The prize for Israel sounds tempting. After the Hamas attack on October 7th 2023 Palestinian labourers from the occupied territories were barred from working in Israel. Unpicked olives rotted on trees. Cranes stood idle over building sites once manned by Palestinians. But now, over the border in Syria, Israel is eyeing a pool of cheap labour, hungry for work. Avi Dichter, Israel’s agriculture minister, says he is soon to unveil a “pilot scheme” to bring Druze farmhands from Syria to toil on Israeli-run land. “They’ll be willing substitutes,” says Mahmoud Shanan, a Druze lawyer and former Israeli army officer who has been building a Druze heritage centre in Israel near the Lebanese border.
Israel is not just seeking economic advantage following Bashar al-Assad’s downfall in Syria and the curbing of Iran’s regional ambitions. It is now a triumphalist power seeking to forge old and new alliances. Even before Syria’s change of regime, Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, had singled out Syria’s Druze and various Kurdish groups as a bulwark against the region’s Sunni Arab majority who had cheered when the Islamists of Hamas broke through Israel’s border with Gaza.
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Israel’s foreign ministry boasts that Israeli aid to minorities in the region already flows across Israel’s borders. Uri Grinott, an Israeli analyst, notes that this includes weapons. Mr Saar spoke of cementing “natural alliances” with the region’s patchwork of ethnic minorities. The more ambitious of Israeli expansionists see a wedge of more than 100m people from minority groups, including Azeris, Berbers, Circassians, Kurds and Yazidis, waiting to follow Israel’s lead. Dan Diker of the Jerusalem Centre of Political Affairs, an Israeli think-tank, reckons they could serve as stepping stones to project Israel’s influence from north-west Africa across to Iran.
After a string of battlefield victories, some Israelis bask in their country’s new power. They reflect that in the 19th century several European countries adopted the Middle East’s minorities, Jews included, to carve out colonial influence, just as, more recently, Iran’s rulers have spread their clout by turning the region’s Shia Muslim minority into proxies, such as the Houthis in Yemen and Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Israel’s ambition to seek regional alliances is nothing new. Early Zionists created warm ties with Maronite Christian farmers in Lebanon, who—so it is said—could be heard tending their cattle in Yiddish. After Israel’s independence in 1948 David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, proposed a brit—biblical Hebrew for “covenant”—with the region’s minorities to confront Arab nationalism fostered largely by Sunnis. Yigal Allon, an Israeli general, championed an alliance with the Druze to extend Israel’s reach into southern Syria. Another Israeli general once led Kurdish rebels in Iraq. Golda Meir, another Israeli prime minister, courted Christians in Sudan to counter Egyptian influence.
Some minorities may see benefits in allying with Israel today. Syria is now ruled by a former al-Qaeda leader. A recent massacre of minority Alawites on the country’s coast has left them crying for protection. Many Syrian manual workers, who are destitute after the civil war, are aware they could earn many times more in Israel.
For the Druze there is a spiritual lure, too. Several of the holiest Druze shrines are in Israel. For the first time in decades, red-and-white-capped Druze sheikhs recently crossed from Syria to worship at the tomb of Nabi Shuaib, their prophet, also known as the biblical Jethro, Moses’s father-in-law, on a hill above the Sea of Galilee. Israel’s Druze tend to champion the cause of regional minorities. “All minorities are worried about the extremist jihadist terrorists and want protection,” says Mowafaf Tarif, the Druze spiritual leader in Israel, who has begun fielding Syrian Druze applications for work. “If they’re going to protect us, let them have an expanded Israel,” adds an Israeli Druze activist.
Yet many Israelis recall that what starts as hubris in the region often ends in humiliation. When Israel marched into Lebanon in 1982 it anointed a Maronite Christian as president and expected to seal a peace treaty. But he was assassinated, resistance to Israel grew and Israel had to retreat. The Shia minority who welcomed Israel were soon hurling grenades. “They didn’t play the role expected of them,” says Mr Dichter, who back then was an intelligence officer stationed in Lebanon’s coastal city of Sidon. Likewise, Israel armed Zaydi Shias in Yemen in the 1960s; now their Houthi descendants chant “Death to Israel” and fire ballistic missiles at it.
And alliances can turn sour in a flash. Israel dropped its Kurdish friends in the 1970s after Iran’s shah and Turkey’s generals offered better terms. (In 1999 Israeli spooks helped the Turks capture the Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan.) In 2000 Israel abandoned the South Lebanese Army, a militia of minorities it had backed across its northern border, though it offered citizenship to some members and their families. Some Druze remain wary. Though Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria half a century ago, most of the Druze there still balk at accepting Israeli citizenship.
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has even promised to protect the Druze and Christians in the suburbs of southern Damascus, where many are concentrated. His finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, suggests taking the whole city. If the past is a guide, that might well turn out to be foolhardy. ■
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