The small, generally unobtrusive and law-abiding Druze community in Israel was briefly in the international news at the beginning of May, when it organized several demonstrations to demand that the Israeli military protect its coreligionists from sectarian violence in neighboring Syria. The protesters were responding to reports that armed militants loosely affiliated with the newly installed government of Ahmad al-Sharaa, the former jihadist who led the forces that ousted Bashar al-Assad, had attacked Druze areas and killed at least 100 people. Dozens of Israeli Druze blocked major intersections in the north of the country, where their villages are concentrated, and there was an additional demonstration in front of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence in Caesarea. Israel’s Druze, unlike other Arab citizens, are subject to mandatory conscription in the army, where they often distinguish themselves in combat units; now they want tangible evidence that the state values and reciprocates their loyalty and service.
The Israeli air force did strike several targets in Syria, including the area near the presidential palace in Damascus; these actions, said Netanyahu, were undertaken “out of a deep commitment to our Druze brothers in Israel.” Netanyahu’s sincerity could be questioned on the basis of the targets that were hit, which went well beyond the areas where Druze were vulnerable. Many analysts have posited that Netanyahu’s true goal is to keep Syria politically destabilized and that he exploited an opportunity by claiming he was acting on behalf of the Druze.
On July 14, a new round of sectarian clashes erupted between Bedouin and Druze communities in Sweida, in southern Syria. Druze in Israel were horrified by videos and images of the violent attacks committed against Druze civilians, with hundreds killed, including the elderly and children. One image in particular, which shows a man in military uniform forcibly shaving the white beard and moustache of an elderly Druze man, echoes a well-known black-and-white photo of a Nazi soldier forcibly shaving the face of a religious Jew in Poland during World War II. The two images have been posted side by side by both Druze and Jewish Israelis on their social media accounts to indicate mutual sympathy. In other words, the Druze of Israel perceive the violence against their coreligionists in Syria as genocidal. They want the army in which they serve, which is often held up as the reason Jews need not fear another Holocaust, to offer protection.
Netanyahu responded with widespread bombings, including Syria’s military headquarters in Damascus on July 16. What is the goal here? There is most likely no long-term thinking involved. The Druze of Israel have no interest in encouraging Israel to divide Syria or undermine its sovereignty; they perceive the new government under al-Sharaa as hostile and the jihadists still operating as a threat from which the Druze of Syria need protection. Nor is it likely that Netanyahu’s goal is to divide or destabilize Syria. The Israeli military and wider population are completely exhausted by the nearly two-year military campaign in Gaza; they would hardly support a new front that would see their children dying in Syria on behalf of the Druze. The U.S., too, would not stand by if Israel launched a sustained military campaign in Syria, given the new friendship between al-Sharaa and President Donald Trump, and in light of the fact that U.S. officials, according to prominent Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, told Netanyahu twice between July 15 and 16 to calm the situation down in Syria, to “stop and take a breath.”
So why did the Druze citizens of Israel respond to the sectarian violence in neighboring Syria by demanding that the Israeli government take military action? The question is particularly relevant in that, while Israeli military intervention might deter the jihadists from attacking the Druze in the short term, the medium- and long-term implications are negative. The Israeli Druze see military intervention as a protective and defensive act, but many — perhaps most — Syrians see it as an attack on their country’s sovereignty. For this reason, it could have a significant negative impact on the future of the Druze in Syria as well as their relations with the government and the broader population. Given the obvious potential collateral damage to the Druze population’s position in Syria, the stated rationale underlying Israeli Druze lobbying for military intervention — fear for the survival of the community across the border — also speaks to the complex, fraught history of this small ethnic and religious minority’s relationship with the state.
The demonstrations in May were an expression of the Israeli Druze community’s deep existential insecurity and fear, rooted in discriminatory policies imposed since the state was founded in 1948. Several regional and domestic events over the last decade or so have combined to exacerbate that anxiety. These include discriminatory legislation that threatens the rights of Druze as citizens of Israel and regional sectarian violence, which they perceive as a real threat to their people’s physical survival.
The Druze number around 1.1 million worldwide. The majority live in Syria (about 700,000) and Lebanon (about 250,000), with small populations in Jordan and Israel and an even smaller diaspora spread around the Americas, Europe and Australia. They follow a monotheistic, Abrahamic, syncretic faith that is famously secretive, rejects would-be converts and discourages marriage outside the faith. Druze have lived for centuries in the Levant, connected by familial and communal ties. After World War I, the French and British, who replaced the defeated Ottoman rulers, divided the region into the countries that are now Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Palestine-Israel. Upon Israel’s establishment in 1948, villages that were then home to about 15,000 Druze fell inside the boundaries of the new state. The borders with Syria and Lebanon, now enemy states, were closed, physically isolating the Druze of Israel from their community, many of whom were blood relatives, and from their cultural, religious, political and economic centers.
According to a 2018 census, there are now about 143,000 Druze in Israel, or 1.6% of the population. Like other Druze in the region, the Israeli Druze are Arabic speakers. They have been subject to mandatory conscription in the Israeli military since 1956 and have worked hard to maintain an alliance with the state. They are in many ways model citizens: Their sons not only serve the mandatory three years of conscription, but often choose to be career combat officers; they maintain good neighborly relations with Jews; and their schools teach a curriculum that inculcates them with an Israeli identity. But despite their efforts to prove their loyalty, the state of Israel has for years implemented discriminatory policies that undermine the rights and status of Druze citizens, most notably by denying them permits to build homes on their own land. The passage in 2018 of the controversial Nation-State Law effectively made all non-Jewish minorities second-class citizens. For the Druze, the law is an ongoing humiliation that deepens their feeling of marginalization and deep uncertainty about their future in Israel.
The Israeli government has, since the establishment of the state, employed divide-and-rule tactics that have politically isolated the Druze minority from Palestinian citizens of Israel. For example, while Israel imposed mandatory military service on the Druze, it exempted Muslim and Christian minorities, who together make up 20% of the population, although a significant number, most notably Bedouin citizens but also Christians and non-Bedouin Muslims, do volunteer to serve in the army. The state also recognized the Druze as an autonomous religious community with its own religious courts, separate from the Muslim religious courts, and ceased to recognize Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of Ramadan, as an official Druze holiday, though it is celebrated by both Muslims and Druze. The state established a school system for Druze pupils that was separate from the state schools for Christian and Muslim Palestinian citizens, as a means of consolidating the Druze-Israeli identity. The local councils of the Druze towns were separated from the councils of the Palestinian-Arab authorities. Under “nationality” on their state identity cards, they are listed as Druze, while Muslim and Christian Palestinian citizens are identified as Arabs. This complicated combination of identities — Arab, Israeli and Druze — is crucial for understanding the behavior of Israeli Druze.
In lobbying for equal citizenship, Druze leaders place heavy emphasis on the community’s military service. They feel it should provide significant leverage in Israel’s militarized, nationalistic society. Israeli political leaders often describe relations between Jews and Druze with the words “alliance” and “blood covenant,” referring to the joint sacrifice of Druze and Jewish soldiers in the army. Some claim there is a religious bond between Jews and Druze because Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law in the Hebrew Bible, is also a prophet in the Druze religion. But despite their military service, slogans about a blood covenant and the principles of democracy and equality in the Declaration of Independence, the state discriminates against Druze citizens just as it does against its Palestinian population.
Informally, the discourse surrounding the blood covenant and the Druze-Jewish alliance carries political and security expectations. Implicitly or explicitly, the Druze believe that, since they serve in the military that exists to protect the state of the Jews, Israel has a corresponding responsibility to protect the Druze — including those living across the border, to whom they are connected through family, community and religion.
Since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2013, Israeli Druze have been trying to leverage this alliance as a means of urging Israel into action on behalf of their coreligionists, who live with the very real threat of sectarian violence. Netanyahu and his government exploit this narrative of an alliance by claiming their military interventions in Syria are on behalf of Israel’s Druze citizens, rather than in pursuit of Israel’s own perceived security interests. While successive Israeli governments have for decades denied Druze full civil rights, Druze citizens continue to hope and believe that the Israeli government will reward their commitment to serving in the military by according them all the rights of citizenship in Israel as well as protection for their embattled fellow Druze in Syria.
Meanwhile, in the last decade, the government passed two discriminatory laws that were explicitly designed to hollow out the rights of all non-Jewish Arab citizens, including the Druze.
In April 2017, the Knesset passed Amendment 116 to the Building and Planning Law, often referred to as the Kaminitz Law, for Deputy State Attorney Erez Kaminitz. The law gives local authorities sweeping powers to enforce home demolitions and evictions without going through the judicial system, while levying prohibitive fines amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars on people who build or expand their homes, even on their own agricultural land. Technically, the law applies to all citizens. In practice, however, it disproportionately affects the residents of Druze and Palestinian-Israeli towns and cities, which Netanyahu and several other members of his far-right government said explicitly was their intention. Historically, the Israeli government has almost never granted permits to build or expand homes in the towns and cities populated by Arab citizens, largely because it has not implemented planning or zoning policies there, as it has in Jewish-majority or “mixed” cities and towns. While 97% of the land in Israel is owned by the state, Palestinian and Druze citizens own their land. The catch is that most of this privately owned land is classified for agricultural use only, with the state declining to rezone it for residential use. For this reason, the authorities reject nearly all applications for permits to expand or build homes in Arab towns, so Arab citizens — Druze, Muslim and Christian — feel they have no choice but to build without them. For decades, they have lived with the threats of demolition orders, evictions and land confiscation, but until 2017 those orders could be contested in court. The Kaminitz Law gives the authorities the power to demolish homes, impose prohibitive fines and enforce evictions without a court order.
The controversial Nation-State Law, passed in 2018, defines Israel as the nation-state solely of the Jewish people; it also downgrades the status of Arabic from one of Israel’s two official languages, alongside Hebrew, to one with a “special status.” This makes all non-Jewish citizens, including the Druze, second-class citizens, while ultra-Orthodox Jewish citizens remain exempt from mandatory service but enjoy all the benefits of full citizenship. The Druze community protested the law vociferously, demonstrating with placards that bore slogans referring to the state’s betrayal, with no effect. Still, they continue to serve in the military, pay their taxes and send their children to state schools.
The extreme violence of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel perpetrated by Hamas and Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza have ratcheted up the fear and anxiety in the Druze community. As Israelis, they were terrified by the brutality of Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians, which included Arab-Palestinian civilians who were killed and taken hostage on Oct. 7; as Arabs, they have watched with horror the Israeli military’s destruction of Gaza and the killing of at least 60,000 Palestinians; as second-class citizens of Israel, they were frightened by the atmosphere of official intimidation, with police arresting Arab citizens who engaged in any kind of dissent, even something as anodyne as a prayer for peace posted on a Facebook page. The Gaza war has had a massive, destabilizing impact on the region and on Israeli society, which has shifted far to the right. This has raised serious questions about what type of state and society it will be after the war — how the war will affect the state’s democratic institutions and culture, the rights of its minority citizens and their struggle for equality and belonging. It is through the lens of these events that the Druze of Israel viewed and reacted to the sectarian violence in Syria — as a threat to their community as a whole, throughout the region.
Israel and Hezbollah, based in southern Lebanon, were also at war from Oct. 8, 2023, until Nov. 27, 2024. During that time, the warring parties exchanged fire so frequently that residents of southern Lebanon and northern Israel evacuated to safer areas. But while most of the Jewish Israeli population moved south, to stay with relatives or in cheap hotels at government expense, the Druze refused to leave their land. They stayed at home in their villages near the Lebanese border, under constant Hezbollah missile fire. On July 24, 2024, one of those missiles hit a soccer field in the Druze village of Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights; it killed 13 children and injured at least 42, the majority of whom were between 10 and 16 years old.
Everywhere the Druze of Israel look, they see threats to their existence — in brutal attacks committed by Hamas against Israeli civilians; in massive, dehumanizing violence committed by the Israeli military against Palestinians in Gaza; in the silence of Israeli Jews in the face of the killing of thousands of innocents and the destruction in Gaza; in the silencing of Arab citizens of Israel who criticize the war in Gaza; in Hezbollah missiles fired at their villages from southern Lebanon; in jihadist violence against their coreligionists in Syria; in sectarian violence in the rest of the post-Arab Spring Middle East. They are acutely aware that while Arab leaders and the Arab League focused on Israel’s violation of Syrian sovereignty, they offered no official condemnation of the sectarian violence against the Druze.
The 2013-24 civil war in Syria had a particularly powerful emotional impact on the Druze citizens of Israel. There were many reports of anti-Druze incitement and sectarian violence, including the June 10, 2015, massacre of 24 Druze in Idlib province that was carried out by the jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra. The May 2025 attacks recalled a previous wave of violence a decade earlier. Then, as now, neither the Arab media nor Arab leaders offered any condemnations of the attacks or exhortations on behalf of minority rights. This lack of support in the Arab world has increased fear among the Israeli Druze that the Druze in Syria are extremely vulnerable and that no one will protect them from the demonstrably real threat of sectarian violence.
Thirteen Druze soldiers have been killed fighting in the current Gaza war. At their funerals, Druze religious and political leaders called for equality and the repeal of the Nation-State Law, hoping that the coffins of fallen Druze soldiers would shame the Israeli government for its discriminatory policies. They wanted to remind the state, once again, that Druze citizens continue to fulfill their duties and to repeat that the time has come for the state to reciprocate by granting them equal rights.
The question of how the Druze of Israel can be horrified by the ongoing killing and destruction in Gaza but stay silent, even as they continue to serve in the army, speaks to their complex identity, their insecurities and their fears. Certainly, their silence is largely a product of the official repression of dissent, with police harassing and arresting Arab citizens even for innocuous expressions of sympathy for Palestinians in Gaza. The Israeli media’s role in contributing to this atmosphere of fear and repression by omitting any coverage of the death and starvation in Gaza is significant; most Israeli Jews ignore or simply do not believe the foreign media reports, while Arab citizens do know what is happening because they watch events in Gaza on Arabic television news programs. But fear is not the only factor explaining Druze silence on the war: Despite their horror at what is happening in Gaza, the Druze feel that they have no choice but to continue serving in the army, which they believe is the only path to realizing their rights as citizens. They also feel keenly the importance of being prepared to defend themselves from the threat of political violence at the hands of Hamas, Hezbollah and regional jihadist groups, which is something they have in common with Israeli Jews.
Israeli Druze face several challenges that they feel are existential. Their ongoing struggle for equality and security has historically been rejected by Israel, even as the state demands that they continue to fulfill the obligations of citizens. This reflects the precariousness of their position, 80 years after Israel’s establishment. Beyond Israel, they see the ongoing threat of sectarian violence against fellow Druze in the region; as Druze and as soldiers in Israel’s army, they feel a responsibility to protect them. While Israel denies them full citizenship and appears not to respect the sacrifice of their dead, the Druze feel that the very least the state can do is prove it values the loyalty underlying the alliance by offering protection to their coreligionists across the border.
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