Last month, we posted about an opinion piece at the Independent by Sam Kiley, their new world affairs editor, (“The House of Assad has finally fallen – but chaotic Syria could still be torn apart“, Dec. 9) which included the following:
Israel doesn’t want a stable Syria, as the Jewish state has occupied the Syrian Golan Heights since 1967, and captured more in 1973.
Leaving aside his bizarre assertion that “Israel doesn’t want a stable Syra”, we argued in a complaint to the Indy that though, by the end of the Yom Kippur War, outnumbered IDF forces fought back against the invading Soviet-armed Syrian army and eventually took control of more of the Golan than they captured in the Six Day War, they did not hold on to that additional territory.
The 1974 disengagement agreement with Syria included Israeli withdrawal from that new territory, as well as from an additional 60 sq. km. in the Quneitra area that was captured in 1967. So, by 1974, Israel was in control of less land in the Golan than it had following the Six Day War.
Our complaint was upheld and the sentence revised, deleting the claim about Israel capturing more of the Golan in 1973.
Israel doesn’t want a stable Syria, as the Jewish state has occupied the Syrian Golan Heights since 1967, and annexed the territory in 1981.
Note that we prompted another correction to a separate piece by Riley last month, concerning an egregiously inaccurate Gaza death toll claim.
the “syrian golan” is simply rewarding the French and British colonial settlers who divied up the border region between the syrian and Palestine mandates….pushing the Syrian westward to within meters of the Kinneret/Sea of Galilee and also orchestrating the “Hayat” Syria land annexation by a resurgent rump Ottoman empire aka Attaturk’s creation of a so called Turkish homeland. So the largely Arabic speaking Alexandretta region became the Turkified Iskenduran. And so on. So “Syrian Golan” is meaningless….they had the gift of Quenitra. left as a museum of propaganda by H. Assad…I hope the Israeli’s now annex this too and rename it and rebuild it as Trump City.