Israel's aggression in Syria advances a century-long plan to co-opt the Druze
Last week, the predatory Israeli military took time from its busy schedule of exterminating Gaza's Palestinians, bombing and shooting Palestinians across the West Bank, bombing Lebanon, and initiating an assortment of bombing runs across Syrian territory - including the capital Damascus - to launch an extra special bombing run.
The latest air raid targeted what Israel claimed was "an extremist group" that had attacked members of the Syrian Druze community, whom Israel "promised" to defend within Syria itself.
Following the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad's regime last December at the hands of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate, state-linked sectarian violence against Syrian Alawites and Druze has broken out. Religious minorities have felt beleaguered and increasingly fearful of what lies ahead.
Despite assurances from Syria's interim self-declared president and former al-Qaeda commander, Ahmed al-Sharaa, that religious minorities would be protected, the regime has already begun imposing "Sunni Islamist" strictures on many aspects of society, including school curricula and the gender segregation of public transportation.
Meanwhile, sectarian violence by state-linked groups and non-state militias persists.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
It is in the context of this sectarian violence that Israel saw an opportunity to further a programme that the Zionist movement had pursued since the 1920s: to create new, or exploit existing, schisms among religious groups in Palestine and the surrounding Arab countries, in a classic divide-and-conquer strategy.
This ongoing Israeli policy aims to lend greater legitimacy to Israel's alleged raison d'être - not as a European Zionist-settler colony serving European and US imperial interests, but as a religiously sectarian state whose model should be replicated across the Middle East, by dividing indigenous religious groups into separate statelets to "protect" minorities.
Sectarian blueprint
Israel believes it can only be normalised in the region if such sectarian statelets are created - especially in Lebanon and Syria.
As early as the 1930s, Israeli leaders allied themselves with Lebanese Maronite sectarians, and in 1946, they signed a political agreement with the sectarian Maronite Church.
Although the Druze were initially dismissed as too marginal to co-opt, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, Zionist leaders had waged a concerted campaign to bring them into the fold
Their subsequent support for fascist Lebanese Christian groups, like the Phalangists - who sought to establish a Maronite state in Lebanon - was consistent with Zionist plans for the Palestinian Druze community. This strategy began in the 1920s, when Zionist colonisers first targeted the Palestinian Druze population.
In the wake of World War One, and following British sponsorship of Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, Zionist leaders launched efforts to create sectarian divisions between Palestinian Christians and Muslims.
Palestinians, however, were unified in their opposition to Zionism and the British occupation through the rubric of the "Muslim-Christian Associations", established in 1918 as institutional instruments of national unity and resistance to colonial rule.
A related Zionist project aimed to isolate the tiny Palestinian Druze religious community in order to cultivate it as a possible ally.
At the start of the British Mandate in 1922, the Palestinian Druze numbered 7,000, living in 18 villages across Palestine and comprising less than one percent of the country's 750,000 inhabitants.
Colonial mythology
Colonial powers often relied on racial mythologies to divide native populations. While the French claimed that Algerian Berbers were descended from the Gauls to separate them from their Arab compatriots, the British portrayed the Druze as descendants of the Crusaders - describing them as a non-Arab "older 'white' race" and "a much cleaner and better looking race" than other Palestinians, due to the predominance of fair skin and blue eyes among them.
Although the Druze were initially dismissed as too marginal to co-opt, by the late 1920s and early 1930s, Zionist leaders had waged a concerted campaign to bring them into the fold.
Just as they had exploited rivalries between the prominent Palestinian families of Jerusalem - the Husaynis and the Nashashibis - the Zionists sought to do the same with the Druze, encouraging factionalism between the Tarifs and the Khayrs, and promoting a particularist sectarian identity.
In the 1920s, the British occupation authorities instituted a sectarian system in Palestine to serve European Jewish colonisation - one that separated the Palestinian Druze community from the rest of the Palestinian people.
Alongside the Zionists, the British encouraged factionalism and religious communalism - efforts that culminated in the founding of the sectarian Druze Union Society in 1932, alongside new Muslim and Orthodox Christian societies formed in the same period as a result of British policy.
That same year, Zionist efforts to co-opt Druze leaders intensified, focusing on one faction in particular and encouraging its sectarianism.
This led to clashes between the different Druze factions in 1933, but the nationalist Tarif family retained its leadership and defeated the faction collaborating with the Zionists. The Zionists hoped that co-opting Palestinian Druze would pave the way for alliances with the larger Druze populations in Syria and Lebanon.
Anti-revolt tactics
In the second half of the 1930s, during the Great Palestinian Revolt against British occupation and European Zionist colonisation (1936-1939), the Zionists and the British escalated their sectarian campaign to prevent Druze Palestinians from joining the anti-colonial uprising.
To that end, they conscripted Shaykh Hasan Abu Rukun, a Druze factional leader from the Palestinian village of 'Isfiya, at a time when Druze from Palestine, Syria and Lebanon had joined the revolt. In November 1938, Abu Rukun was killed by the Palestinian revolutionaries as a collaborator, and his village was attacked to root out other collaborators.
Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage for all the latest on the Israel-Palestine war
The Zionists exploited his killing in their sectarian campaign to co-opt the Druze community, claiming that he was targeted for being Druze rather than for being a collaborator.
In fact, during the Palestinian revolt, revolutionaries killed around 1,000 Palestinian collaborators - most of them Sunni Muslims, including many from prominent families.
Even as Zionists worked assiduously to spread sectarianism among the Druze communities of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon, by late 1937 they were simultaneously planning to expel the entire Druze population - then numbering 10,000 - from the projected Jewish state proposed by the British Peel Commission, since all Druze villages fell within its recommended borders.
Meanwhile, the British occupation authorities advanced their sectarian project by paying certain Druze leaders to refrain from participating in the revolt.
Transfer schemes
In 1938, the Zionists established relations with the Syrian Druze anti-colonial leader Sultan al-Atrash, whose 1925-1927 revolt against French rule had been suppressed a decade earlier. They offered al-Atrash the so-called "transfer plan" - the proposed expulsion of the Palestinian Druze community, framed as a way to protect them from attacks by Palestinian revolutionaries.
Al-Atrash agreed only to the voluntary migration of those seeking refuge, but refused any friendship agreements with the Zionists.
To reach al-Atrash, the Zionists enlisted one of their contacts, Yusuf al-'Aysami - a former Syrian Druze aide of his who had been in exile in Transjordan during the 1930s. While in exile, he visited the Palestinian Druze and established ties with the Zionists.
In 1939, Chaim Weizmann, head of the Zionist Organisation, was keen on the idea of expelling the Druze. The "voluntary" emigration of 10,000 Palestinians - whom he believed "would no doubt be followed by others" - presented a valuable opportunity for advancing European Jewish colonisation in the Galilee region of northern Palestine.
Funding for the purchase of Druze lands, however, never materialised. And in 1940, reconciliation between some Druze families and the Palestinian revolutionaries eased the pressure on the Druze leaders and undermined the Zionists' initial bet on the community.
In 1944, the Zionist intelligence organisation (then known as "Shai") and the Syrian al-'Aysami hatched a plan to transfer the Druze to Transjordan and fund the establishment of villages there in exchange for all the Druze lands in Palestine.
The Zionists even sent an exploratory expedition east of Mafraq in Transjordan in pursuit of the plan. However, due to opposition from both the Druze and the British, the plan collapsed by the end of 1945. Nonetheless, in 1946, the Zionists succeeded in purchasing Druze-owned land in Palestine through local collaborators.
Co-optation
In December 1947, more Palestinian Druze joined the resistance, even as Zionists and Druze collaborators worked to keep the community neutral or recruit them to the Zionist side.
In fact, Druze from Syria and Lebanon joined the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist conquest in 1948.
In April 1948, Palestinian Druze resistance fighters retaliated against the Jewish settler-colony of Ramat Yohanan in response to a settler's attack on a Druze patrol and sustained heavy casualties.
However, amid Zionist victories, desertion and despair among Druze fighters gave Zionist intelligence agents - including the Ukrainian Zionist leader Moshe Dayan - and Druze collaborators an opportunity to recruit Druze defectors.
When the Israeli settler-colony was established in 1948, one of its first acts was to institutionalise divisions among the Palestinian people by inventing fictitious ethnic identities drawn along religious and sectarian lines.
At this point, the Israeli state recognised Palestinian Druze - then numbering 15,000 - as a "distinct" religious sect from other Muslims, and established separate religious courts for them.
Soon after, Israel began designating the Druze population as "Druze" rather than "Arab" in terms of both ethnicity and nationality. Yet then, as now, they continued to suffer the same Jewish supremacist racial discrimination and oppression experienced by all Palestinians in Israel, including the appropriation of their lands.
By then, with the backing of the Israeli state, Druze collaborators had gained the upper hand in the community. Some of their leaders even called on the government to enlist Druze in the Israeli military - an offer Israel duly accepted, though Druze soldiers remain barred from joining "sensitive" units.
Druze resistance
Despite the Israeli state's co-optation of many within the Druze community, resistance to its settler-colonisation continued apace.
The Palestinian Druze poet Samih al-Qasim (1939-2014) remains one of the three most renowned figures in the Palestinian pantheon of poets known for their resistance to Zionism (the other two being Tawfiq Zayyad and Mahmoud Darwish). His work is not only widely recited across Palestinian society, both inside and outside Palestine, but many of his poems have been set to music by singers such as Kamilya Jubran and Rim al-Banna.
Syrian Druze leaders are resisting this Israeli blitzkrieg by affirming that they are part and parcel of the Syrian people
Other prominent Palestinian Druze literary and academic figures at the forefront of resistance to Zionism and Israeli settler-colonialism include the novelist Salman Natour (1949-2016); contemporary poet Sami Muhanna, whom Israel imprisoned on several occasions for his political views; the late scholar Sulayman Bashir (1947-1991) who wrote on the history of the USSR's relationship with Palestinian nationalism and Zionist Jewish "communists"; and historian Kais Firro (1944-2019), known for his histories of the Druze community.
Israel's current attempt to co-opt the Syrian Druze leadership aims to replicate what it previously achieved with Palestinian Druze collaborators.
Syrian Druze leaders, however, are resisting this Israeli blitzkrieg by affirming that they are part and parcel of the Syrian people - even as they condemn the policies of the new "Islamist" and sectarian regime.
Still, Israel's appetite for destroying Arab unity remains undeterred.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Middle East Eye delivers independent and unrivalled coverage and analysis of the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. To learn more about republishing this content and the associated fees, please fill out this form. More about MEE can be found here.
