ABSTRACT
The Golan plateau in south western Syria has been under Israeli military occupation since the six-day war of 1967. The territory has many names including the Syrian Heights and the Arabic name of Jawlan, however the political term ‘Golan Heights’ has dominated popular discourse since occupation began. For the small fraction of the Syrian inhabitants that were not expelled, Israeli policies have resulted in the loss of private properties through expropriation of agricultural lands and urban planning processes. Central to the occupation was the incorporation of Golan into Israel proper by introducing settlements and an ethnocentric legal regime that continues to impact the identity of the indigenous Syrian population. They have remained, for the most part, cut off from Syria, restricted to the northernmost corner of the Golan. This chapter will begin by laying out the legal issues surrounding a tentative right to landscape and, using the Golan as an example, suggest ways in which the existing human rights machinery might be used to provide legal protection for the meaningful interaction between a people and their space. By exploring how existing international human rights protections might operate in relationship to landscape we are better positioned to gauge the need for or benefit of a tentative ‘right to landscape’.
