Who are the Druze, the victims of a deadly strike on Israel?

A ROCKET FLEW across Israel’s tense northern border on July 27th, and landed on a football pitch, killing 12 children and teenagers. Israel says that Hizbullah, a Lebanese militant group, is responsible; America agrees. Diplomats are now scrambling to avoid an all-out war between Israel and Hizbullah. One factor complicating the response is the fact that the victims were from Israel’s Druze minority. Who are the Druze—and why are they caught in the middle of a conflict between Israel and Lebanon?

An offshoot of Shia Islam, the Druze religion was founded in 11th-century Egypt. Followers later settled in modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Israel. Their faith is rooted in Abrahamic monotheism but blends elements of other religions; Druze devotional practices are still mostly secret. The sect permits no conversions to or from the faith, frowns upon marriages outside the religion and controls access to knowledge even within the faith. Though a small and self-contained community, the Druze have played a significant role in the countries they have settled in, notably in leading the revolt against the French presence in Syria and Lebanon in 1925.

Today there are over 1m Druze around the world, roughly 150,000 of them in Israel. Unlike most other minorities in the country, many are fiercely loyal to the Israeli state and serve in the Israel Defence Forces. Yet in recent years this loyalty has been tested. In 2018 Israel introduced a nation-state law, which codified the right to “national-self determination” as “unique to the Jewish people”, made Hebrew the national language but did not confer the same status on Arabic, and established “Jewish settlement as a national value”. The Druze led protests against the law; they, and other Arab groups, said that it rendered them second-class citizens.

The Druze in the Golan Heights, where Saturday’s rocket attack struck, are a minority within a minority. They were originally Syrian, but when Israel annexed the territory after capturing it in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, they were offered Israeli citizenship. Most refused, declaring their loyalty to Syria. But those attachments have frayed in recent years. Some Druze in Syria took part in protests against Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s president, after a popular revolt against his authoritarian regime broke out in 2011. The younger generation of Golani Druze, meanwhile, have only ever known life in the Israeli state.

Because the Druze are a tiny minority in the countries they live in, they have sometimes forged pragmatic political alliances with more powerful groups. In a fractured region, this can set them at odds with their co-religionists. Druze in Israel are incensed by the alliance their Lebanese counterparts have with Hizbullah, which fought in support of Mr Assad in the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile Druze in Lebanon are critical of those in Israel for not being vocal enough in condemning Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.

But Saturday’s deaths outraged the entire Druze community, and Hizbullah—which, somewhat implausibly, denies responsibility—faces anger in Lebanon as well as abroad. Israeli politicians have also met with a backlash. When a group visited Majdal Shams, the site of the strike, they were heckled. Some of the protesters were angry with the government for neglecting their community; some were calling for retaliation against Hizbullah; and others simply voiced anger that the Druze were, once again, caught in the crossfire of other people’s conflicts. ■