Alwaght- A group of Syrian activists from the occupied Golan Heights has issued a statement condemning the “suspicious visits” to the region recently by rightwing Zionist regime political leaders.
Along with Palestinian and Egyptian lands, the Golan Heights was occupied by the Zionist regime's military during the 1967 war. Most of its inhabitants were ethnically cleansed and dozens of villages were razed, but an estimated 20,000 indigenous Syrian Druze continue to live in the six villages still standing.
In violation of international law, dozens of Zionists-only colonies have been built across the territory and provide residence to some 21,000 Zionist settlers.
Jointly written by a group of seven activists known as Loading Consription (a reference to Occupying Land’s militarization of the region), the letter points to the “racism” and “barbaric hatred” of Zionist political leaders such as Ayelet Shaked, who “called for the annihilation of all the Palestinian people” in a Facebook post in July.
According to Shaked’s Facebook page, she visited a family in Majdal Shams, the largest Syrian village in the Golan, on 5 October.
Shaked is a lawmaker in Israeli regime’s parliament, the Knesset, and a member of the Jewish Home party, part of the ruling coalition. She designated “the entire Palestinian people” as “the enemy,” including “Its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”
As The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah reported at the time, that post received thousands of Facebook “likes” and “shares” from supporters.
“Ayelet Shaked is known for clearly racist statements and anti-Arab rhetoric, especially during the last war on Gaza,” Aamer Ibrahim, one of the letter’s authors, told The Electronic Intifada by telephone. “It’s clear that she — and Israeli regime in general — is looking for opportunities to colonize the Golan even more.”
The statement goes on to decry visits by several other Zionist political leaders known for their virulently anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab incitement.
“Numbing a society”
With visits by at least seven Israeli regime's politicians thus far in 2014, the activists took particular offense at a trip made Naftali Bennett, Israeli regime’s economy minister. After his visit on 25 March, he declared on his offical Facebook page: “A message to the Druze of the Golan: the Golan Heights will remain under Israeli control forever, and now you will join us.”
Bennett is known for advocating the annexation of large swaths of the occupied West Bank and expelling most of their Palestinian inhabitants. He also sparked outrage in July 2013 when he bragged in an Israeli regime's cabinet meeting, “I killed a lot of Arabs in my life, and there’s no problem with that.”
“This phenomenon of normalization promotes and markets the occupation as if it were natural,” the letter states.
Calling on locals to reject Zionist political visits, it concludes:
We believe that the repercussions of these public visits are by all means disastrous. This is not only because they promote the idea of the occupation and the logic of surrendering to it, but also because they lead to numbing an entire society and robbing it of what it has left of the concept of freedom and liberation. These [visits] make the society devoted to the concept of servitude and submission to the occupier.
Increased colonization
With world attention focused on the terrorism in Syria, the Zionist has expedited its theft and appropriation of local resources at the expense of the indigenous Syrian population. A government-funded Zionist organization deceptively attempted to recruit Syrians into a civil service program, as The Electronic Intifada exposed in August.
Earlier in the summer, a Zionist academic college in Katzrin, an illegal Zionist settlement in the Golan, announced extensive scholarships to encourage the Zionist students to enroll. In addition to the scholarships, the program will “encourage local tourism through 19 million shekels [around $5.5 million] worth of financial investments in museums and parks,” as well as several Jewish religious centers.
In December 2013, Israeli regime’s ministry for energy and water granted the American-Israeli company Genie Energy “exclusive license to explore for oil and gas in a 153-square-mile radius in the southern part of the Golan,” according the local human rights group Al-Marsad. Former America's Vice-President Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, was appointed to serve as an adviser to the exploration project.
“It’s certainly no coincidence that these politicians have been visiting more frequently at the same time that Israeli regime is trying to take more natural resources and increase the number of settlers in the Golan,” activist Aamer Ibrahim said. “The occupation and colonization are nothing new here, but the [politicians’] overt discourse and the process of colonization have become much more public in the last two years.”
Source: Global Research
