Golan annexation
recognition
US President
Donald Trump, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looking on
approvingly over his shoulder, signed a proclamation on March 25, 2019
recognising Israel’s 1981 annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights captured by
Israel in the 1967 war. All four other permanent members of the UN Security
Council – Britain, France, Russia and China – as well as the EU and most
countries worldwide, have rejected the move. Pathetically though, the Arab and
Muslim world cannot even put up a token united resistance to the step that is
in blatant violation of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. The decision
flies in the face of international law, attempting to justify annexation of
other states’ territories captured through war. Pakistan has at least found the
voice to condemn the development. Perhaps now the idea of recognizing Israel, a
blatant violator of international law and the UNSC’s resolutions on many
occasions and cruel oppressor of the Palestinian people, can be laid to rest
where it belongs. The US has from the very beginning in 1948 been a blind
supporter of Israel as an aggressive occupier of Palestine and a consistent
expansionary power at the expense of its beleaguered people. Israel has often
been described as an imperialist dagger plunged into the heart of the Middle
East. If US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s remarks the other day are any
guide, the US is poised to follow up its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s
capital by now the Golan annexation and tomorrow partial or complete annexation
of the West Bank. All this has been made possible if not feasible in the wake
of the ouster of the Palestinian leadership and fighters from Jordan in 1970
and Lebanon in 1982. The latter outcome in particular condemned the Palestinian
leadership under Yasser Arafat to permanent exile in Tunisia and other Arab
countries, from which continuing the armed struggle against Israel proved
difficult if not impossible. The Palestinians therefore perforce had to accept
Washington’s mediation to agree to the ‘land for peace formula’, enshrined in
the 1993 Oslo Accords, which idea now seems dead in the water. Israel and its
US backer have been able to bend the situation in their favour also because the
Arabs have virtually abandoned the Palestinian cause, lip service notwithstanding,
and the wider Muslim world is silent on the Palestinian people’s continuing and
worsening plight.
In Golan alone Israel
has set up since its occupation in 1967 32 illegal settlements housing 20,000
Israeli residents. This is in addition to the creeping, undeclared annexation
of parts of the West Bank by illegal settlements that have carved up and
squeezed Palestinian territories into unviable enclaves often separated from each
other. The US-brokered plan therefore that a two-state solution ensuring the
creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, resolution of the
Jerusalem question through negotiations, and in essence the peace process, are
all but moribund. Given the recent uptick in clashes between Israel and the
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and incidents of resistance in the West Bank,
the writing on the wall could not be clearer. Israel’s war booty in the shape
of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem is no longer on offer to the weakened and
without Arab or Muslim support Palestinian movement while Syria is being
blatantly denied return and sovereignty of its captured territory in Golan in
the face of universal but perhaps ineffective global condemnation. The US’s
argument that Syria’s Bashar al Assad and his Iran backers cannot be allowed to
have Golan back as they mean to confront Israel from that area boils down to making
the Syrian and Palestinian people pay for the US-led west’s defeat in seeking
regime change in Syria through first political and then armed subversion
through proxies funded, armed, trained and unleashed on Syria as the last
bastion of resistance to Israeli expansionism and occupation in the Middle
East. What the US and Israel may find however is that when they offer the
Palestinian people and Syria no hope of a peaceful settlement, the only
recourse left is conflict and even war. Is this what Trump and his blatantly
pro-Israeli family interests intend?
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