The Druse Connection
The ongoing Arab–Israeli war appears to be entering a new escalatory phase, in which the eye of the storm has shifted to Syria and Yemen, as well as back to Gaza.
This essay first appeared at Quillette. Read more by Benny Morris here → https://quillette.com/author/benny-morris/
Last week, Syrian Sunni jihadists attacked Druse communities in Jaramana and Ashrafiyat Sahnaya, suburbs of the Syrian capital of Damascus. The Israel Air Force (IAF) intervened by striking Syrian jihadi personnel and positions, including a site adjacent to the Syrian presidential palace. Meanwhile, the Houthi rebels who control northern Yemen delivered a resounding blow against Israel on Sunday, when one of their ballistic missiles penetrated Israeli defences and landed next to Israel’s main international airport, briefly halting almost all international flights to and from the Jewish state, except those operated by Israeli airlines. Israel retaliated with a twenty-plane strike against Houthi economic installations. Further strikes are likely—and, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has hinted, these may also target Iran, the Houthis’ political and military patron. Meanwhile, Israel’s cabinet has authorised the immediate call-up of tens of thousands of IDF reservists in preparation for an “expansion” of the country’s war-making against Hamas, which has been more or less stalemated for months.
Syrian government spokesmen have said that the attacks on the Druse were carried out by Sunni “extremist” armed groups. But the Syrian government is run by President Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa (also known as Abu Muhammad al-Julani), a veteran al Qaeda-linked Sunni jihadist who headed the Nusra Front forces that conquered Damascus and toppled the Assad regime, which had been in power since 1970, last December. Al-Sharaa subsequently reached out to Western governments and, speaking softly and sporting a Western suit, he promised to protect Syria’s non-Sunni minorities and even hinted at a future policy of non-belligerence vis-à-vis Israel. This would be especially surprising since, in the past, he has targeted the Jewish state for jihad. Although he was born in Saudi Arabia, al-Sharaa’s family hails from the Golan Heights, a tract of Syrian land conquered by Israel during the 1967 Six Day War and subsequently annexed. Israel’s leaders have dismissed al-Sharaa’s conciliatory avowals as a function of current Syrian military weakness, rather than a heartfelt new approach. But some Israeli and American commentators have recommended that Jerusalem remain open to a pragmatic accommodation with the new regime in Damascus.
Al-Sharaa’s doveish statements about Syria’s non-Sunni minorities have already proved hollow. In early March, Sunni fighters and government security forces descended on the Latakia-Tartus coastal area of northwestern Syria and slaughtered some 1,600 local Alawites, members of the Shi’ite sect that formed the Assad regime’s demographic base. Observers saw this as just the latest vengeful chapter of bloodletting in a civil war that began in 2011 and a possible augury of future violence in the chaotic ethno-religious patchwork that is Syria. The Syrian civil war erupted against the backdrop of the region-wide Arab Spring. Discontented young Syrians, including many Druse, took to the streets in protest against Assad’s tyrannical behaviour, were greeted by live fire from Assad’s security forces, and then embarked on armed rebellion. President Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers refused to fight, and for a moment it looked as though he would be overthrown, but Iran, Russia, and the Lebanese terrorist organisation Hezbollah came to his rescue. Years of civil war followed, during which more than half a million Syrians died and many million fled. The Assads and their foreign backers eventually regained control of most of the country, confining the rebels—mostly anti-Alawite Sunni jihadists backed by Turkey—to Idlib, a small area in northwestern Syria.
But following Israel’s devastation of Hezbollah and the ravaging of Iran last October, the jihadists, re-armed and organised by Turkey, launched a lightning offensive southward, swiftly taking first Aleppo and then Damascus. The Assad regime collapsed like a house of cards. But after a decade and a half of civil war, Syria was in shambles. Al-Sharaa spent the following months trying to patch the country back together. But the Kurds in the north, the Alawites in the north-west, and the Druse in the south were leery of subordination to the new Islamist Sunni government.
As ever in the Middle East, religion triggered violence. The jihadist assault on the Druse that erupted last Monday at Jaramana was sparked by an audio clip of a Druse cleric purportedly insulting the Prophet Mohammed. The cleric denied involvement. But the dogs of war had already been loosed.
The Druse are an Arabic-speaking, non-Muslim religious community that splintered off from Shi’ite Islam about a thousand years ago in Egypt. To escape persecution there, they eventually moved to the Levant. Some 700,000 of them now live in Syria, where they make up 3.2 per cent of the country’s population. There are also large Druse communities in Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. The Druse look to Jethro (Nabi Shuayb), Moses’ Midianite father-in-law, according to the Bible, as their prophet—his tomb is in northern Israel—but they also revere Moses himself, Jesus, and John the Baptist. Under the Assads (1970–2024), the Syrian Druse were generally loyal citizens of the regime. But many Sunnis saw them as infidels.
Loyalty to the regime in power in the country in which they live is a major tenet of Druse political thinking. Hence, most Syrian Druse seek to live in peace with the new jihadist regime. Indeed, following the jihadist onslaught on Ashrafiyat Sahnaya, local Druse leaders proposed that their militiamen join the government’s security forces.
But the Druse’s most important political principle is fraternity with fellow Druse, which obliges them to extend help to beleaguered Druse communities. Over the past week, Israel’s Druse, who number some 150,000, began pressuring Israel’s leaders to come to the aid of their Syrian brothers. Last weekend, they blocked roads in the Galilee and noisily demonstrated outside Netanyahu’s Caesarea home. On Saturday, Netanyahu announced that Israel would not allow Syrian forces to endanger the Syrian Druse community or deploy in areas “south of Damascus,” i.e. near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the border with Israel proper. Israeli jets then attacked Syrian government positions and armed Sunni personnel; some two dozen Syrian Druse, some injured in the clashes near Damascus, are currently being treated in Israeli hospitals. Israeli helicopters have also ferried supplies—possibly including munitions—to the Druse “capital” of Suweida in southern Syria, which adjoins Jabal Druse (Mount of the Druse), the Syrian Druse heartland.
Some Syrian Druse have openly welcomed this Israeli intervention. But most, it appears, have voiced their opposition: They know that Damascus will construe any alignment with Israel as supping with the devil at best and treason at worst.
The Druse connection with Israel has a long history. Israel’s Jews and Druse bonded back in summer 1948 during the first Israeli–Arab war, when local Druse notables, foreseeing an eventual Israeli victory, threw in their lot with the Jews and sent their sons to join the IDF.
Since then, Druse males—like most Jewish Israeli males—are obliged by law to serve in the army, where a few Druse have attained the high ranks of brigadier and major general. (The IDF commander, i.e., the chief of general staff, is the Israeli military’s only lieutenant-general).
Israeli–Syrian relations have always been bad. Syria was the last of the Arab belligerents to sign an armistice agreement with Israel following the first Arab–Israeli war, of 1948. Although Egypt and Jordan eventually made peace with the Jewish state, in 1979 and 1994 respectively, the Assads refused to make peace, even though they were offered the Golan Heights in exchange. Since al-Sharaa took over in December, Israeli–Syrian relations have been chilly. In Israel, al-Sharaa’s assumption of power was viewed with trepidation—after all, in his younger days, al-Sharaa had spoken of a jihad to conquer Jerusalem. Israel took advantage of the immediate post-Assad chaos to bomb Syrian Army munitions and chemical weapons depots and factories, military airfields, armoured corps bases, and SAM batteries, to prevent them from falling into the jihadists’ hands, and occupied the north-south buffer zone between the Golan Heights and Syria that is patrolled by UN forces (UNDOF). The country also established a number of outposts in dominant sites inside southeastern Syria proper.
After last week’s Israeli raids on jihadist positions, al-Sharaa’s father, Hussein al-Sharaa, posted on Facebook that Syria’s “response will be launched from a place you do not expect.” But so far, Damascus has only meekly protested against the Israeli moves. Some Israeli commentators have opined that Israel’s exploitation of Syria’s current weakness will not be forgotten and that, once it re-arms, Syria will likely seek revenge. It seems clear that, given Israel’s actions, al-Sharaa is unlikely to take a conciliatory tack vis-à-vis the Jewish state.
Some commentators have also raised a more general question of principle: whether Israel should be intervening in internal Arab political squabbles or protecting Arab minorities, however embattled or suffering, reminding their readers that Israel’s intervention on behalf of the Lebanese Christians in the 1980s and ’90s ended badly, both for Israel and for the Christians themselves, since it led to the emergence of a new Shi’ite party, Hezbollah, which came to dominate Lebanon and drove the IDF out of the country.
In the case of Syria, Israeli intervention may well deepen the al-Sharaa regime’s reliance on Turkey, whose leader, the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdogan, recently called for Israel’s destruction. This could facilitate Turkish military deployments in Syria, possibly leading to an Israeli–Turkish confrontation.
No doubt some Israelis may be toying with the notion of helping establish a Druse mini-state in what is today southern Syria, centred on Jabal Druse, which is not far from the Golan Heights. During the period 1921–36, the Jabal Druse area was an autonomous Druse-controlled “state” under the auspices of the French Mandate. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Zionist leaders periodically promoted Jewish–Druse amity against the backdrop of Sunni Arab enmity toward both Zionism and the Druse “infidels.” During the Six Day War of 1967, prominent former general and politician Yigal Allon, who subsequently became Israel’s foreign minister, advocated the Israeli conquest of Jabal Druse and the establishment of a Druse mini-state that would be aligned with Israel. Today, these ideas may seem like pipe dreams, but amid the current flux, with Syria badly battered and a semi-messianic government in Jerusalem, who knows what will happen—especially if the jihadists continue to harass Syria’s Druse?
As for Yemen, the success of the Houthis’ rocket attack on Israel’s international airport over the weekend may prove a game-changer. Israel cannot afford to let its air connection with the outside world be partially severed again, as it was during much of the past seventeen months of the war. But given the distance between Israel and Yemen and Israel’s relative ignorance of Houthi military and political dispositions and territory, retaliating could prove problematic, especially as the Trump Administration has taken upon itself the task of restraining the Houthis. American and British jets have been bombing Houthi installations for months to no decisive effect. The Americans had hoped that their missiles and drones would end the Houthi blockade of Israeli and international shipping at the Bab al Mandab Straits, which connect the Indian Ocean with the Red Sea and, hence, the Suez Canal and Israel’s southern port of Eilat. They also hoped to halt the Houthi missile launches against Israel itself. But so far they have had little success and the Houthis previously weathered a decade-long aerial campaign against them by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The Houthi warriors live in the mountains, and their armaments and missile launchers are dispersed in barely identifiable and relatively invulnerable caves and underground tunnels.
The Houthis control the northern half of Yemen, including its capital city of Sanaa. They have been launching ballistic missiles and drones at Israel and at ships passing through the straits since October 2023, in a show of solidarity with Hamas. After a brief pause during the recent short-lived Israeli–Hamas ceasefire, in mid-March the Houthis renewed their rocketing, sending twenty ballistic missiles and numerous drones toward Israel. The last missile got through Israel’s normally effective anti-missile defences and reached the strategically crucial Ben-Gurion Airport outside Tel Aviv.
The missile killed no one and did little physical damage. But non-Israeli airlines, and their crews and insurers, took fright. On Monday, Israel sent the IAF to Yemen, where they destroyed Houthi targets around the port of Hodeida. But few in Jerusalem believe this, or further such strikes, will end Houthi belligerence. It is possible that Israeli special forces and the Mossad may be able to come up with something more effective. Israel might also strike at economic targets in Iran, which arms and to some degree runs the Houthi attacks. These strikes, as Netanyahu has hinted, could persuade Tehran to rein in its Yemeni proxy. But this option remains only a remote possibility, given the current American–Iranian dialogue about Tehran’s nuclear program, which Trump has warned Israel not to disrupt.
And there remains the question of Gaza. For months now, Israel and Hamas have been at a stand-off: The two parties have been unable to agree on a further hostage–prisoner exchange. Israeli ground forces now occupy as much as forty per cent of the Gaza Strip but the Hamas fighters, whose numbers have been replenished by new sixteen- and seventeen-year-old recruits, are still standing—or at least hiding away in their vast tunnel system, protected by the two groups of people whom they are using as human shields: the remaining Israeli hostages taken on 7 October on the one hand, and Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinian civilians, amid whom the Hamas fighters are embedded, on the other. Israel refuses to end the war and completely withdraw from Gaza, as Hamas demands, in exchange for the release of the hostages, 21 of whom are still alive. Hamas refuses to lay down its arms and give up political and military control of the Strip, as Israel demands.
So last weekend, the IDF issued call-up orders to tens of thousands of reserve soldiers, apparently intending to launch a new offensive—probably scheduled for mid-May, after Trump winds up his planned visit to Saudi Arabia—against Hamas-controlled areas of the Strip, in the hope that this may break Hamas’s spirit, loosen its grip over the population, and force it to disgorge the hostages. But it is unclear what exactly the IDF intends to try that it hasn’t tried before. Off the record, some IDF officers have said that this time their troops will occupy areas such as Gaza City, expel the population to “safe areas” in the south of the Strip, uproot the Hamas units that are left behind, and permanently occupy the “liberated” areas until an outside force (perhaps involving troops from Egypt or the United Arab Emirates) replaces them. What is certain is that, along the way, the IDF will encounter hit-and-run guerrilla tactics as Hamas fighters emerge from their underground tunnel hideaways and deploy RPGs and IEDs.
To make matters worse, the IDF is facing a severe manpower problem. At the start of the war, call-up orders to reservists were met with 130 percent compliance, but recent reserve call-ups have been only 50–60 percent successful. Most of the reservists have served 200–500 days in uniform over the past seventeen months and many are exhausted and no longer trust the Netanyahu government to do the right thing either militarily or politically.
Over the coming weeks, we will see how many reservists actually show up and what the IDF general staff intends to do with them. It appears that the reservists are destined to replace 18–21-year-old IDF conscripts now stationed in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria when the young soldiers are sent to the Strip to deal with Hamas. The parents of these soldiers will no doubt have to suffer through many long, sleepless nights—alongside the relatives of the hostages still in Hamas hands—worried that their loved ones may come to harm amid Gaza’s ruins and tunnels.
More from Benny Morris at Quillette → https://quillette.com/author/benny-morris/
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