Tens of thousands of people live under Israeli occupation whom most of us never hear about. They are entirely ignored almost everywhere. Few outside the Middle East even know they exist. Their plight is not taught in schools. No activists rally on their behalf. Hardly anyone in the world demands with passion that they be liberated.
They are Arabs, but they are not Muslims.
They’re the Druze of the Golan Heights.
“We have an undefined nationality,” Faiz Safd said and sipped from a cup of thick Turkish coffee.
He agreed to meet me and my Israeli friend Hadar Sela and explain what he and the people in his community think of Israel’s occupation of the Golan. The Israelis took it from Syria during the Six Day War in 1967 after Syria, Egypt, and Jordan tried for a second time in eighteen years to obliterate Israel. The Assad regime in Damascus demands the land be returned, but Jerusalem effectively annexed it by extending Israeli law to the territory in 1981 and offering all its people citizenship"”an offer most Druze felt compelled to turn down.
Faiz is in his mid-thirties and, like me, wasn’t yet born when Syria lost the Golan. Israel has been in charge of it during his entire life, but if the 1967 war had never happened"”or if Israel had returned the Golan to Syria for peace in the meantime"”his nationality would not be ambiguous. He would be Syrian.
“How do you travel out of the country if you have an undefined nationality?” Hadar said.
“It isn’t easy,” Faiz said. “We can’t get Syrian or Israeli passports, and Syria won’t let us visit or move there. They want us to stay here on the Golan so we can help them get it back.”
The largest Druze community on the Golan is in Majdal Shams, high on the slopes of Mount Hermon, where around 9,000 people live. “Majdal Shams” is the Arabic adaptation of the village’s Aramaic name, which in English means Tower of the Sun.
The Druze village of Majdal Shams (Tower of the Sun) on the Golan Heights
In the years between 1948 and 1967, Syrian soldiers fired from fixed positions on the ridge of the Golan at Israeli civilians below in the Galilee region. Israel, therefore, refuses to give the area back until Syria signs a peace treaty. The Druze, however, weren’t the ones shooting from that ridgeline. They had excellent relations with Jews in the area before Israel declared independence in 1948 and Syria waged its first war of destruction. Good relations were restored at once after Israel conquered the territory. None of the Israelis I met on the Golan had anything bad to say about their Druze neighbors, nor did I detect any hatred of Jews or of Israel among the Druze.
Israel never annexed the West Bank or Gaza, never extended Israeli law to those territories, and never offered citizenship to the people who live there. Israelis almost certainly never will, mostly, but not entirely, because they don’t want millions of vehemently and at times violently anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist Palestinians inside their country.
There are no Palestinians on the Golan, though, so it was safer to annex. Almost all the non-Jews who live there aren’t even Muslims.
The Druze are an unusual bunch. They’re monotheists who emerged from Islam a thousand years ago, but their religion changed so drastically it became something else. They don’t proselytize or wage wars of conversion or conquest. No one is even allowed to convert. That door closed in the year 1043. You’re either born a Druze, or you aren’t a Druze. And if you die a Druze, they say you’ll be reincarnated as one.
Their religious texts are kept secret, not only from non-Druze, but from most Druze, as well. The “uninitiated” majority aren’t required to observe any rituals. They aren’t even allowed to know much about the religion.
There are only around 800,000 of them in the entire Middle East, and they live exclusively in the Levant"”the Eastern Mediterranean. The Middle East beyond Israel’s borders is often thought of as a monolithic bloc of Arabs and Muslims, but it isn’t, and it’s especially not in the Levant. This part of the region is practically defined by diversity and disunity. Druze live chockablock next to Arab Christians who live alongside Armenians. Shias live near Jews and Maronite Catholics who often don’t even think of themselves as Arabs. Alawites live among Sunnis, Shias, Christians, and Jews. Sectarian-ethnic maps look similar to those in the former Yugoslavia before it unraveled.
Druze men on the Golan Heights (photo copyright Pam Willson)
The Druze, like the Maronites, are too few to build their own state. They don’t even appear to want their own state, opting instead for caution to insure themselves against persecution. Kamal Jumblatt, the father of Lebanon’s current Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, once explained his people this way: “Ever alert, [Druze] gauge their surroundings and choose their words carefully, assessing what must be said and what can be said.”
They’re loyal to whoever is in charge of the country they live in. Syria’s Druze side with Bashar Assad and the Baath Party. Lebanon’s Druze forge alliances with the majority coalition of local political parties, or with whoever is ruling Lebanon from the outside. Israeli Druze support and defend the Zionist project.
The Druze on the Golan are no different from Israeli or Lebanese Druze in this way, but their political geography is different. Though they’re governed by Israel now, they may be governed again by Syria later. So even though Israel offers them citizenship, most haven’t taken it. They’re afraid of the consequences if Syrian rule ever returns.
The Sea of Galilee from a Syrian bunker on the Golan Heights
If the Assad regime is still in charge when it happens, they would almost certainly be denounced as traitors for joining the “Zionist Entity” if they accepted the offer of citizenship. Any number of bad things might happen. They could be imprisoned. They might even be killed. They could be thrown off the Golan and permanently exiled to Israel. As far as I know, the Syrian government never once threatened anything of the sort, but it doesn’t have to. The Druze may be more finely attuned to their political environment than anyone in the Middle East, and they understand the nature of the government in Damascus precisely.
What distinguishes totalitarian regimes like Syria’s from garden variety authoritarians like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is their ability to prevent citizens from even thinking like free individuals. When I visited the Balkans a couple of years ago I heard about a particularly chilling example from the communist era. “Under the regime of Enver Hoxha,” an Albanian human rights official told me, “people were afraid to look at churches and mosques. A friend told me she was too scared to even think about God because Hoxha would know and would throw her in prison.”
Syria’s Bashar Assad isn’t as bad as some of his peers, though his late father Hafez at his worst came awfully close.
A billboard in Syria depicting the late Hafez Assad
The younger Assad still has a powerful effect on the minds of the people who live under his rule. He can even affect the minds of Druze on the Golan who were born after 1967. They effectively live in Israel and have never known anything else. They’ve never met a single Syrian police or intelligence officer. All they need to know is that someday they might.
“Why,” I said to Faiz, “don’t you just take Israeli citizenship?”
“We can’t think about these things,” he said. “We can’t take risks. There are only 20,000 of us.”
I asked him what he thought might happen to him if he did take out citizenship and was later handed over to Syria. He didn’t know. All he knew was that the notion was dangerous.
Israeli journalist and political analyst Jonathan Spyer noticed a similar phenomenon when he traveled from Israel to Lebanon after the war against Hezbollah in 2006. “People have an acute sense of this unseen power which is both nowhere and everywhere,” he told me.
Beirut is a decadent freewheeling Riviera on the Mediterranean. It has more in common with Tel Aviv than with any Arab capital, but much of South Lebanon is ruled by Iran’s proxy militia Hezbollah. Whenever Spyer mentioned to Beirutis that he had a mind to drive to the south, they strongly advised him against it.
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