Jerusalem: A far-right Israeli minister on on Saturday called for the international community to endorse his country's 1981 annexation of Syria's Golan Heights, where he called for increased Jewish settlement.
"I call on the international community... To recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Golan," Naftali Bennett, head of the Jewish Home party, said in a speech at a time of increasing world pressure on Israel over the occupied West Bank and Arab east Jerusalem.
Bennett sees the sparsely-populated Golan as a very different case from the Palestinian territories and a vital buffer between Israel and the turmoil raging a few hundred metres (yards away) where the Syrian government has lost control of the border region to rebels.
"I understand that there is a disagreement on Judaea and Samaria, what the world calls the West Bank. I understand that on this we shall agree to disagree," he said.
"But the Golan, to ban agricultural exports from the Golan? Where is the logic, where is your morality."
"Who would you like us to give the Golan Heights to? To (Syrian President Bashar al-) Assad? To (Al-Qaeda affiliate) Al-Nusra Front? To the Islamic State (jihadist) group. To (Lebanon's) Hezbollah?)," he asked.
Bennett, the education minister and a leading supporter of the settlement movement, addressing a security conference at Herzliya near Tel Aviv, condemned boycott efforts by opponents of Jewish settlement.
He compared the mounting economic and diplomatic pressure on Israel to end its occupation of territories seized in the 1967 Six-Day War to the international community's stance on other disputed territories.
