As Syria reels, Israel looks to expand settlements in Golan Heights

There is a building boom quietly underway in this little kibbutz, the first established after Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 war, The New York Times reported.

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.

“If a living organism does not have new blood all the time, he is going to die,” Mr. Bogdanovsky, 65, said as he showed off the kibbutz, which has a waiting list because it cannot build quickly enough.

That growth is tiny compared with the aggressive development goal — 100,000 new residents across the Golan in five years — being promoted by Naftali Bennett, a senior Israeli minister and one of many Israeli leaders and thinkers seizing on the chaos in Syria to solidify Israel’s hold on the Golan.

With Syria “disintegrating” after years of civil war, they argue, it is hard to imagine a stable state to which the territory could be returned. Further, they say that international — or, at least, American — recognition of Israel’s 1981 annexation of the Golan would be an appropriate salve to Israeli security concerns in the wake of the nuclear deal with Iran. Some proponents of this push, who unlike Mr. Bennett support a two-state solution with the Palestinians, also see this international recognition as an important way to distinguish the status of Golan from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“We’re in a whole new strategic situation, and a new strategic situation requires new strategic responses,” said Mr. Bennett, who promised to introduce a plan this fall involving “several hundreds of millions of shekels” to create jobs, housing, schools and transportation in the sprawling, green Golan Heights.

“I think we have an opportunity here, a rare opportunity, and I think it’s vital,” he added. “Given the storm we’re in that can go on for the next five or 50 years, nobody knows, we need some constants, and one big constant is for the big mountain of the Golan to be Israeli.

Source: MENA