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Trump's Golan Announcement Was No Impulse Tweet
(Atlantic) Kathy Gilsinan - Donald Trump overturned decades of U.S. policy via Twitter when he declared on Thursday that the U.S. should recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a disputed territory Israel seized in the 1967 war with Syria. The push for Trump to make such a move has been going on for more than a year and the issue was discussed at the highest levels of the State Department and the National Security Council, according to Mark Dubowitz, who co-wrote a February 2017 op-ed calling for the Golan recognition and was engaged in the discussions. With the bulk of U.S. troops leaving Syria, the question of how Iranian proxies could be kept from Israel's borders suddenly looked more urgent. For the policy's backers, declaring Israeli sovereignty over the Golan is a recognition of reality in the same way that moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem was a recognition that the city is Israel's capital.