Belfast (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Last week, Israel launched the latest of some 300 raids into Syria in the past few months. Some such incursions, as with a major set of airstrikes on Syria in July shows its determination to be a destabilizing factor in the region. Israel claimed that it carried out the airstrike in order to protect the Druze community in Syria — trying to project itself as the protector of minorities in the region.
In November of last year, Israel foreign minister, Gideon Saar, went beyond protection and talked about an alliance between Israel and minorities in the region such as the Druze and the Kurds.
However, the talk about protection and alliance with minorities contradicts how Israel treats its own minorities. To start with, Israel”s own legislation discriminates against minorities. A report issued by Amnesty International in 2022 condemned Israel as an apartheid stated. Amnesty highlighted that not only in Gaza and the West Bank but also inside Israel itself, Palestinian communities – including Druze – are treated as lesser citizens than Jews and face many forms of institutionalized discrimination. the 2018 “nation state of the Jewish people” constitutional law crystallized and enshrined this discrimination, investing sovereignty solely in Israel’s Jewish citizens, some 79% of the total.
Although the Druze who live inside Israel serve in the Israeli army, Israel still discriminates against them. For example, The Druze Have a higher rate of conscription than Jews and are more likely to be assigned a combat role where they face greater danger. Despite that, like Palestinian Muslims and Christians, the Druze have seen large parts of their land — estimated at 70% — confiscated by Israel to build houses exclusively for Jews while the Druze were often denied building permits.
In relation to the Kurdish Jewish community in Israel, during a recent conversion with the renowned Jewish historian Avi Shlaim who lived in Israel and served in the Israeli army, he told me about racism towards the Jewish Kurds in Israeli society, where they use Kurds as an example of stupidity. This reflects the often unfaced racism of European Jews in Israel toward Jews who are not of European origin.
To deconstruct Israeli officials’ discourse about “protecting minorities,” we just need to look at how Israel treats other minorities in the wider region. Soon after bombing Syria, Israel bombed a church in Gaza, killing three people. The attack on the church attracted worldwide condemnation, including by Pope Leo XIV who called for an immediate halt to Israeli military barbarity in Gaza. Additionally, not only in Palestine but also in Israel’s latest war on Lebanon, Israeli forces attacked a church compound destroying the church, the priest’s house, and the parish offices, and killed a number of people. There are many other documented attacks on Christians by Israel.
It is, therefore, clear that Israeli officialdom often has a blind spot in its view of other ethnic and faith groups. For hard line Israeli nationalists, it is all about using minorities to serve a national agenda. It is about going back to David Ben Gurion strategy of the “periphery doctrine” designed in the 1950’s to use the neighbors of the Arabs against the Arabs. This strategy also applies to minorities within the Arab world. For example, the Israeli alliance with the Lebanese far-right Maronite militias led to the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre in which thousands of Palestinian civilians and others were killed.
File photo of Aleppo, Syria by Fadi Alagi on Unsplash
After Israel signed peace and normalization agreements with several Arab countries, including Egypt, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, it became possible for its elites to abandon the periphery doctrine and focus on building bridges. It seems, however, that like other colonial powers, Israel prefers to continue to use ‘divide and rule’ politics in order to weaken the Arab states further. Some Israeli strategists may view the Syrian revolution as an opportunity to expand its borders, or to further partition an Arab world long since partitioned by imperial Britain and France — and to carve out tiny new sectarian and ethnic mini-states loyal to Israel and dependent on it, but constantly at war with each other.
Minorities in Syria are best placed to thrive by building a new, multi-cultural society and engaging in the necessary internal struggles — through peaceful politics — to accomplish that goal. Weakening their own homeland by becoming cat’s paws of an external power will not benefit them or their country in the medium to long run.
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