Golan annexation recognition

US President Donald Trump, with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looking on approvingly over his shoulder, signed a proclamation on March 25, 2019 recognising Israel's 1981 annexation of Syria's Golan Heights captured by Israel in the 1967 war. All four other permanent members of the UN Security Council - Britain, France, Russia and China - as well as the EU and most countries worldwide have rejected the move. Pathetically though, the Arab and Muslim world cannot even put up a token united resistance to the step that is in blatant violation of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. The decision flies in the face of international law, attempting to justify annexation of other states' territories captured through war. Pakistan has at least found the voice to condemn the development. Perhaps now the idea of recognizing Israel, a blatant violator of international law and the UNSC's resolutions on many occasions and cruel oppressor of the Palestinian people, can be laid to rest where it belongs. The US has always been a blind supporter of Israel as an aggressive occupier of Palestine and a consistent expansionary power at the expense of its beleaguered people. Israel has often been described as an imperialist dagger plunged into the heart of the Middle East. If US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's remarks the other day are any guide, the US is poised to follow up its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital by now the Golan annexation and tomorrow partial or complete annexation of the West Bank. All this has been made possible if not feasible in the wake of the ouster of the Palestinian leadership and fighters from Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon in 1982. The latter outcome in particular condemned the Palestinian leadership under Yasser Arafat to permanent exile in Tunisia and other Arab countries, from which continuing the armed struggle against Israel proved difficult if not impossible. The Palestinians therefore perforce had to accept Washington's mediation to agree to the 'land for peace formula', enshrined in the 1993 Oslo Accords, which idea now seems dead in the water. Israel and its US backer have been able to bend the situation in their favour also because the Arabs have virtually abandoned the Palestinian cause, lip service notwithstanding, and the wider Muslim world is silent on the Palestinian people's continuing and worsening plight.
In Golan alone Israel has set up since its occupation in 1967 32 illegal settlements housing 20,000 Israeli residents. This is in addition to the creeping, undeclared annexation of parts of the West Bank by illegal settlements that have carved up and squeezed Palestinian territories into unviable enclaves often separated from each other. The US-brokered plan therefore that a two-state solution ensuring the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, resolution of the Jerusalem question through negotiations, and in essence the peace process, are all but moribund. Given the recent uptick in clashes between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and incidents of resistance in the West Bank, the writing on the wall could not be clearer. Israel's war booty in the shape of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem is no longer on offer to the weakened and without Arab or Muslim support Palestinian movement while Syria is being blatantly denied return and sovereignty of its captured territory in Golan in the face of universal but perhaps ineffective global condemnation. The US's argument that Syria's Bashar al Assad and his Iran backers cannot be allowed to have Golan back as they mean to confront Israel from that area boils down to making the Syrian and Palestinian people pay for the US-led west's defeat in seeking regime change in Syria through first political and then armed subversion through proxies funded, armed, trained and unleashed on Syria as the last bastion of resistance to Israeli expansionism and occupation in the Middle East. What the US and Israel may find however is that when they offer the Palestinian people and Syria no hope of a peaceful settlement, the only recourse left is conflict and even war. Is this what Trump and his blatantly pro-Israeli family interests intend?