In the occupied Golan Heights last week, hundreds of Druze protesters demonstrated against Israeli plans to build wind turbines on their land, saying it would harm agriculture in the region.
Opposition to the state-backed renewable energy project has seen thousands of Druze in the Golan, most of whom are Syrian citizens, mobilise against the Israeli state in recent weeks.
On Saturday, the spiritual leader of the Druze in Israel, Sheikh Muwafak Tarif, spoke at an emergency meeting in Kafr Yasif near Acre in northern Israel, warning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if he didn’t respond to the community’s demands “there will be a response that Israel has not seen to this day”.
The Druze leader also called for a halt to demolition orders issued for Druze homes in Israel and the cancellation of fines for construction without a permit.
Tensions between Israel’s Druze and the state have been festering for years, becoming more visible with Israel’s introduction of the 2017 Kaminitz legislation and the 2018 controversial Nation-State law.
The Kaminitz legislation expanded the use of the Israeli state’s administrative powers to carry out demolition and eviction orders, which thus far had focused solely on Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
“Tensions between Israel’s Druze and the state have been festering for years, becoming more visible with Israel’s introduction of the 2017 Kaminitz legislation and the 2018 controversial Nation-State law”
The Nation-State law, meanwhile, downgraded Arabic – spoken by 20% of the population – to a secondary language and limited the right to self-determination to Jews only. The law does not reference the equality of all Israeli citizens as once made in the 1948 Declaration of Independence.
The roughly 150,000 Arab Druze – a 1,000-year offshoot practice of Shia Islam – saw in Kaminitz and the Nation-State laws a violation of their citizenship rights, especially as most have deemed themselves loyal, integrated Israeli subjects with undeniable contributions to the Jewish state.
The impact of discriminatory laws was noticeable in the last two Israeli general elections, with more Druze voting for the Arab Joint List, and, according to Israeli Channel 12, more engaging in debates about the value of enlisting in the Israeli army. RELATED
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Hierarchal rights
On the surface, the Druze issue appears like an internal civil rights debate. But in the self-declared Jewish state, non-Jews’ rights have been contingent on proving ‘loyalty’ to the state, even if certain laws are geared against them.
Druze ‘loyalty’ and, therefore, access to civil rights, has been closely tied to their service in the Israeli army. Some Druze, in fact, occupied high-ranking positions in the army and many of them served in the 1967-occupied territories. That earned the community a negative reputation amongst most Palestinians.
Others, however, see the Druze situation more critically as a product of a tragic identity crisis imposed by a complex settler-colonial context.
As early as the 1930s, the Zionist movement realised that given the fierce Druze resistance against the French in Syria (1925), it was necessary to neutralise their threat or align them with the Zionist cause. One way to do it was to exploit their minority vulnerabilities and the factionalism among the three Druze families – Tarif, Yarka, and Abu Snaan.
After Israel’s 1948 inception, the Israeli state sought to divide the remnants of Palestinians by marginalising groups – like Bedouins – and cultivating relations with others, mainly the vulnerable Druze.
