“I am from the occupied Golan Heights,” Walid tells me, by way of introduction. A Druze, Walid (a pseudonym) teaches English at a Druze high school in the Galilee—that is, in Israel proper. For four months I too attend this school: as an observer and as a researcher. Even after all that time, Walid still does not abbreviate reference to his home, never just saying “the Golan Heights.” It is always “occupied.” “Occupied” since before he was even born. His passport is that of the same state then still presided over (albeit in a bloody, contested manner) by Bashar al-Assad. But he neither carries nor stores it; to the contrary, he had handed his passport over to the Syrian authorities for safekeeping. His undergraduate degree is from Damascus University. And yet he is an employee of the Israeli Ministry of Education, and carries an Israeli identity card. “On the line for nationality,” he tells me, it says “undefined.”
Walid is different from all the other teachers I first met at the Druze school in the Galilee where, since 2015, I have been conducting research on Hebrew language teaching among Druze in Israel: very authority-conscious, including in his relation to the school principal. He waxes proudly about his hometown, Majdal al-Shams, “in the occupied Golan Heights. . . . It is much more modern than here,” he says, comparing it to the mostly-Druze village in the Galilee where he teaches. “Women will wear their skirts much higher. You have McDonald’s there. When you come visit, you’ll think you’re back home in America.”
I eventually visit Walid in his home “in the occupied Golan Heights.” But I don’t feel that I’m back home in America. I do feel, though, that I have left Israel—even though I encounter no checkpoint or border control along the way. It’s all in the ambiance.
A Brief History of the Golan Druze
Understood by historians as devotees of an 11th-century offshoot of the Ismaili sect of Shiite Islam, the Druze themselves view their religion as distinct and utterly unitarian, emanating from a divine cosmic genesis in which time is cyclical and transmigration of the soul eternal. Or at least that is what can be gleaned from the escaped shards of holy texts that are otherwise secret, even to the majority of Druze themselves. Only the minority who have taken the vow of the uqqal, the “enlightened,” are entitled to access to the scriptures in exchange for leading an observant lifestyle. Numbering but one million worldwide, with no conversion possible, Druze are clustered in the Levant, the vast majority being in Syria and Lebanon.
In the literature on the Druze, you will come across a problematic concept (borrowed from Islam) wrapped up in the Arabic word taqiyya. Taqiyya can be defined as “dissembling,” or “hiding.” In contexts where being “out” about your faith can be perilous on account of violent prejudice—of which Druze have historically experienced quite a bit—it is perfectly acceptable, if not encouraged, to conceal one’s religious identity. Some (prejudicial) commentators have extended the notion of taqiyya from the strictly theological to the secular: people who practice taqiyya for reasons of religion tend to extend it to other aspects of their lives.
No traces of taqiyya were evident during my time at the Druze school in the Galilee. Druze there are so Israeli that they are dugari—direct. But in the Golan Heights, it doesn’t take long to catch on that—especially when it comes to questions of identity—there are profound differences separating what people think, what they say, and what they feel.
The feeling is palpable: Druze of the Golan view non-tourist newcomers with suspicion. “Where does he or she come from? Why are they here?” On the other hand, the Golan Druze are much more outwardly Westernized than the Druze of Israel proper. Even after more than half a century, the influence of secular Syrian sovereignty lingers on. How the December 2024 replacement of that Baathist regime in Syria by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) will redound to the Golan Druze is still anyone’s guess.
From 1946 until 1967, Majdal Shams, Mas’ade, Bouktaha, and Ein Qiniyye were Druze villages in what the locals called Jawlan, the Syrian mountain region bordering northern Israel. Captured in the Six-Day War, and retained despite Syria’s attempt to retake them in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, these four villages, along with the rest of the Golan Heights, were annexed by Israel in 1981. But that did not automatically turn its Druze residents into Israeli citizens, like their coreligionists in Israel proper. A Golan Druze would have to apply for Israeli citizenship, a rare step that brings opprobrium from members of the surrounding community.
Citizenship notwithstanding, generations of Druze children in the Golan Heights have been Israelized through the schools. Six years before annexation, authority over the educational system in the Golan was transferred to the newly established Druze department within the Israeli Ministry of Education. That is why I was able to spend several days in the middle and secondary schools of Majdal Shams, observing Hebrew language classes and meeting with teachers and school administrators.
Majdal is the largest of the four Golan Druze villages; its secondary schools are a twelve-minute walk from the site of the soccer field where, on July 26, 2024, twelve children and teenagers were killed by a Hizballah missile strike. While the curriculum and pedagogy are familiar, the ambiance is quite different from that in Druze schools in the Galilee. Everything institutional in the Majdal schools cries “Israel”; but it does not feel like Israel in the way that Druze Galilee schools do. And the cat-and-mouse game I need to play with the principal to gain access to his school—despite (or perhaps because of) my permission letter from the Israeli Ministry of Education—is emblematic of the ambivalence I perceive in many of my interactions there.
Unlike their counterparts in the rest of Israel, graduating Druze high-school seniors from the Golan are not subject to conscription into the IDF. Israel grants Golan Druze permission to continue their education in Syrian universities. Mediated by UN truce observers, marriages between Golan Heights and Syrian Druze have also been arranged, as artistically portrayed in the 2004 film The Syrian Bride.
The Syrian civil war scrambled much of this picture. When I visited, the famous “shouting hill”—where Druze would “meet” family members with bullhorns and binoculars across a valley separating Majdal from Syria proper—had already gone silent. Druze graduates of Israeli schools in the Golan no longer may study in Aleppo or Damascus. Most important, fissures in the pro-Assad stance grew steadily as the war raged on, triggering a significant uptick in Golan Druze applications for Israeli citizenship, now held by one in five residents. Long contributing to voluntary Israelization are periodic fears that Israel might negotiate a return of part of the Golan to Syria, leaving vulnerable those Druze who have participated, in one way or another, in the Israeli civil service; given the fall of Assad, the regime change in Syria, and the IDF’s extension into Syrian territory, return of any of the Golan now appears even less likely.
Targeted killings of Druze by Islamist rebels during the civil war—resulting in discreet Israeli actions to protect Druze in Syria—also upended conventional Golan Druze wishes to rejoin the Syrian polity. The massive show of Israeli solidarity after Hizballah killed those dozen Majdal Shams youngsters in the soccer-field missile massacre further diminished opposition to integration within Israeli society.
A more instructive gauge of sentiment vis-à-vis Israel is the attitude towards learning the language of the Jews: Hebrew. More and more, Druze of the Golan take advantage of opportunities to study and to work in Israel proper. There are also healthcare benefits. And for that, there is appreciation of the need to master Hebrew. Politics notwithstanding, Golan Druze parents encourage their children to apply themselves to learning the language.
Time has also been a major factor: those residents with direct ties to Syria are fewer and fewer. Economic opportunity is clearly on the Israeli side of the fence (figuratively as well as literally). The pull of consumerist, if not capitalistic, life is irresistible.
At the same time, there remains considerable social opprobrium when individuals make their civil status official—that is, become Israeli citizens. In many circles, this is still considered an act of treachery. It can result in excommunication by the sheikhs, the religious notables.
But there is an interesting exception: there is no condemnation for acquiring Israeli citizenship at birth. Such is the case of offspring from marriages between a Golan Heights man or woman and a spouse from Israel proper.
Studying Hebrew in the “Occupied Golan Heights”
The principal of the Druze high school in the Golan Heights is evasive. If he responds at all to your message or phone call, he is vague, barely responsive. When I email him from the U.S., he ignores it. A follow-up email meets with no response. I then telephone to determine receipt, but all he’ll say is that he received it. When I suggest a meeting date, he says he is too committed that day but doesn’t suggest an alternative. When I suggest an alternative, he doesn’t answer directly. He instead invokes “the terms of my permission from the Ministry of Education.” Walid, my teacher friend from the Golan Heights, texts on my behalf, and receives merely a cursory “Have a good evening.” Walid suggests contacting a friend of his who is in turn close to the principal of the middle school. Our strategy is to ask if the high-school principal had mentioned to the middle-school principal my coming visit, and if I could drop in on the middle school. The answer from the middle-school principal comes swiftly: “Stop by any time.”
Shortly thereafter, the high-school principal returns my call! He says I should arrive not at 8:00 am, as I had offered, but rather at 8:30 am. When I do arrive at the appointed time, he’s in a class, teaching as scheduled.
When we finally sit down together, he has in front of him a printout of my permission letter. He reads the lengthy Hebrew document out loud, emphasizing when he gets to the “all notes to be recorded only by hand” clause. He then basically dismisses me, but does so by putting me in the hands of Walid’s friend “Amal,” the acting coordinator (the regular one is on pregnancy leave) and “Bashir,” a young, friendly teacher with excellent command of Hebrew.
Amal convenes the entire team of Hebrew teachers. The Hebrew mastery of most of them is nowhere near the level of that of the teachers in Israel proper. I attend the Hebrew classes of two exceptions: Amal and Nashat. Nashat, she will tell me later, comes from a family of very accomplished Hebrew speakers: her brother’s erudition even extends to the Tanakh.
Doubling back to the high school, I wonder why the gates between the immediately adjacent school buildings are locked. My class with Bashir is followed by one with a glamorous, loquacious, strikingly intelligent blonde Hebrew teacher, Dalia. After her lesson, we speak at length with some particularly obdurate and misbehaving tenth-graders. One girl, Shams, refuses to hand over her smartphone to Dalia.
Dalia is not the only interesting (and friendly) teacher I meet. There is Najah Ibrahim, the first female high-school principal in the Golan; Tarrar, teacher of civics (and English, before that); Ziad Barar, a psychologist, who taught in the Galilee for seventeen years; and Amin Kadamani, a poet who published a book of verse titled Chinese Plate.
“Dina” is a first-year Hebrew teacher in a Golan Heights middle school. We are speaking about her subject, lashon (Hebrew for language, but in this context grammar and vocabulary). “Lashon is important for Arab speakers learning Hebrew,” she edifies me. “Jews in general don’t like it. They already speak it at home and so find studying it the way we do to be boring. And religious Jews”—by which she means Haredim—“hate studying lashon. All they’re interested in is Torah and Talmud.” Dina has good standing to make such generalizations: she herself had studied in the Jewish town of Tsfat (Safed).
Israel or Syria?
Among the Druze in the Galilee, Hebrew teaching reinforces the ties between the minority and the majority. In the Golan, Hebrew teaching serves as part of the pedagogic annexation of the territory. Druze of the Golan are the equivalent of green-card holders. They do not serve in the army and have no national voting privileges. Municipal elections are held, but few who are eligible participate.
By the standards of the Galilee Druze village Horfesh, they sport “immodest” dress: boys, girls, men, women—all feel free in the summer to wear shorts. But skin is not all they show off by the way they dress. The local “computer doctor” Emad—a religious Druze neighbor of mine in the Galilee who studies philosophy—explains.
We are sitting on his cushion-lined living room floor, myself in a corner, as his wife plies me with tea and munchies. Our neighborhood is on the same hill as the shrine to the Druze prophet Sabalan, identified in Hebrew as the founder and namesake of the Israelite tribe of Zebulun. From this perch, we can see the homes of the old center of the village, before Mount Sabalan was gentrified.
“Dr.” Emad, a member of a true cult—those who swear by Macintosh—has just spent a good hour figuring out how to transfer pictures from my Android phone to my laptop. In the time it takes to do so, the sun sets, a red band of fading light blending with the shimmering lights of the village below. His digital beneficence over, we now swap stories. I go first, giving my impressions of the Druze of the Golan Heights from my few recent days there, including how differently they dress from what I’m used to in Israel proper.
He tells me a story of a very richly clad boy coming to show off before an ascetically dressed Aristotle. “What does clothing matter?” muses the Aristotelian Druze cyber-maven, channeling the Peripatetic Greek. “Does it change the inside of a person? We Druze dress this way,” he says, pointing to his simple black shirt and pantaloons, “precisely to eliminate the ‘show-off.’ That’s what the Majdal Shams people are like. Showing off their clothes. Showing off their legs. Is it not better to live in simplicity?” A visitor of Emad’s complains of more “showing” problems by Golan Druze.
“I had a problem with a woman teacher from Boukatha,” the principal-turned-pedagogic supervisor tells me, referring to one of the smaller Golan Heights Druze villages. “She was posting pictures of herself in on Facebook. Including pictures of herself in bars! Can you imagine? What kind of example does that set for students? Her defense was that it was her ‘private life.’ What private life is there if you are a teacher and your students can see such things?”
I share my overall sentiment: “It almost felt as if I were no longer in Israel, as if I were in another country. Not even in a Druze community.” Emad goes a step further. “They’re Syrians! A different mentality. There are some religious Druze there, yes—but the others? No values.”
Those “Secular” Golan Druze
“Walid is a nice guy,” says my orthodox Druze computer-jockey neighbor, speaking of the Druze English teacher who commutes to the village from the Golan Heights. “But he wouldn’t accept an invitation to my home. That’s the way it is with the Druze of the Golan—a big separation between the religious and non-religious people. Not like here.” By “here,” Emad means “real Israel.”
“Walid told me that, back in in his village, he has no contact with dati (religious) Druze because they, the religious, don’t want it. I told him that he’s wrong. ‘It’s you, the non-religious, who don’t want anything to do with the religious ones. That’s why you don’t know any orthodox ones.’”
“If the Arab nations had not refused the partition and attacked the Jews—if there had not been a War of Independence—then we would not have been in Israel,” Emad pronounces. “And what would have become of us? Maybe we wouldn’t be,” he adds, referring to the civil war in Syria in which Druze had been targeted by jihadists. “Maybe we would have been all killed off, subjected to a genocide. Perhaps we would have suffered our own Holocaust.”
“Do you know what a herem is?” asks Yehiya Amar, an independent journalist from Horfesh. Of course I do. Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher, was punished with herem—excommunication or expulsion from the community—by the Amsterdam rabbinate, for his allegedly heretical (and pantheistic) views. But Yehiya is not talking about Jewish theological renegades but rather Golan Heights Druze guilty of political heresy. “Those who have strong dealings with Israel are excommunicated,” he informs me. “They are not invited to parties. Or to weddings. They are ignored in public settings. Even their children are excluded.”
“My nationality is ‘undefined,’” says Walid. “This creates a big problem when I apply for scholarships. On the application form, there’s no option for someone like me.” It’s a digital-era frustration: drop-down menus prevent you from stating the essential.
“When you were in America,” I query, referring to a U.S. government cultural-exchange program for which he was selected, “What did you say when people asked where you are from?”
By rote, Walid quotes himself: “I’m from the Golan Heights, which is controlled by Israel but used to be part of Syria.” I can well imagine Middle American eyes glazing over.
“I was in a pub in Fort Wayne, Indiana,” Walid recalls, mixing British idioms within his midwestern memories. “A woman came up to me and asked where I was from. When I told her, ‘The Golan, which used to be part of Syria,’ she asked if the Golan was somewhere in Africa!” We both chortled.
“When I told her no, that it is not in Africa but in the Middle East, she said, ‘So, near Saudi Arabia?’”
“‘It’s very far from there, too,’ I told her. Only when I mentioned Israel did she show some recognition.”
Walid can go overseas with travel documents issued by Israel. They are valid for only two years and must be renewed in person. “Some people need to renew their travel documents every year,” Walid adds. “For my brother, it’s every six months.”
For Walid, there is a concerted effort by Israeli education authorities to separate Druze from Arab identity. He cites the imposition of Israeli ID cards in the early 80s, which gave rise to strikes and stone throwing.
“I had a classmate whose father was very politically involved. Once, in class, he asked the moreshet (culture) teacher: ‘Why is it that we learn about Jewish history and culture, and about Druze history and culture, but we don’t learn about Arab history and culture?’ The teacher had no answer. What could he say? Only, ‘This is what the Ministry of Education has decided, and I have to follow it.’”
“Israel wants to change us, for us to become more modern,” observes Walid. “That’s why they easily give permits for more and more pubs and restaurants to open up. They want to promote Majdal as a place for tourism.” There are other ways that Golan Druze are influenced too: “Many of our teachers do higher training,” he says, using the Hebrew word hishtalmut, “far, far away. In Haifa. In Netanya.”
A View from the Border
Walid takes me to Har Bental, the outpost from which UN peacekeepers survey the horizon and take note of military action on either side of the Israel-Syrian border; this, a result of a 1974 disengagement agreement. Two soldiers—an Australian and a Finn—are on duty, scanning the horizon. “We are like the commentators at a sports game,” says the tall, affable Aussie, “not like referees or umpires. We don’t keep score. We don’t pass judgment or assign penalties. We just observe, passing on what we see.”
Almost on cue, an Israeli drone hovers overhead. He turns to Sami the Finn, then on telescope duty, and reminds him to track whether the drone enters Syrian airspace.
A North American-sounding visitor with a negative view of the international body that from time to time condemns Israeli actions interrupts, rather loudly, “The UN doesn’t do anything!” before moving on. The otherwise unflappable Aussie bridles at the interrupter’s comment. “It’s fine to have your perspective,” he says. “But just be open to hearing what we have to say.”
During our visit, Walid and I are surrounded (overwhelmed, really) by several Birthright groups. These are free first-time tours to Israel for young Jewish men and women.
Walid is intrigued by both the name “Birthright” and the very idea of it. He asks me about it again, the day after our visit. So I ask him—he who refers to his home in ordinary conversation as “the occupied Golan Heights”—what he feels when hearing the Jewish perspective of his home region that is imparted to such American Zionist youth groups.
“I have no problem with it,” he says. “They have their point of view, and I have mine.” But later he adds: “There is one thing about the Jews that I do admire very much. That they really work to build their country. From all over the world they unite and come to strengthen Israel.” Though from “occupied” territory himself, he never calls Israel “Palestine.”
“It’s not like that with the Arab countries. There, the rulers care only for themselves, not the ordinary people. Only to get rich. No democracy, only dictators for themselves.”
On Saturday evening, July 27, 2024, Walid’s ten-year-old daughter “Leila” was playing on the soccer pitch of Majdal Shams along with another dozen children. At around 6:15 pm, she started home. A few minutes later, the rocket from Lebanon hit the sports field.
Poor Walid is conflicted. Leila survived by virtue of an early chance departure. But two of her friends were killed, and that memory will remain a lifetime scar.
Walid is also squeezed. Squeezed between a Syrian nationalism he cannot kick and a Zionist reality he cannot resist. Squeezed between an Arabic that he cultivates in his children and a Hebrew that is a ticket to their opportunity. Squeezed between a Lebanese terrorist organization and a Jewish state which will defend him, and his land, as its own.
More about: Druze, Golan Heights, Israeli society, Syria