The US State Department changed its usual description of the Golan Heights from “Israeli-occupied” to “Israeli-controlled” in an annual global human rights report released by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday.

While portrayed as a positive endeavor to provide clean and economic energy, producing wind energy in the Golan is a ruse to further expand Israel’s control and presence in the region, while disregarding the Syrian community’s rights over its own resources.

This report is devoted to a review of seizure orders issued by military commanders in the West Bank from the years 1967-2014. Throughout the course of those years over 1,150 orders were signed, through which just over 100,000 dunams were seized, most of them privately owned by Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

One of the project’s leading opponents is Emek Shaveh, an NGO dedicated to the defense of cultural heritage rights and ancient sites. “There is no precedent for a historic city, thousands of years old, having a cable car,” archaeologist Yoni Mizrachi, the NGO’s director, told Al-Monitor. “This is a political project advanced by the right. The very fact that it has been defined as a national project, enabling it to bypass [most] zoning and planning authorities, raises serious questions.”

An Israeli action and implementation agency informed a Palestinian family in the Silwan neighborhood, in occupied East Jerusalem, that they have to leave their home by the end of March 2019, in order to grant ownership to Israeli settlers.

The Netanyahu government’s naked racism has not only formalized the marginalization of Palestinian citizens of Israel — it has made it far more visible.

Brazilian right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro will visit Israel at the end of the month but he may not be able to deliver on a promise to move Brazil’s embassy to Jerusalem, a move opposed by military officers in his cabinet.