Blood and oil in Golan

Golda Meir, who led Israel during the 1973 war, once lamented about Moses: "He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil."

-  R. PRASANNAN

Now her successor Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have found the spot that Moses had missed, and claimed it for Israel.

Within hours of the rebels storming into Damascus and Bashar al-Assad fleeing, Netanyahu ordered his forces to go and grab the little stretch of Golan Heights that hadn't been under Israel's control. Bravo! But what has that got to do with Meir's lament about Moses and oil? The story has to start with Exodus. After he led God's chosen people out of Egyptian captivity across a cinematically (watch The Ten Commandments) parted Red Sea, Moses had to herd them through the desert for 40 years till he spotted the 'promised land. Sadly, the messiah missed walking in there with his people; that honour went to his disciple Joshua, much like in the case of Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastian Elcano who sailed around the globe for the first time.