Major oil find on Golan Heights which will never be returned to Syria

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Large amounts of oil have been found on the Golan Heights. Estimates are that the amount of oil discovered will make Israel self sufficient for very many years to come.

Three drilling sites on the Golan have uncovered what is potentially billions of barrels of oil, enough to fulfill the Israeli market’s 270,000-barrel-per-day consumption for a very long time.

Israel was not going to give the Golan Heights back anyway but now that will clearly never happen. Internationally recognized as Syrian territory, the Golan Heights has been occupied and administered by Israel since 1967. It was captured during the 1967 Six-Day War, establishing the Purple Line. On 19 June 1967, the Israeli cabinet voted to return the Golan to Syria in exchange for a peace agreement, although this was rejected after the Khartoum Resolution of September 1, 1967. In the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel agreed to return about 5% of the territory to Syrian civilian control. This part was incorporated into a demilitarised zone that runs along the ceasefire line and extends eastward. This strip is under the military control of UNDOF.

Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert each stated that they were willing to exchange the Golan for peace with Syria. However, in 2010, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman told Syria to abandon its dreams of recovering the Golan Heights. Approximately 10% of Syrian Golan Druze have accepted Israeli citizenship. According to the CIA World Factbook, as of 2010, “there are 41 Israeli settlements and civilian land use sites in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Syria may never return to being a unified region again

The Institute for the study of war has all of the details on the Syria situation.

The oil find is a layer 350 meters thick. The layer is ten times larger than the average oil find worldwide.

Genie, the U.S. company that is doing the drilling-exploration in Golan, intereting people on its strategic advisory board.

* Rupert Murdoch
* Jacob Rothschild, the chairman of the Rothschild Foundation and the J Rothschild group of companies
* ex-CIA director James Woolsey
* Dick Cheney
* Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University
* Bill Richardson, former secretary of energy under Bill Clinton.

SOURCES -Wikipedia, BBC News, Institute for the study of war, Personal Liberty, Times of Israel