In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Golan Heights remains a major strategic issue for Israel.
In Tel Aviv
Six months after coming to power, Naftali Bennett intends to refine his image as a builder. To achieve this, he chose the Golan Heights as his favorite place, a strategic site overlooking both Syria, with the Damascus Plain, and northern Israel, with the Galilee. He got his government to vote on a plan worth 282 million euros. This sum is supposed to make it possible to double the number of inhabitants of the region by bringing it to 100,000 within four years. A demographic expansion much less “problematic” than the construction of housing in Israeli settlements in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem, in the eyes of the United States.
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Important detail: The Golan Heights were conquered from Syria by the Jewish state in the Six-Day War in 1967, then unilaterally annexed in 1981, a measure that a UN resolution declared “void. and void ”. It was then not until 2019 and a “gift” from Donald Trump for the United States to decide to be the first country in the world to recognize Israeli sovereignty over this territory. In gratitude, the site of a new settlement in the Golan Heights has been dubbed “Trump Heights”.
The vast majority of homes will be for Israelis, who are already 27,000 to have settled there. But the region is also home to 24,000 Druze, already present in the region before annexation by the Hebrew state.
Netanyahu’s successor Naftali Bennett was confident. He was pleased that Joe Biden did not go back on this “important” decision. In other words, while there should be no criticism from Washington, there has been discreet but effective pressure recently exerted by the United States, which has resulted in particular in the freezing, at least provisionally, of a draft construction of thousands of housing units on the site of a former airport (see opposite) in the Arab part of Jerusalem, also annexed. Reactions should also be moderate elsewhere. According to Naftali Bennett, “the war in Syria has made the idea of Israel’s control over the Golan more acceptable” abroad.
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Concretely, the vast majority of the dwellings will be intended for Israelis, who are already 27,000 to have settled there. But the region is also home to 24,000 Druze, already present in the region before annexation by the Jewish state. Most claim to be Syrians and refuse to take Israeli citizenship. To go abroad, they must have a laissez-passer, on which the nationality box is left empty. The plateau also hosts 2,600 people from the Alawite community, a branch of Shiism which includes the family of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. There is no chance that other Druze or Alawites from Syria or Lebanon, two countries officially at war with Israel, could move to the Golan Heights. Virtually all of the accommodation will therefore be intended for Israelis drawn to this verdant region. »READ ALSO – When Israel bombed the Syrian chemical arsenal
Moreover, it is precisely on the ecological front that the most bitter criticisms have been made when the government’s construction plan has benefited from a broad political consensus. “This project will cause devastation and destruction in the region” with the arrival of tens of thousands of new residents, warned the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel. This cry of alarm, however, was hardly heard beyond small circles of environmentalists.
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