Mr. Netanyahu, you invited us to read the Bible, so we did.
It tells us the Golan (Bashan) belonged to Og, king of Bashan, before any Israelite arrived. It tells us the kingdom of Geshur, on the Golan, remained there because the Israelites never drove it out (Joshua 13:13). And it names Damascus as early as Genesis. By your own logic, the Syrian claim is older than yours.
Bibi, scripture is NOT a land registry...😑
The Golan was ruled and populated by dozens of civilizations across 3,000 years: Amorites, Arameans, Itureans, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ghassanid Arabs, Umayyads, Ottomans, and modern Syrians. Applying an ancient, intermittent tribal presence as a modern title deed ignores millennia of continuous regional demographics.
(Mind you, this is the identical argument that Putin made before his "special operation" in Ukraine)
If ancient presence created modern sovereignty, half the world's borders would be up for seizure. You know all this, which is why Israel returned Sinai, the very place where Moses received the Law, to Egypt in 1982.
What decides sovereignty today is international law. In 1981, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 497, declaring Israel's annexation of the Golan "null and void and without international legal effect." The United States voted for it. Resolution 242 affirms the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by war. Apart from the 2019 US proclamation (which was an unprecedented rupture from all of the past US administrations) no country on earth recognizes your annexation.
And lastly the people of the Golan are not reducible to a Bible story. Well over 100,000 Syrians were displaced in 1967, including the family of our president Ahmad al-Sharaa. Their villages were destroyed. The Syrian communities who remained in Majdal Shams and neighboring villages have largely refused Israeli citizenship for over half a century.
The Golan was Syrian before 1967, it is Syrian under international law, and it will remain Syrian.
Netanyahu to Syria:
Mr. al-Sharaa, you should know the Jews have been on the Golan Heights since the days of Moses.
You can read it in the Bible.