Nadene Goldfoot
The scene is set which is unbelievable in itself without the ultimate lie. It took place in Washington DC in the Rose Garden of the White House on Wednesday, December 15, 1999 during a chilly 17 degrees! It was a Summit meeting and was supposed to be a breakthrough with the people attending. There was President Bill Clinton and his team led by Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross, Prime Minister Barak of Israel and Syria's Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shar'a.
Clinton wanted people to make short speeches. It was cold out there!
Al-Shar spoke: "It goes without saying that peace for Syria means the return of all its occupied land...Those who reject to return the occupied territories to their original owners in the framework of international legitimacy send a message to the Arabs that the conflict between Israel and Arab is a conflict of existence in which bloodshed can never stop, and not a conflict about borders which can be ended as soon as parties get their rights."....
He's talking about the Golan Heights and he wants it back. Peace talks are the time that the Palestinians want land they lost by making war against Israel in the first place and lose it. Israel didn't make war on the Romans, they came from Italy and attacked, occupied and destroyed their land. This time, ALL the surrounding Palestinians ganged up in a Middle East WWI against Israel called the Six Day War where Israel won in 6 days.
Golan was an ancient town of West Bashan; one of the cities of refuge listed in the Torah (Josh.20:8). It was the capital of a region in 2nd Temple times and had a Jewish town until the 5th century CE. This was named Bashan after its chief city. In Greek it was called Gaulanitis. The Upper Golan in the Bible was called Beth-Maachah, and stretched from Mt. Hermon to the Sea of Galilee, and was pasture land, sparsely populated, whereas the Lower Golan, called Geshur in the Bible, was rich and fertile soil until the Arab invasion. By the late-19th century, the Golan Heights was inhabited mostly by colonized peasants (fellaḥîn), Bedouin Arabs, Druze, Turkmen, and Circassians. Circassians helped the Eastern European Jews who were farming. They were horsemen, and rode, protecting the land for them. I had students in junior high English class in Safed who were Circassians; nice boys.
The Golan Heights from which the Syrians bombarded kibbutzim along the upper Jordan Valley, was occupied by Israel troops in the 1967 Six Day War, and subsequently extensively populated with Israeli homes. Its 1985 population was 22,500 and this included the Druze living there as well.
What's happened to the Golan since then? Since the Six-Day War of 1967, the western two-thirds of the Golan Heights has been occupied and administered by Israel, whereas the eastern third remains under the control of Syria. Following the war, Syria dismissed any negotiations with Israel as part of the Khartoum Resolution at the 1967 Arab League summit. That's when they proclaimed their 3 Nos' no peace, no recognition, no nothing.
Construction of Israeli neighborhoods began in the remainder of the territory held by Israel, which was under a military administration until the Knesset passed the Golan Heights Law in 1981, which applied Israeli law to the territory; the move has been described as an annexation.
The Golan Heights Law was condemned by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 497, which stated that "the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction, and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect", and Resolution 242, which emphasizes the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war". (That should be when that country was a victim and defended themselves. Aggressors should not have any rights.) Israel has been a defended from attack every time; 47, 56, 67, 73, and so on.
Israel maintains it has a right to retain the Golan, also citing the text of Resolution 242, which calls for "secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force". Native people have returned to a land that suffered from abuse and neglect and now everyone wants it because the Jews are home again to recall their land and have made something beautiful out of it. We have a saying, "The land was just waiting for the return of the Jews to blossom again. It took their loving hands to reshape it once more.
Al-Shar'a continued: "During the last half-century, in particular, the vision of the Arabs and their sufferings were totally ignored....and the last example of this is what we have witnessed during the last 4 days of attempts to muster international sympathy with the few thousand of settlers in the Golan, ignoring totally more than half a million Syrian people who were uprooted from tens of villages on the Golan, where their forefathers lived for thousands of years and their villages were totally wiped out from existence....The image formulated in the minds of western people and which formulated in public opinion was that Syria was the aggressor , and Syria was the one who shelled settlements from the Golan prior to the 1967 war. Oh, but they did! These claims carry no grain of truth in them....it was the other side who insisted on provoking the Syrians until they clashed together and then claimed that the Syrians are the aggressors".....Oy! Give me strength!
On 25 March 2019, then-President of the United States Donald Trump proclaimed the recognition by the United States of the Golan Heights as part of the State of Israel, making the United States the first country to recognize Israeli rather than Syrian sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
The 28 member states of the European Union declared in turn that they do not recognize Israeli sovereignty, and several Israeli experts on international law reiterated that the principle remains that land gained by either defensive or offensive wars cannot be legally annexed under international law.
This was being constantly shelled on Jews below. It will not be going back to Syria.
President Trump’s recent proclamation recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights has attracted much criticism. This criticism is often simplistic and unrealistic. The prohibition on the use of force to acquire territory is an important foundation of modern international law, but it does not mean that wars of aggression against a neighbouring state cannot have territorial consequences. A state, like Syria, that repeatedly uses force that infringes the territorial integrity of a neighboring state like Israel, should be subject to the risk of losing sovereignty over that territory used to perpetrate the aggressive acts or use of force against that neighboring state. By Dr. Matthijs de Blois, Senior Fellow, thinc.
“This is our moment. This is the moment of the Golan Heights,” Bennett said at a special Cabinet meeting in the Golan Heights on Sunday.“After long and static years in terms of the scope of settlement, our goal today is to double settlement in the Golan Heights,” he added. About 25,000 Israeli settlers live in the Golan Heights, along with some 23,000 Druze, who remained on the land after it was seized by Israel in 1967 after Israel was attacked .
Resource:
Book: Israel and the Arabs by Ahron Bregman and Jihan El-Tahri
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/26/israel-double-settlements-golan-heights-syria-bennett
https://www.thinc.info/the-us-recognition-of-israeli-sovereignty-over-the-golan-heights-an-international-law-perspective/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights
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