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Golan Heights 'essential to our existence,' says Israeli President

June 16, 2017 at 8:03 pm

In a speech he made yesterday evening at an event marking 50 years since settling in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin urged the world to recognise the Golan Heights as part of Israel.

“The internal Israeli debate about the Golan, if there was one, has ended. We will never leave the residents of the Galilee exposed to the intentions and weapons of a regime that massacres its own citizens. The nations of the world must formally recognise that the Golan is an integral part of the State of Israel, and is essential to our existence as a people,” he said, adding:

“Fifty years of Jewish settlement on the Golan Heights is not just fifty [years] of Jewish history on the Golan Heights. Anyone who knows Jewish history here in the Golan knows it is a history of 2,000 years. We have here archaeological findings from biblical times. To be accurate, until the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Golan Heights were forever and always an integral part of the Galilee region.”

Read: Israel will never give up Golan Heights

The border between Israeli occupied Golan Heights and Syria [Eviatar Bach/Wikipedia]

The border between Israeli occupied Golan Heights and Syria [Eviatar Bach/Wikipedia]