The rocket attack that killed 12 young Druze in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights has thrust the religious minority to the forefront of the escalating conflict between Israel and Hizbollah.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu paid tribute to the community that has long played an outsized role in the Israeli military, as he visited the scene of Saturday’s attack, which has been blamed on the Lebanese militant group.
“The Druze community has paid a very heavy price in the war,” he said on Monday. “The State of Israel will continue to stand by your side.”
His speech in Majdal Shams, a town situated in territory that Israel seized from Syria during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, was delivered to local leaders, but protesters gathered nearby to yell at the embattled premier to “get out” in both Arabic and Hebrew. This echoed the scenes that took place a day earlier during a visit by several Israeli cabinet ministers.
Some of the anger has been directed at the Israeli government: some protesters voiced demands for better protection from the rockets fired by Hizbollah since this round of hostilities began after Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Others reflected the frustration of the 150,000-person Druze community in Israel that has felt marginalised by the growing Jewish supremacism of the Israeli far-right.
Their frustrations about their second-class status are exacerbated because more than 80 per cent of Druze men enlist in the Israeli army, fighting and dying shoulder-to-shoulder with their Jewish brothers-in-arms, including in the current war.
There was rage too at Hizbollah, the likely culprit behind the attack but which has denied responsibility. “Leave our children out of these wars,” a man shouted at one of the funerals broadcast on Arabic media channels. “We’ve nothing to do with any of this.”
Such comments reflect the Druze’s unique history in the region: an ethnically Arab minority numbering about 1mn and spread across Lebanon, Syria and Jordan as well as Israel.
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The religion, which traces its roots back to 11th century Egypt, is often described as an offshoot of Shia Islam, but also includes tenets from other religions and ancient philosophies.
Sami Nasib Makarem, in his book The Druze Faith, described the religion as secretive, noting that it did not accept converts and discouraged intermarriage. Having developed “in an environment intolerant to unorthodox beliefs”, its practitioners passed down the faith orally, wrote Makarem, a Druze Lebanese scholar, and its literature was not widely circulated.
Despite a history of resistance to foreign rule, including rebellions under the Ottomans and French colonialists in Syria, the Druze have a reputation for being fiercely loyal to the state in which they live — reflected in their strong presence in the Israeli military, where they often rise to high rank.
“These are part of the values of our religion. I’m Israeli,” said Eman Safady, a researcher on Middle East military affairs who remains the only Druze woman to serve in the Israeli army.
The reality for Druze living in the Golan Heights is more complicated. The community numbers about 20,000 people, and only an estimated fifth hold Israeli citizenship.
For years, Golan Druze feared that their territory would one day be handed back to Syria as part of a peace deal, and therefore most stayed faithful to the Assad regime in Damascus. But since the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian civil war, and the weakening of Syrian Druzes’ loyalties to President Bashar al-Assad, that position has begun to shift.
“The old generation, divided from their families in Syria, still live with the mentality that they’re under Syrian rule,” explained Safady. “The younger generation has undergone a form of ‘Israelisation’. They’ve studied in the Israeli education system [and] the local politics are now integrated into the Israeli system.”
But a break with the Israeli state came in 2018, when Netanyahu’s rightwing government passed a controversial law codifying Israel as solely the nation-state of the Jewish people.
Most minority groups in the country, but especially the Druze, viewed this as a betrayal. Tens of thousands took to the streets in protest, opposition leaders vowed to amend the bill, yet Netanyahu has remained unmoved and the legislation remains in law.
Anger also festers at the inadequate housing and public infrastructure in Druze towns, which locals blame on a lack of planning and investment by the state.
Lebanon’s Druze community is relatively cohesive, but there are divisions over its alignment with Hizbollah and Syria.
Walid Jumblatt, a fierce proponent of Palestinian rights and Lebanese Druzes’ most influential leader, condemned the targeting of civilians killed when a rocket stuck a football field on Saturday, but directed his ire towards Israel for trying to exploit the tragedy and urged vigilance in the face of “the enemy’s destructive project”.
Yet on Sunday in Majdal Shams, chants could be heard demanding a more forceful response against Hizbollah. “Destroy Beirut!” more than one local shouted, in Hebrew, to Israeli television.
Safady said many Druze believed that the town was deliberately targeted by Hizbollah, which is a proxy force of Iran, as “revenge for standing with the Jews”. “People are angry: their kids went to play soccer and were torn to shreds — it’s understandable. But many of us do care about Lebanon. Our brothers and sisters are there,” she added.
The rocket attack came at a time when Hizbollah had been seeking to mend its fractured ties with the Druze in Lebanon to avoid inflaming sectarian tensions — some of which stemmed from the Syrian Druze community’s recent break with the Assad’s regime — said Mohanad Hage Ali, deputy director of research the Carnegie Center in Beirut.
Syria is home to the largest Druze community, who mostly reside in the southern Suwayda province. Suwayda was largely spared by the civil war, because of an informal deal between its Druze leaders and Assad: in exchange for exemptions from military service and a limited deployment of state security forces, Druze leaders agreed to tacitly support his government.
But the collapse of the economy in Syria has tested this alliance and the province has seen a spate of protests since 2020. Those protests have drawn support from Druze across the region, further complicating the patchwork of Druze alliances.
At a small vigil in Suwayda’s capital, Druze residents held signs blaming the Assad regime and its ally, Hizbollah, for “murdering children” in Majdal Shams.
“For us, every life lost is magnified because we are so small,” said student Ayman, asking to be referred to by his first name for fear of retribution. “Hizbollah has done well to protect Lebanon these past 10 months, but how could it make such an enormous mistake?”