WarSclerotic

The US State Department has erased the word “occupation” from its description of the Golan Heights and the Palestinian territories in its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which it published on Wednesday.

Last year, it referred to the areas as “occupied” by Israel; now, it speaks of them as under Israeli “control.”

Within the 2017 report itself, however, the State Department last year still used the word “occupation” but much more sparingly. In 2016, the report referred to the occupied territories, and in 2017 it spoke of the Palestinian territories.

This year, the 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices made no mention of the word “occupation” at all.

Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria during the Six-Day War and annexed it in 1981. The United States and the international community have never recognized that act. Since the Six-Day War, Israel has never annexed the West Bank, and it withdrew from Gaza in 2005.

Right-wing politicians have pressured Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to apply Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank, which they refer to as Judea and Samaria.

The shift on the Golan comes as US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham promised Netanyahu that he would work to sway the Trump administration to recognize Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights.

At a Wednesday State Department press conference in Washington about the report, Michael Kozak from the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor downplayed the move.

“My understanding is that there is no change in our outlook or our policy vis-à-vis the territories and the need for a negotiated settlement there,” Kozak said.

A reporter pressed him on the point: “You no longer consider the West Bank to be occupied?”

“No. I said that our policy on the status has not changed. That is my understanding. We decided not to use the term in the reports because it is not a human rights term and it was distracting,” Kozak said.

The linguistic change was made by the regional bureau of the Office of the Legal Adviser, Kozak said.

“What we’re trying to do is report on the human rights situation in those territories…. You’re just trying to find a way of describing the place that you are reporting on. ‘Occupied territory’ has a legal meaning to it. What they tried to do was shift more to just a geographic description. So we said Israel, Golan, West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.”

“It’s a complicated report because there are sometimes multiple authorities who have authority over people in particular parts of that territory. So it’s a very complicated one to write,” Kozak said.

ISRAELI POLITICIANS took the linguistic shift as an affirmative nod from the Trump administration on the acceptance of the Golan as part of sovereign Israel and support for the annexation of the West Bank.

Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein said, “The nation has long been with the Golan, now [US President Donald] Trump is also. Thank you, President Trump, for another important step on the path of truth and justice – for the Golan Heights and for Judea and Samaria. The next step: the application of sovereignty [in Judea and Samaria]!” Edelstein said.

MK Bezalel Smotrich (Bayit Yehudi) called on Netanyahu to take action, explaining that the State Department shift in language provided a “window of opportunity” for such a step.

Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely (Likud) thanked Israel’s “great friend” the United States, which “continues to stand for historical truth.

“The fact that the term ‘occupied territory’ is absent from an official [US] State Department document is an important step for Israel’s foreign relations and the future of the [West Bank] settlements,” Hotovely said.

She credited both Netanyahu and the Foreign Ministry for the State Department’s linguistic shift.

“I welcome the move. I’m confident that in the future, other countries will also stand by Israel,” Hotovely said.

Yesha Council foreign envoy and Efrat Council head Oded Revivi said it was a “welcome and courageous act by the US administration that has consistently resisted the standard international consensus when it diverged with reality, just like the US government’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”

Prof. Eugene Kontorovich, director of international law at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum said, “This is a massive change in how America relates to the conflict. It is coming to understand that while Israel and the Palestinians have a dispute, international law does not provide the answers to that dispute. The report, also for the first time, expresses skepticism at the claims and submissions of anti-Israel groups, whose poorly documented allegations have previously been accepted as gospel.”

Reuters contributed to this report.

BAGHOUZ, Syria March 13 – The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces militia said it thwarted an attempted Islamic State group suicide bomb attack early on Wednesday during a last-stand battle for the jihadist group’s final enclave.

The enclave is the last shred of populated territory held by the jihadists who have been driven from roughly a third of both Iraq and Syria over the past four years.

Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the SDF media office, said its forces had been bombarding Baghouz heavily overnight before engaging in direct clashes with Islamic State fighters in the pre-dawn hours.

Live footage broadcast by the Kurdish Ronahi TV overnight showed a series of large explosions lighting up the night sky over Baghouz.

“There were suicide vest attacks by a group of bombers who tried to blow themselves up amidst our forces. Our forces targeted and killed them before they reached our positions,” Bali said.

The SDF has laid siege to Baghouz for weeks but had repeatedly postponed its final assault to allow thousands of civilians, many of them wives and children of Islamic State fighters, to leave. It resumed the attack on Sunday.

Around 3,000 fighters and their families surrendered to SDF forces in 24 hours, Bali said overnight. Three women and four children belonging to the Yazidi sect, a minority group who were kidnapped and enslaved by Islamic State in 2014, were also freed, he said.

While Baghouz is the last populated territory of what was once the group’s self-proclaimed “caliphate,” fighters still operate in remote areas elsewhere.

The group put out a new propaganda video overnight Monday filmed in recent weeks inside Baghouz, maintaining its claim to leadership of all Muslims and calling on its supporters to keep the faith.

“Tomorrow, God willing, we will be in paradise and they will be burning in hell,” one of the men interviewed in the video said.

The collapse of Islamic State’s territorial rule comes at a pivotal point in the wider eight year multi-sided Syrian civil war, with President Bashar al-Assad’s government having also recaptured most territory from rebels that tried to topple him.Government forces rained incendiary bombs overnight on Idlib in the northwest, the last major area held by anti-Assad rebels, where fighting has escalated in recent weeks despite a September de-escalation agreement.

The Lebanese Shi’ite terror group Hezbollah is building a new and dangerous terror network in Syria’s Golan Heights without the knowledge of Syrian President Bashar Assad, the IDF has revealed.

“The Hezbollah terrorist organization has begun an attempt to establish and entrench a covert force in the Syrian Golan Heights that is designed to act against Israel when given the order,” the IDF said on Tuesday.

A U.S. solider shows a picture of Ali Mussa Daqduq during a news conference. (Reuters)

Other senior Hezbollah operatives involved in the clandestine project have been identified by the IDF as Bashar and Ismail Mustafa, Talal Hassoun and Fahim Abu Qais.

The threat posed by Hezbollah and Ali Musa Daqduq, a senior operative in Hezbollah, was unmasked by Israel on Wednesday. Daqduq was responsible for the “abduction and execution of five American servicemen in Iraq in 2007,” the IDF said. The role of Hezbollah members in neighboring states is an illustration of how groups allied with Iran are continuing to build a web linking Tehran to Beirut via a “road to the sea” that transits Iraq and Syria.

According to the IDF the role of Daqduq includes establishing terror cells in Iraq to fight the US in 2006, stints training in Lebanon in 2013-2018 and now putting down roots in Syria. “He then came back to Lebanon and to Syria this time with a new mission, now what we have today is an infrastructure masterminded by Hezbollah on Syrian soil using the local civilian infrastructure,” said Jonathan Conricus of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit. Israel says it won’t allow Hezbollah to establish terror infrastructure on the border and that it holds the Syrian regime responsible. This is related to regional stability, the IDF says.

The larger strategic threat is Iran’s corridor to the sea, which has been exposed by writer such as Martin Chulov of The Guardian since 2016. The concept is that Iran wants to use its influence over Shi’ite militias in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and paramilitaries in Syria to create a seamless network of allies based along a corridor of power that will stretch very close to Israel. Iran is not shy about boasting of its victory in recent years in the region. It openly talks about the role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, who recently won a new award from Ayatollah Khamanei. In Iraq the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani met with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on Wednesday, cementing the close relations that Iran and Iraq have. These relations now knit together the Iranian and Iraqi economies, as well as fraternal religious relations. On flags of various Shi’ite paramilitary groups the images of Iranian and Iraqi clerics can be seen alongside images of what they call martyrs from the war on ISIS.

The symbolism is clear. It’s not like there are other Iraqi paramilitary groups putting up posts with images of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. There is one political force whose images appear most frequently in Iraq, and that is Iran. The same is true of Iran’s influence now in Syria and Lebanon. Some of this could be discounted as merely a natural alliance of like-minded groups. But the threat to Israel and to other countries in the region is that Iran sees itself as leading the “resistance” against Israel. This is used as an excuse to extend bases and infrastructure in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.

The role of Iran in supporting groups like Hezbollah is not new. This goes back to the 1980s after the Islamic Revolution in Tehran. It was then that some Iraqi Shi’ites also came to Iran and joined groups associated with the IRGC. Those men, like Hadi al-Amiri, went on to form the Badr Organization, which includes a paramilitary group and political section by the same name. It is a key part of the Fatah Alliance which came in second in the Iraqi elections in 2018. Similarly in Lebanon Hezbollah has a model of maintaining an armed force while also being in politics. It recently appointed Lebanon’s new health minister under a deal in January.

For Syria this presents challenges. Syria is recovering from years of civil war. To fight the war it was assisted by Iran and Hezbollah and Shi’ite militias from Iraq. This helped blend the network of Iraqi fighters with Hezbollah. These Iraqi militia leaders have become more outspoken now about fighting Israel, claiming that in any upcoming conflict with Israel they will aid Hezbollah. Asaib Ahl Al-Haq’s Qais Khazali even came to Lebanon to view Israel an area near Metulla in December 2017. Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, recently sanctioned by the US, also has expressed support for conflict with Israel. Regional Arab media also accused Israel of striking the Iraqi militia Kata’ib Hezbollah in June 2018.

Today the situation is rapidly changing as the war on ISIS ends and Iran can begin to concentrate its efforts against Israel. Iran is hailing a “turning point” in ties with Iraq. But Syria may not want to be fully used as part of Iran’s plans. It is trying to reconstruct parts of the country after the war. It also has tensions in Idlib where Turkish-backed Syrian rebels still operate. Syria is trying to cement its sovereignty in the south near the Golan, and it must balance complex relations with its Russian ally and Hezbollah. Syrian media was mum on Wednesday regarding Israel’s accusations. Iranian media sought to critique the visit by US Senator Lindsey Graham to the Golan this week in which the Senator intimated the US may seek to recognize the area as part of Israel.

If Iran thinks that its road to the sea will not face some obstacles, the message is that those like Daqduq are being watched.