Israel/Palestine
Related: About this forumIsrael Seeks To Quintuple Jewish Population In The Occupied Golan Heights
Published: 03:10 October 4, 2015
Gulf News
By Jodi Ruderen, New York Times
Occupied Golan Heights: There is a building boom quietly underway in Merom Golan, a tiny colony first built when the Israeli regime occupied the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 war.
Stone utility enclosures mark sites where a few dozen homes will soon break ground. A fallow field is slated to become, next year, a new neighborhood called Banim Bonim, Hebrew for Children Build. Near the ring road Doron Bogdanovsky, the kibbutz secretary-general, has plans approved for 100 more families to settle over the next decade.
The plan for the kibbutz is dwarfed by the aggressive development goals of Naftali Bennett, a senior Israeli minister and leader of the Jewish Home party, and one of many Israeli politicians seizing on the chaotic situation in Syria to secure Israels sovereignty over the contested Golan. They are calling for 100,000 new Golan residents in the next five years. That number, nearly quintuple the current Jewish population, may be unrealistic.
The 400-plus square miles of the Israeli-occupied Golan on the northeast border with Syria is both strategic plateau and lush agricultural terrain yielding prize apples, cherries and beef. Its also a vast playground that drew 3 million tourist visits last year.
The UN Security Council condemned Israels annexation, and most of the world officially considers the Golan illegally occupied, just like the West Bank. But it is rarely the focus of international activism or diplomacy; the construction in Merom Golan drew no public criticism, unlike the hubbub that erupts with every new housing block announced in the occupied East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.
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http://gulfnews.com/news/mena/syria/israel-seeks-to-quintuple-jewish-population-in-the-occupied-golan-heights-1.1594296
jaysunb
(11,856 posts)it's an International uproar...but when everyone--including the government of Syria---are looking the other way, it goes kind of under the radar.
I feel sorry for the people of Israel. There will be a day of reckoning in the near future.
hack89
(39,171 posts)Not very complicated
starroute
(12,977 posts)It's the Golan "Heights* after all. It's the strategic high ground. Israel seized it in the first place because they didn't want any risk of being shelled from above.
That land will never return to Syria except under extreme political duress.
hack89
(39,171 posts)Little Tich
(6,171 posts)It's conceivable that those settlements could impede handing back the Golan Heights to Syria in the future.
msongs
(67,443 posts)6chars
(3,967 posts)Or Iran?