AS if stealing Palestinian land isn't enough, the Zionist regime of Israel headed by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is going for a land grab in the Golan Heights, the occupied Syrian territory that it captured in 1967. "Our aim is to double, and then to double again, the number of residents in the Golan Heights," the Times of Israel quoted Bennett as telling a conference on Golan Heights' future there on Monday.
Golan Heights is Israel's, he falsely claimed. The Zionist regime's audacity is understandable. After all, Israel stands on land stolen from the Palestinians. Once a robber nation, always a robber nation.
Today, there are 27,000 Jewish settlers there. In fact, settler colonialism began almost as immediately as Israel captured the Golan Heights.
If the Zionists have their way, the settler population would hit 100,000 soon judging from the money being set aside for development there. International law is very clear. Occupying regimes can neither annex land nor settle its people there.
Yet the United States and Europe, countries that strut the globe, claiming to be great respecters of international law, are doing exactly the opposite. The United Nations is no better.
Start with the US. The world may be fooled into thinking that things have changed in the US since Joe Biden replaced Donald Trump as president. Not at all. With Trump, everyone knew he cared very little for international law because he said so.
But Biden is a silent Trump. To put it differently, a seeming-being president. In speech after speech, he tells the world that his America, as opposed to Trump's, is a rule of law nation.
The status of the Golan Heights in the eyes of Biden's America is no different from his predecessor's. Trump, though he didn't have the right, handed the occupied territory to Israel.
Biden's Secretary of State Antony Blinken had this to say in February: US policy on the status of the Golan Heights will depend on the situation in Syria. For a lawyer, Blinken's understanding of international law is dismal.
The Golan Heights is Syria's and so it has been since 1944 when it gained independence. America is not the world's court to decide which territory belongs to which country.
Europe is similarly playing a seeming and being game. Citing Israel's security as a pretext, it is weaponising the Zionist regime's settlement colonialism. Europe knows the Zionist regime is the mightiest militarily in the Middle East, yet it ships hundreds of millions of euros worth of weapons to Tel Aviv to bombard unarmed Palestinian women and children. Why?
Holocaust guilt that hangs around the continent's neck like an albatross. Europe must surely know that the descendants of Holocaust victims are themselves committing genocide against the Palestinians and Syrians.
The UN is its usual silent self when it comes to territories occupied by Israel. Since Bennett's audacious "Golan is Israel's" claim on Monday, not a word has come from UN secretary-general António Guterres, who was quick to condemn the Taliban when they recaptured their homeland from the occupying forces.
Where is the alarm, secretary-general?
A world body claiming to represent more than 200 countries and territories can't be this silent.
The world expects more from the UN and its secretary-general. Being a talkshop alone isn't enough.
It must be a "do shop" as well. The UN may be 76 years old, but it has little of the wisdom of its years.
