On Monday, President Donald Trump, side-by-side with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, signed a presidential proclamation that will officially recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the highly-contested Golan Heights region. After making his remarks, Netanyahu cut his visit in Washington short as the Israeli military attacked targets in the Gaza Strip, including infrastructure occupied by Hamas’ supreme leader, in response to an unforeseen rocket launch from Palestinian territory in a new round of intense fighting with the Islamic militant group.
In May 2018, the Iranian-backed Quds Force, a special forces unit affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, also attacked the contested region, marking the first time that Iranian forces fired directly on Israeli troops. Netanyahu’s military responded with the largest intervention from Israel into neighboring Syria in decades, with Israeli ally President Trump supporting the measure.
Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in 1967 during the Six-Day War. Weeks later, the United Nations (UN) called on Israel to withdraw from the territory, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, but the country instead annexed the western two-thirds of the Golan Heights in 1981 following years of conflict over the resolution.
Afterwards, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 497 declaring “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.”
Nevertheless, the U.S. recognition of an Israeli Golan Heights will see such a development as rivaling the significance of last year’s relocation of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The city is now even planning to name a new subway station after President Trump.
In a tweet late last week the president said, “After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!”
A spokesman for Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called Trump’s decision “a continuation of the hostile approach of the American administration toward our Palestinian people,” NPR reports.
Although Democrats like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (MN-5) believe the Jewish nation should be beat down with anti-Semitic tropes, may they listen to what one of the lasting beacons of the Democratic Party, President John F. Kennedy, said decades ago: “Israel was not created in order to disappear – Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.”