The Arab Druse of Israel are a loyal community to the Jewish state.
Will Israel get sucked into the Syrian quagmire to protect the Druse community near its border from the advancing threat of Islamic State?
Members of the Druze community stand near a Druze flag during a rally in the Druze village of Majdal Shams.. (photo credit:REUTERS)
A druze state existed in Syria from 1921 to 1936 located in the Jabal Druse – which means Druse Mountain‒ region that gave the state its eponymous name. Jabal Druse is part of the volcanic heights in southwest Syria, some sixty kilometers from the Jordanian border and a similar distance from the Israeli border with Syria along the Golan Heights.
Today, as pressure grows from the advancing forces of the Islamic State, the Syrian Druse community is preparing to defend and establish its own autonomous zone. This may also, for the first time since the war broke out more than four years ago, suck Israel, with its own Druse community of some 130,000 people, deep into the bloody Syrian quagmire.
The “Druse State” was an autonomous district during the days when the French ruled Syria and Lebanon between the two world wars. Its capital and central city was and still is As-Suwayda. During the state’s brief period of “independence,” the Druse led by Sultan al-Atrash rebelled in 1925 against the French occupiers. The revolt with a strong Syrian nationalist sentiment spread to engulf the whole of Syria, but was quashed within two years by the French. Still, the revolt did ensure that autonomy lasted until 1936 when the area’s special status was canceled and it was incorporated into Syria as part of the Franco-Syrian treaty signed the same year.
The Druse dream of independence vanished.
Though al-Atrash was a Syrian nationalist who showed solidarity with the Palestinians, he is still admired nowadays by Druse everywhere, including in Israel.
