President Donald Trump has once again overturned decades of US policy, this time by saying it was time to recognize Israel's sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967. The first time was recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It is further evidence that the Trump administration is willing to ignore international law, including Security Council resolutions, in order to satisfy Israeli demands. The Golan becoming Israeli territory because Trump says so has no legal justification. As was said after the Jerusalem announcement in December 2017, the US administration recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital did not mean that Jerusalem suddenly became the capital of Israel. So, too, recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory amounts to little more than an acknowledgement by one country, the United States, that the Golan is now part of Israel – not that it actually is. The US is not the law of the land and it is certainly not the law of the international community. That would be the purview of the United Nations. The Security Council is very clear that the Golan is Syrian territory. Israel has occupied the western part of the Golan since 1967 as a spoil from that war. In 1981, Tel Aviv formally annexed the Syrian territory. However, that year, the UN Security Council, including the US, unanimously condemned the annexation as illegal. The resolution mandates Israel to return the land to Syria which has historical claim to the entire Golan. And again, just like a country cannot pick and choose the capital of another country, a country cannot in and of itself decide that what is occupied territory is suddenly no longer occupied. This would hold doubly true when the country that is making these spectacular announcements of occupation and non-occupation does so with regard to a piece of territory thousands of miles away. The decision - actually a tweet from Trump - is another unilateral move that Trump has taken vis-a-vis Israel, bucking longstanding US policy. The development marks an egregious flouting of international law. It also hands Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a significant foreign policy victory, less than three weeks before elections. It is difficult to not see this as an attempt to buttress Netanyahu's chances of remaining prime minister, perhaps for Trump to later on use an extremely grateful Netanyahu to help get the Palestinians on board the as yet to be revealed US-sponsored Palestinian-Israeli peace deal. The other thing is the precedent it sets; it violates important principles of international law. How from now on can the US look Russia straight in the eye and talk about Crimea when the Golan announcement undercuts five years of US and NATO condemnation of Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014? If Trump endorses the seizure of territory, he will have no moral authority to criticize Russia for doing so in Ukraine's Crimea. But it does not appear the Trump administration cares much about who the legal owners of Crimea and the Golan Heights truly are. This is another hammer blow to the international order. It completely repudiates the basis of the UN charter that states cannot seize the territory of other states, the whole bedrock principle of the postwar order. The Golan move is not a complete surprise. Trump's tweet follows a report last week that his administration had deliberately softened the US government's language concerning the Golan Heights in a way that is favorable to Israel, referring to the region as "Israeli-controlled" instead of "Israeli-occupied" as it had always previously been. Netanyahu had also been seeking Trump's Golan recognition since his first White House visit in 2017. The Golan should not be recognized as part of Israel simply because Israel should not be rewarded for a 52-year occupation. Making the Golan a permanent piece of Israel legitimizes the acquisition of territory by annexation.
