Druze Stirrings
The secretive sect that helped topple Assad
The Druze are an elusive people. During the few summers I spent in Lebanon I met Maronites, Melkites, Sunni, Shi’a, Armenians, and many others but I only recall knowingly meeting one Druze — and that’s a story for another day.
Druze beliefs are as secretive as they are distinct. Most file them as (for lack of a less judgemental word) a schismatic branch of Islam that emerged out of Isma’ilism; others argue that they are gnostics who took up the Islamic mantle to avoid oppression. Naturally they do not call themselves Druze, but muwaḥidūn, which more or less means ‘monotheists’ or ‘singularists’ — believers in the singularity of God. Ethnically, they are Arab, and migrated to the Lebanese mountains and Jabal al-Druze from south Arabia before the advent of Islam.
Christians have traversed the four corners of the globe in order to share the Gospel, but the Druze are completely at odds with this mentality. They are not bothered if you are uninterested in their religion: In fact, altogether they very much prefer you don’t ask too many questions because, frankly, they don’t want you to know. Since the closing of the daʿwa — the call to belief — in AD 1043, no converts may be accepted, nor can rituals or worship take place in public, and all marriage outside the community is prohibited.
■ There is only one famous Druze in the world: the perennial survivor of Lebanese politics, Walid Joumblatt. He ascended to the political headship of Lebanon’s Druze in 1977, succeeding his father Kamal as the leader of the Progressive Socialist Party — whose name elides the sectarian tribal nature of the entity as the outlet for political Druzism in the Lebanon — and maintained his leadership throughout the devastation of the fifteen-year civil war.
Joumblatt is an educated and entertaining fellow, sharing his holiday snaps on the Nile with pith helmet and parasol, mockingly comparing himself to Hercules Poirot. His wife Nora is the daughter of the late Syrian defence minister Ahmad al-Sharabati. After nearly half a century at the helm, Joumblatt surrendered the presidency of the PSP in 2023 to his son Taymur — the natural hereditary principle once more overcoming any progressive socialist obstacles.
Despite this tribalism, the PSP remains the “official” socialist party of Lebanon, in the sense it is the country’s only member-party of the Socialist International.
■ Lebanon is home to a quarter of a million Druze, Israel and the Golan another 143,000, and in the New World perhaps another 135,000. The largest portion — more than 500,000 — are in Syria, where things have been kicking off.
The Druze role in Assad’s downfall is little appreciated. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa have taken the credit and inherited the mantle of the state, but the militias in the south that decided to take Damascus were a bloc of Sunni and Druze. This decision was taken at a December 6 meeting that followed HTS’s success in taking a series of government-controlled cities in the north. Ahmad al-Awda and his Deraa-based militia moved on Damascus and forced President Assad to flee. When al-Awda’s forces moved in, al-Sharaa was uncertain whether they were going to back up Assad or to topple him. They then invited al-Sharaa’s forces in to the capital and withdrew to their southern holdouts — to wait, and see.
“Assad’s rule destroyed Syria morally,” one Druze emir told The Times. “We’ve ended that phase. Today we demand that there is participation in decision making, and in citizenship, nationalism, and the constitution. Whoever wants to rule Syria has to rule it with a constitution, not a religious book.”
■ Months have passed and the new government is looking to firm up its authority. Al-Sharaa scored a noted success by securing an agreement with the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to integrate into the army of the new republic. Simultaneously, however, the militias in Deraa and Suwayda in the south have begun putting an arm’s length between themselves and the new president.
From Lebanon, meanwhile, Walid Joumblatt warns the Druze of Syria to beware of Israeli plots. “There is a plan to undermine Arab national security,” according to the elder Joumblatt, who invoked the legacy of his co-religionist Sultan al-Atrash and the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 in calling for Syrian unity.
Armchair generals dream of separating the southwest of Syria into a Druze-dominated state protected by Israel, perhaps even merging the Golan into it. Some Druze probably sympathise with the idea. In Suwayda, one of the largest Druze cities, an Israeli flag was raised at a central roundabout — who raised it, no one knows, but it was hours before it was taken down and burned.
Under the French League of Nations mandate, the Druze had their own state, but today the majority seem keen to stay part of Syria, while keeping their weapons at hand. The areas of Druze majority or plurality are neither geographically contiguous nor cohesive, meaning any potential Druze state would have to include a significant and potentially destabilising number of non-Druze.
■ Druze doubts about the value of separatism are hardly surprising: One characteristic of their group is that they generally have a marked loyalty to the state — whichever state it may be.
In Israel proper, they serve in the defence forces (often very high up) and are elected to the Knesset. Amal Nasraldin (or Nasser el-Din) was the first non-Jew to be elected to serve as a Likud member of the Israeli parliament. The Sword Battalion (sometimes called the Minorities Unit) was as old as the State of Israel and while it welcomed Arab Muslims and Christians, Circassians, and others, the largest portion of the unit were Druze. It was disbanded in 2015 because most non-Jewish Israelis prefer to serve in normal unsegregated units – an all-too-rare triumph for civic integration.
■ In the Golan Heights, things are a little more complicated. Israel captured the rocky plateau from Syria in 1967, when tens of thousands of Golanis fled to Syria. Those that stayed were overwhelmingly Druze. Today there are 24,000 in the Golan, compared to 31,000 Israeli settlers.
All Israeli Jews — male and female — do mandatory national military service. Druze men (but not women) are likewise conscripted, like Circassians at the request of the leaders of their community in Israel. The conscription of Druze men has not been extended to the Israeli-occupied heights.
The Golan has never been formally annexed by Israel, though the Knesset passed legislation in 1981 extending Israeli “laws, jurisdiction, and administration” to the Heights. The United Nations Charter bans the use (or threat) of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. By extension, international law generally considers the acquisition of territory through conquest illegitimate and illegal, though many whose reading and knowledge extend beyond the parochialism of the past hundred years might consider this something between laughable and naïve.
International law, unlike domestic law, is whatever you can get away with. In 1961, India invaded Portuguese territory but as Goa was a colony (effectively, though an ‘overseas province’ in Portuguese law) and Portugal only put up a two-day fight, they got away with it.
Portugal was and is a NATO power, but Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifically applies only to armed attacks that take place in Europe and North America — a convenient get-out clause insisted upon by an anti-imperialist Washington keen to avoid being dragged into allies’ colonial conflicts.
■ Druze in the Golan have suffered as the collateral damage of Iran’s determination to throw its weight around the region. The Iranian proxy Hezbollah launched a rocket that struck a football field in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights on 27 July 2024, killing twelve Druze children and injuring another 42. Most of the victims were between the ages of 10 and 16.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is doubly uncaring: Tehran is Shia and Persian whereas the victims were Druze and Arabs. Iran is (in many ways) a highly developed country and certainly an ancient civilisation. The post-Pahlavi regime has been cunning in how it operates. The saying goes that the Persians are willing to fight the Jews to the last Arab, while holding back from active combat themselves.
Iran was a strong, but not uncritical, ally of Israel in the region until Jimmy Carter pulled the rug from under the Pahlavis in 1979.
■ In the Golan Heights, there is an ambiguity of being Syrian land but administered and occupied by Israel. Unlike in the West Bank, where Israeli tolerance of settler abuse of Arab Palestinians has become the norm (and is getting worse), the longer Israel runs the Golan Heights, the further away the memory of Syrian rule becomes. Many Golani Druze are worried that identifying with the Israelis may undermine the cause of their brethren across the frontline in Syria. There are families in Syria that are dependent upon remittances sent from relations in the more prosperous Golan. Loyalties are divided.
The Times has printed some good reporting from the Golan:
“The culprits are the leaders of every faction, all of them,” he said. “Ordinary people don’t care about any of the politics.”
He speaks as an old man. Across the road, 18-year-old Selen, a shop assistant, spoke for the younger generation, but maybe she ended up saying the same thing.
Her attitudes to Israel were positive, she said. She was doing an architecture foundation course at a college in Nazareth and hoped to go to university in Haifa. She had friends in the Israeli army.
This wasn’t something she could discuss with her Damascus-born father or grandfather, though, she added. “We don’t want arguments.”
It was not that she disrespected that side of her heritage either, she said. “I am Israeli and Syrian, and proud of it.”
■ Israel itself is an intensely divided society (as I reported from Jerusalem in Quadrant May 2023). Proportional representation doesn’t help: every government coalition is reliant on smaller fringe parties that make high demands. There is no country whose experience is a better argument for First Past the Post, with its tendency to orient politics toward the centre-ground, than Israel which has suffered from the opposite.
I remember reading about a (left-)liberal retired politician in Israel who was complaining about the Arabs because they don’t join the army so they can’t integrate properly into Israeli society. This confused me as my flawed and limited understanding as an outsider was that, while not conscripted like Jewish Israelis, many Arabs nonetheless serve voluntarily.
Just a few minutes research were enough to find out not only that my initial hunch was true but also that voluntary service in the Defence Forces by Arab Israelis is at its highest point ever. Yet the establishment bourgeois liberal Israeli in question seemed to have no awareness of his fellow countrymen.
■ Incidentally, in the late 1990s some deep work was done on trying to find a modus operandi between Israeli and Assad’s Syrian Arab Republic. My fellow New Yorker the philanthropist Ronald Lauder was knee deep in these discussions — in fact he was these discussions — and perhaps soon the day will come for him to put his experience on the record.
In 2012, Mr Lauder wrote that the view that the Arab Spring was a step towards greater democracy and freedom in the Middle East “now looks premature”:
The idea was probably based partly on wishful thinking, which overlooked the power realities actually shaping events. Even a year on, it is impossible to reach a definite conclusion – the situation is still too confusing, and the new leaders too unknown.
Indeed, where new leaders have taken over, they have been unable to deliver what people were hoping for when they went to the barricades.
Lauder predicted more than a decade ago that Assad’s days were numbered.
That is good news for the world, but there is no assurance that regime change will ultimately resolve Syria’s problems. On the contrary, some problems may worsen.
The most critical issue is how to maintain political stability in the region. […]
A “Syrian Spring” will be dangerous if it results in a failed state. Given the already growing tensions between the Sunni majority and Assad’s ruling Alawite-Shia minority, the risk is considerable. Those demanding change will have huge and unrealistic expectations of a new government, which, in turn, will be limited by the conflicting interests of the main players.
Lauder has also been vocal in speaking up for the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East.
■ Israeli forces are now selectively deployed within Syria beyond the former buffer zone dividing the Golan Heights from Syria proper. An observation post on Mount Hermon provides advance warning of rocket attacks from Iran, a strategic advantage Israel is unlikely to give up any time soon.
Massacres in Latakia and the Syrian littoral have been deeply disturbing for the Alawites, backbone of the old Assadist state. This month, an Orthodox church in Damascus was bombed, killing twenty-five Christians.
The Druze have eyes to see and have taken note. Tensions in the southern suburbs of Damascus, with Druze gunmen clashing with the new government’s forces, may be an unfortunate harbinger of Syria’s near-future.
An earlier version of this piece appeared in the April 2025 edition of Quadrant (Australia).
One famous Druze? Good God, man, Casey Kasem, literally the voice of Shaggy in Scooby-Doo!
"Ethnically, they are Arab, and migrated to the Lebanese mountains and Jabal al-Druze from south Arabia before the advent of Islam." This is false. They are almost entirely Levantine. I am very closely related to them and I am a Persian Jew.