Donald Trump is preparing to go one step further to validate Israel's fait accompli policy and whitewash its violations of international law. The president of the United States has announced through social networks that he is ready to recognize Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, the Syrian plateau occupied by the Jewish state in the Six Day War of 1967. The decision comes after an intense pressure campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has found in the Republican tycoon an unconditional ally to alter the parameters of the most entrenched conflict in the Middle East and continue unhindered with the Jewish colonization of the occupied territories. The timing of the announcement seems calibrated to help Netanyahu in the Israeli elections on April 9.
"After 52 years, the time has come for the United States to fully recognize the Israeli sovereignty of the Golan Heights, which is critically important in terms of security and security for the State of Israel and regional stability," Trump wrote in Twitter Its decision breaks with the traditional position of the foreign policy of the United States, a country that, like the rest of the world, has considered the Golan as occupied territory until now. It is very similar to what Trump already did at the end of 2017, when he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, ignoring the resolutions of the United Nations that consider the eastern and Arab sector of the city as occupied territory and undermining Palestinian aspirations to raise a day there the capital of his State.
The future of the West Bank
More than 20,000 Israelis live in thirty settlements built in the Golan, a territory that even in the eyes of the Supreme Court of Israel is in a state of "belligerent occupation." Successive US governments have tried to use the Golan as a bargaining chip for an eventual peace agreement between Israel and Syria, a prospect far removed today.
The Trump Administration has also stopped designating Gaza and the West Bank as "occupied territories." The label disappeared for the first time a few days ago of the human rights report presented each year by the State Department. The gesture has practical consequences because international law prohibits the annexation of lands in the occupied territories, the destruction of property and the transfer of population from the occupying to the occupied power. By erasing that designation, Washington is essentially giving carte blanche to the demolition of houses or the expansion of settlements in the shrinking Palestinian territory. Among the Israeli right, several voices have seen the gesture as a kind of authorization for the annexation of the West Bank.
