Pompeo visits Israeli -occupied West Bank
Mike Pompeo yesterday became the first US secretary of state to visit an Israeli West Bank settlement and the Golan Heights, in a show of solidarity that led Palestinians to accuse him of helping to cement Israeli control over occupied territory.
Pompeo's trips came during the Israeli leg of what may be his last tour of the Middle East in the final months of President Donald Trump's administration.
Trump delighted Israel in 2019 by recognising Israel's claim to sovereignty over the area of the Golan Heights that it captured from Syria in a 1967 war and later annexed, in a move that was not recognised by most of the international community.
Last year, Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, broke with decades of US foreign policy to announce that the United States under Trump no longer viewed Israel's settlements in the West Bank as "inconsistent with international law".
Yesterday morning Pompeo appeared alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said both Pompeo and Trump were long-standing friends of Israel.
Pompeo issued guidelines for Israeli products made in settlements to be labelled "Made in Israel" or "Product of Israel" when exported to the United States, removing the distinction between goods made within Israel and those produced in occupied territory.
First, Pompeo travelled the short distance from Jerusalem to the Israeli-occupied West Bank - known to most Israelis as Judea and Samaria - where more than 440,000 Jewish settlers live uneasily among three million Palestinians, mostly in fortified hilltop settlements.
Pompeo later flew to the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau that overlooks Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
"I very much wanted to come here on this trip to tell the world that we have it right. That we, the United States has it right. That Israel has it right," Pompeo said from a hilltop looking into an area of the Syrian Golan that was until recently controlled by militias fighting the Syrian civil war.
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