Forty years since the general strike, the Syrian Golan is back, and the occupation is about to come to an end
Damascus (ST): Our people in the occupied Syrian Golan wrote a heroic epic with their comprehensive strike on February 14, 1982, when they confronted the decision of the Knesset of the false Israeli occupation to annex the Golan and impose the laws of occupation on it, which was issued on December 14, 1981, when they launched the slogan (Death nor Identity) on their open strike in refusal to impose the Israeli identity and the decision of annexation and to affirm their adherence to their Syrian Arab identity and to continue their struggle in the face of the arbitrary measures of the occupation until the liberation of the Golan and the return to the homeland Syria.
The struggle of our people in the Golan against the Israeli occupation and its racist plans and decisions is full of stations of their resistance to it since the soil of the Golan was desecrated in 1967. The comprehensive strike that they announced 40 years ago was the most prominent of these stations and came after a popular meeting on the thirteenth of February 1982 that included thousands of the people of the Golan, they decided to declare a strike to confirm their categorical rejection of the decision to annex, resist all occupation measures, and adhere to their Syrian Arab identity.
Immediately after the strike was announced, the occupation authorities imposed a military siege on the villages and towns of the Golan, prevented the arrival of foodstuffs and cut off electricity for the people in an attempt to obscure what was happening and isolate them from the outside world to pressure them to end the strike.
The steadfast people of the Golan faced the siege and occupation practices by rooting themselves in their land and villages and continued their resistance. During the strike period, they fought violent confrontations with the occupation forces, the most important of which was the battle of identity on the first of April 1982, after the occupation forces stormed several villages and abused their people. After more than five months of the strike, the occupation entity was forced to respond to the demands of the people and retract its racist plans to impose (Israeli citizenship) on the people of the Golan, in conjunction with the assertion of the United Nations and many free countries in the world that the Israeli (Knesset) decision to annex the Golan is void and has no legal effect and that the Golan is a genuine Syrian land.
Despite the repression, arrests, abuse, and all the aggressive practices of the occupation over 55 years of occupation, our people in the Golan continued to confront all its plans, including the so-called (local council elections), where in October 2018, they burned the Zionist electoral cards in front of the heavily armed occupation forces as an expression of their rejection. They also categorically rejected the settlement plan of building wind turbines on an area of approximately six thousand dunums of agricultural land in the abandoned villages (Uyun Al-Hajal, Al-Mansoura and Al-Taljiyat) and the villages of Majdal Shams, Masada, Ain Qinya, Beqatha, and Tal Al-Fars area.
In order to prevent the Israeli occupation from implementing the expansionist colonial wind turbine scheme, our people in the Golan announced two comprehensive strikes, the first in June 2019, when they set out after the strike was announced from the town of Majdal Shams towards the agricultural lands on which the occupation authorities plan to build turbines, stressing their rejection of all arbitrary occupation measures and the second in December 2020 when they gathered between the villages of Majdal Shams and Masada and divided into groups spread over the lands on which the turbines are to be built, while the occupation forces closed a number of the main entrances to the villages of the occupied Syrian Golan and prevented the people from reaching their agricultural lands.
The Golan is an inseparable part of Syria, and its restoration up to the June 4, 1967 line, by all means guaranteed by international law, will remain a priority for Syrian policy and a compass that we will not deviate from it. Today, after 40 years of a comprehensive strike, our people in the occupied Syrian Golan affirm adhering to their belonging to Syria and the Syrian Arab identity that children inherit from their grandparents, stressing that their land is a sacred property and they will not give up an inch of it to the Israeli occupier, as they are firmly rooted in it.
K.Q.