have handed over the Golan. The sticking point was Lake Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee), which serves as Israel’s largest source of potable water.
Evidently, over the decades, Netanyahu has had a change of mind, which he explains away as being based on security concerns. But he gives the game away with his insistence that the Golan Heights will remain part of Israel forever—with forever being the operative word. Had he argued the point that Israel will hang on to it unless there is a peace agreement at some point down the road, his argument wouldn’t have sounded so spurious or reeking of greed.
Oil discovery drives up value
It so happens that the occupied Golan Heights’ value to the Jewish state increased by leaps and bounds last autumn with the discovery of large reserves of black gold in the form of shale oil capable of producing billions of barrels, which together with three major gasfields discovered within Israel’s territorial waters, could render the country energy self-sufficient once the commercial viability of extraction is determined.
What Netanyahu is proposing is nothing short of theft. A resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 20, 2006, acknowledges the “permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including [occupied] east Jerusalem and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources.” Anything less is considered by international law as “pillage.”
The West is making appropriate noises in response. A spokesman for the US State Department said: “Those territories are not part of Israel” and their status “should be determined through negotiations.” Germany has taken the same line.
But as we witnessed when Moscow annexed Crimea, the US and its European allies are impotent to redress the wrongs, apart from slapping offenders with token or largely ineffective economic sanctions. Unlike Russia, Israel doesn’t risk seeing its economy dented because no American president would green light anything considered detrimental to its favoured Middle East ally.
In short, Netanyahu is exploiting the turmoil in Syria to force a land grab which is likely to be rubber-stamped in the event the next US commander-in-chief is a Republican. The Syrian people have a lot more on their minds right now. Survival is uppermost. But Israel’s theft of the Golan Heights will hamper efforts towards a comprehensive regional peace perhaps for generations to come.
Linda S. Heard is an award-winning British specialist writer on Middle East affairs. She welcomes feedback and can be contacted by email at heardonthegrapevines@yahoo.co.uk.