Druze in an Age of Neglect — From the Palestinian Plow to the Israeli Rifle

One is gripped by chills and sorrow as we witness the assaults of the campaigns of genocide that the Israeli occupation army has been waging on Gaza since October 7, 2023 and up to now, and before that as well, as in the West Bank, and the wound becomes more painful when you learn that there are Palestinian Arab names that took part in the campaigns of genocide, having been recruited into the Israeli occupation army, and among the names of the Israeli occupation army’s dead—soldiers and officers in the Gaza Strip—it turned out that some of them were Palestinian Arabs (Bedouin), and some were Druze from the Palestinian Druze community, whose members number more than 150,000 and who are present in several Arab Druze villages in Palestine, and we learned that there are hundreds of Arabs and Palestinian Druze conscripted compulsorily, and an Israeli source stated that they number in the thousands, and they serve in a unit in the Israeli occupation army formerly called the "Minorities Unit"; likewise, Border Police units are almost mostly composed of Druze Arabs. There were some Druze Arab military governors in the occupied areas after 1967, in addition to Druze Arab individuals who joined and were recruited into the Israeli security services, and their treatment of their Arab Palestinian brethren was described as harsh and strict.

·      As for the other bitter and extremely dangerous story, it is the numbers of Palestinians who collaborate with the Israeli occupation from the rest of the parts of Palestine after 1948..including the West Bank, which gnaws at the Palestinian Arab body.. They are not few in number..despite the obscurity of its details, and the lack of clear information....but these collaborators with the Israeli occupation, are of importance to these occupying authorities to the extent that they were indirectly referenced in the Oslo Accords in Article 15 of the English-language version of the Oslo Accords page 21 - Office of the Secretary-General of the United Nations -) 1995: where the text referred to these Palestinian collaborators:

(Palestinians who have maintained contact with the Israeli authorities will not be subjected to acts of harassment, violence, retribution or prosecution. Appropriate ongoing measures will be taken, in coordination with Israel, in order to ensure their protection)!!

which Israel stipulated that they should not be exposed to this category from the Palestinian side..where the Arabic translation text read as follows☹ (• Palestinians who have remained in contact with the Israeli authorities will not be subjected to acts of harassment, violence, retribution, or prosecution. Appropriate ongoing measures will be taken, in coordination with Israel, in order to ensure their protection), and informed Palestinian sources estimated their numbers in the tens of thousands. But this dangerous subject..we will write about it in later publications...!

·      The current publication, however, will focus on the involvement of some Palestinian Arabs (some Bedouin and some Druze) in recruitment and service in the Israeli occupation army and Israeli security agencies..and it is a heart-wrenching story as one asks...why do some Palestinian Arabs join the Israeli occupation army, or Israeli security agencies...? And fight in the ranks of a common enemy that usurped the land belonging to all Palestinians..and committed massacres against the Palestinian people over a century, regardless of which sect that Palestinian belongs to or another, what is the price for that..! One can, in some of these circumstances, concoct excuses that are due to the force of circumstances and reality..but they are completely unacceptable under any circumstance, since it is not permissible to attribute condemnation to objective circumstance at the expense of condemning the act of cooperation with the occupation, since that act rests, in addition to objective circumstances, on a subjective orientation and readiness..which deserves exposure and confrontation..not as a Druze act but as an unpatriotic act..such that condemnation of the act should not extend to condemnation of the sect itself!!

·      In this regard, I reviewed a summary of a book entitled "Druze in an Age of Neglect".... "From the Palestinian Plow to the Israeli Rifle" authored by the Arab professor of the Druze community, Qais Madi Faru, who was born in the town of Isfiya in 1944 in Palestine..and died in 2019...

·      Professor Faru says that "while the occupation authorities allowed the inhabitants of Beit Jann and the other Druze villages to reach the 'Khit Land' that had been confiscated from their owners, in order to train on it for conducting wars, they were prevented from entering it as farmers for security reasons" and he described this paradox by saying: Beit Jann soldiers were able to enter the 'Khit Land' when they replaced their fathers' and grandfathers' plows with Israeli rifles"

·      And Professor Qais Madi Faru, the Arab Druze, adds...that after 1967 the Arab Druze community witnessed the rise of two contradictory phenomena: an increase in Druze working in Zionist security agencies versus the numbers of opponents who demanded the abolition of "compulsory conscription" and equality, although a number of the educated within the Druze community created several different currents, including those who called for full "integration" into Israel. At their head since 1954 was Salman Fallah who established the Druze Scouts organization and included a number of Druze activists, while this current focused on criticizing the traditional leaderships with the Israeli authorities and called for equality of rights with the Jews. Among the statistics that Professor Faru cited in his mentioned book, there were 84 conscripts from the Druze community who enlisted in 1954 in the Israeli occupation army, out of 504 youths required to be drafted into the Israeli army where the professor considered conscription essentially a basis for separating the Druze from their Arab Palestinian brethren..

·      The Zionist movement over time succeeded in winning over some individuals here and there, and convincing them with the privileges of conscription, and integration with Israeli Jews.., where conscription began as a choice then became obligatory..with increasing enlistees, and convincing some of their peers that their future lies in integration with the Jews..etc..although the majority of the Druze community and its intellectuals, elders and sheikhs..were a strong bulwark against this decline from some opportunistic individuals and those subjected to continuous campaigns by Israeli politicians and security agencies to separate the Arab Druze community from their other Arab Palestinian brethren by all means..of which conscription in the Israeli army was one of the most important tools used to tame these individuals, in addition to Israeli officials repeating to some groups of the Druze community narratives of old, in which they claim that the Druze were killed and slaughtered by Arabs in Lebanon in 1860..! And so on.....and an example of the majority Druze rejection of such conscription is the immortal Palestinian poet the late Samih al-Qasim..(an Arab Druze), who suffered for rejecting the idea of conscription in the Israeli army!

·      Many of those who were conscripted into the Israeli occupation army reconsidered when the Israeli Nation-State and Jewishness Law was issued...which revealed the racism of the Zionist movement in its truth..and it was clear to the Arab Druze community from the beginning that the Zionist movement had lured them with equality in rights and privileges in Israeli military service, while they were not equal in land ownership...where the Zionist movement regarded the Druze community as Arabs when the issue was their rights to lands, so it placed them on the list of Arabs whose lands are to be confiscated....and the lands of Arab Druze were confiscated and still are to this day..!

·      But what did the Arab national movement do with its Arabs and Druze and Bedouin and all its sects to stand before such breaches in the dam, before the Zionist movement that occupied most of Palestine..indeed now all of it. Fortifying the Palestinian community everywhere against any gap like these gaps, which undermine the immunity of the society, is an obligation on every Palestinian, whether an official or an ordinary person..! Knowing that the Palestine Liberation Organization undertook, through some of its officials who were entrusted with tasks of contact with Israeli society,..yet that did not yield the desired results..even at the level of Israeli society...but what is most required is serious, positive, intelligent and sincere action to fortify the Palestinian community in all its locations and sects from the danger of Zionist pressures on Palestinian youth..to recruit them and to separate them and create division among all its sects..