Trump’s Cat Among Pigeons – Golan Heights Are Israel Now

There’s a certain logic to this insistence from Donald Trump, that we should all just recognise that the Golan Heights are part of Israel now. It also flows entirely against the post WW II order. At which point well, so much for the post WW II order.

For military might combined with the passage of time is how the borders of any country were formed. The setting of them in aspic as at 1945 is thus a determined refusal to deal with reality:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Trump: Time to recognise Golan Heights as Israeli territory[/perfectpullquote]

There is certainly some point at which this is going to be true.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] President Donald Trump has overturned decades of US policy by saying it is time to recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which it captured from Syria in 1967. In a tweet, Mr Trump declared that the plateau was of “critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and regional stability”. Israel annexed the Golan in 1981 in a move not recognised internationally. Syria, which has sought to regain the region, has so far made no comments. [/perfectpullquote]

Maybe that moment to recognise de jure what is obvious de facto is some 52 years after the event. Maybe it will be 152 years after the event. 352 perhaps. But at some point that international law will have to come to terms with what has actually happened. As it did with Poland moving a few hundred miles west, with the independence of the US, with Aquitaine, sadly, no longer being British.

This is nothing specifically to do with Israel nor Syria, it’s just that at some distance in time the law, those international boundaries, does have to catch up with reality.