Israel 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 Israel’s 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. It’s also a vast playground that drew 3 million tourist visits last year.
The UN Security Council condemned Israel’s 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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