A very unusual meeting took place in early December in a Druze town in southwestern Syria near the Israeli border on the Golan Heights.
A few hundred residents from several local villages gathered in a town called Hader to discuss the future of their region following the stunning Dec. 8 fall of Bashar Assad’s regime in Damascus to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Islamist rebel group with roots in Al-Qaeda.
The Druze villagers, members of a religious offshoot of Islam that comprises about 3% of Syria’s population, have grave cause for concern. In November 2017, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — then known as the Nusra Front — attacked Druze residents in Hader, killing nine. Two years earlier, in June 2015, the Nusra Front massacred at least 20 people in a Druze village in Idlib province in northwestern Syria.
Despite the name change, the rebel group led by Ahmed al-Sharaa — previously known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — was still designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, United States, the U.K. and others.
Now, after 13 years of civil war and more than half a century of subjugation under the Assad regime, the Druze in Hader seem to have little appetite for taking their chances with the new ruler in Damascus. At their recent meeting they made a startling announcement about who they’d like to rule their area: Israel.
“What’s our fate, my brothers?” a speaker at the Hader gathering asked, as seen in a video of the event. “Israel!” the crowd responded.
“If we have to choose, we will choose the lesser evil, and even if it’s considered evil, to ask to be annexed to the Golan” — said the speaker, who is not identified, referring to the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. “It’s a much lesser evil than the evil coming our way — the evil that might take our women, that might take our daughters, that might take our homes. We are with those that preserve our dignity.”
“Does anyone object to what’s being said?” the speaker asked. The chorus answered, “We agree! We agree!”
This meeting isn’t the only unusual thing happening in southwestern Syria, where the Israel Defense Forces is now deployed inside Syrian territory, slightly beyond the demilitarized buffer zone established in 1974 after the last war between the two countries. The IDF has described its presence in Syria — and its bombing campaign to destroy Syrian military sites — as temporary defensive moves to ensure the security of Israel’s border during this period of instability in Syria and prevent Syrian army assets from falling into the wrong hands.
In some Syrian villages, locals are cooperating with the Israeli army and handing over armaments the Syrian army left behind when it fled — including what appear to be chemical weapons. In one report broadcast on Israel’s Channel 12, Israeli soldiers can be seen working hand in hand with Syrian villagers to collect boxes of artillery rounds, automatic weapons, grenade launchers and other armaments. Among them are grenades and canisters labeled CS gas — a chemical weapon banned for use in warfare by the Geneva Convention.
This isn’t the first time Israel and Syrians in the area have been in direct contact. Early on in Syria’s civil war, Israel provided humanitarian aid to Druze on the Syrian side of the border, including food and clothing. Israel also ran a clandestine program that provided some funding and support for local rebels in a bid to ensure that more radical elements in Syria, including Islamic extremists, stayed away from the Israeli border. And Israel launched a humanitarian operation in 2013 that for years ferried wounded and sick Syrians into Israel for treatment at Israeli hospitals.
To be sure, it’s not clear how widespread support for annexation by Israel is among Syrians near the border. After the Hader video circulated, some Hader locals disavowed it. Farther south, an official from the Syrian village of Maariyah complained of Israel’s military presence and told The Associated Press, “We were happy that HTS came,” referring to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
But the extraordinary plea by residents of Hader is a sign of the extent to which many ordinary Arabs are abandoning the long-held credo that Israel is their eternal enemy. They understand who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in their neighborhood, and that that the real threat they face is from Islamic militancy.
It’s sad that the United Nations, which was quick to criticize Israel’s presence in the Syrian Golan and continually singles out Israel for opprobrium while turning a blind eye to human rights abuses elsewhere, fails to recognize this.
These Syrian Druze know better. For them, Israel is the solution, not the problem.
The Druze in the Golan Heights all lived under Syrian rule until 1967, when Israel captured two-thirds of the strategic high-altitude Golan plateau in the 1967 Six-Day War. For decades afterward and until the advent of internet telephony, Druze families divided by the armistice lines who wanted to communicate with one another did so via megaphone in an area that came to be known as Shouting Hill.
Over the last 58 years, the fates of the Druze in the Golan have diverged sharply. Those who remained on the Syrian side were subject to the authoritarianism, poverty and violence of the Assad regime — and, after the eruption of Syria’s civil war in 2011, attacks by myriad rebel groups who considered them loyal to Assad.
By contrast, the Druze who ended up on the Israeli side of the Golan gained relative security, democratic freedoms and economic opportunity. While in the early decades after the 1967 war they maintained rhetorical fealty to the Syrian regime — in line with their esoteric religion, which obligates loyalty to their home country — over decades they became increasingly Israeli.
A growing number are taking up Israel’s standing offer of citizenship, they’ve built family and economic ties to Israeli Druze elsewhere in the country and they turned the Golan’s main Druze town, Majdal Shams, into a thriving tourist destination. Visitors to Israel’s only ski resort, on Mount Hermon, will find that most of the staff there, including the ski instructors, are local Druze.
Today, about 25,000 Israeli Jews live in the Golan Heights, and about 25,000 Druze. On Dec. 15, Israel’s Cabinet approved a plan to double the Jewish population in the Golan, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1981 in a move that has been recognized internationally only by the United States.
It’s still far from clear how the situation in Syria will turn out, and whether Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s leader will protect or persecute ethnic and religious minorities under his rule (so far, al-Sharaa has pledged to protect them, but his regime is hunting down Assad loyalists). Nor is it clear that Assad’s fall marks the end of Syria’s civil war, with its rotating cast of competing rebel groups. Even now, Turkish-backed Syrians are fighting U.S.-backed Kurds in Syria among various other skirmishes in the fractured country.
So perhaps it’s not completely shocking that, even as the United Nations and others are criticizing Israel’s presence in Syria, some Syrians want Israel’s control over the area to be permanent.
“We ask in the name of all of the surrounding area to join our people in the Golan,” the speaker in Hader said, “and to live in freedom and dignity like our people are living, and to be free from this injustice and oppression — the injustice of Bashar the dog, and the injustice of the people who are coming and threatening us and want to take our children.”
With the conflicts in the Middle East far from settled, the world should support the region’s only real democracy and applaud its battles against Islamic extremists. Israel’s victories can benefit not just Israelis, but people living under Islamic repression in places like Lebanon, Syria and Iran, too.
Heilman is a reporter living in Israel. He works for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.