Druze Protesters Rally Against Golan Annexation

Date: 15 February 2021 - 20:57

News ID: ۸۷۶۲۶

MAJDAL SHAMS (Dispatches) – Druze residents of Syria’s Golan Heights protested on Sunday to mark the 39th anniversary of the first protest against the Zionist regime’s decision to illegally annex the Heights in 1982, according to Syrian state news agency SANA.
The Zionist regime captured Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War and the Knesset voted to annex the Golan Heights in 1981. Druze citizens of the Golan Heights largely refrained from accepting the ‘citizenship’ under the Zionist regime’s rule and even sanctioned those who chose to accept it. In response to the annexation decision, the Druze in the area went on strike for weeks until the occupying regime promised not to force identity cards on the Druze.
Druze residents of the city of Majdal Shams near the Syrian border carried Syrian flags and pictures of Syrian President Bashar Assad on Sunday. They made remarks affirming their identity as Syrian Arabs and protesting the Zionist regime’s ‘rule’ over the Golan Heights, according to SANA.
Simultaneous protests took place in the Syrian city of Quneitra.
Such protests have occurred multiple times near the Syrian border in the past few decades. About 23,000 Syrian Druze live in the Golan Heights.
The protests come less than a week after Zionist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that the Golan Heights would always remain part of the occupied territories, in response to remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken walking back on the Trump administration’s recognition of the Golan Heights as part of the occupied territories.
Blinken said in an interview on CNN on Monday night: "As a practical matter, the control of the Golan in that situation I think remains of real importance to Israel’s security.”
"Legal questions are something else, and over time if the situation were to change in Syria, that’s something we look at, but we are nowhere near that,” he stated.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump granted U.S. recognition of the Golan as the occupying regime’s ‘territory’ in 2019, a dramatic shift from decades of U.S. policy.