In First Since 1967, Syrian Mayor Meets Israeli Officers

December 16, 2024

by: Canaan Lidor ~ JNS

Monday, 16 December 2024 | Community leaders in the Syrian side of the Golan, including at least one mayor, openly met with Israel Defense Forces [IDF] officers holding the area, an Israeli newspaper reported on Sunday.

That revelation coincided with reports of a desire by some Druze villagers in Syria to have their communities come under Israeli rule.

In one meeting, the mayor of an unnamed village in Syria met with three Israelis, two of them army officers visible in a photograph published on the cover of Yediot Achronot. Wearing full gear and toting assault rifles, the officers, one of them a captain, are seen conversing in what looks like a conference room with a man wearing traditional Arab garb.

“Other meetings are also happening, the fear barrier from the Assad regime has been breached and there are new opportunities for cooperation, including economically, that are already being worked out,” an unnamed Israeli officer told the paper. The meetings are the first of their kind in over 50 years.

Israel seized controlling positions in nearby Syria last week following the fall of the regime of Bashar Assad. Israel has also carried out many airstrikes in Syria in a bid to destroy weapons it does not want to see fall into the hands of the Islamists who deposed Assad, Syria, Iran or other regional players.

The Israeli side of the Golan Heights, which Israel took from Syria in 1967 and de facto annexed in 1981, passing the Golan Heights Law and applying Israel’s government and laws there, has about 20,000 Druze residents in four thriving villages that have coexisted harmoniously with the area’s majority Jewish population and the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the area annually.

Leaders and most members of that community have long defined themselves publicly as Syrian citizens living under occupation and declined to take up Israeli citizenship. This was largely understood as a policy of deniability in case the Golan is returned to Syria under the dictatorship of Assad, an Iranian ally whose late father, Hafez, waged several wars against Israel.

Israel has another 150,000 Druze who are citizens elsewhere in the country, mainly in the Galilee. Syria has about 600,000 Druze while Lebanon has some 250,000.

In recent years, the number of Golan Druze who took up Israeli citizenship has skyrocketed, along with participation in municipal elections. However, a large majority of Golan Druze have not done either. The outbreak of the civil war in Syria in 2011, which set the scene for Assad’s ouster, convinced many Golan Druze to become Israeli.

Six Druze Villages

Against this backdrop, a Kurdish news site, Kurdistan News24, reported on Friday that residents of six Druze villages in the Golan have expressed a desire to have them annexed by Israel. A leader of the village of Hader, which is currently under Israeli control and is situated about two miles east of the Druze Israeli town of Majdal Shams, reportedly also said this.

The issue was discussed at a meeting Friday in Hader, Kurdistan News24 reported in an article that featured a video from that meeting. It shows a man speaking before about 200 people, reportedly in Hader, asking them:

“What’s our fate, my brothers?” with the crowd responding: “Israel.”

He continued, according to a translation of the speech: “In the name of all the people of Hader, and if anyone objects, please say,” with no objections heard. “If we have to choose, we will choose the lesser evil, and even if it’s considered evil to ask to be annexed to the [Israeli] Golan. But it’s a much lesser evil than the evil coming our way… That evil might take our women, might take our daughters. They might take our homes.”

The man also said: “We want to be annexed to the Israeli Golan to preserve our dignity, and this applies to all of the region’s villages, because their fate is no different. We want to join our people in the Golan and live with freedom and honor.”

Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz and other officials said the deployment in Syria was temporary.

Uri Heitner, a former leader of Golan communities and a resident of Kibbutz Ortal [collective community] there, welcomed the appeal to annex Druze villages.

“We certainly shouldn’t reject the idea,” he said.

Heitner, who led the fight against plans by the Labor Party to return the Golan to Syria in the 1990s, said Israel could work to establish a Druze state or autonomous region from the Hermon in the northern Golan Heights to Jabal al-Druze, situated about 50 miles [80 km.] southeast of the Hermon. “Another option is to agree to annex the villages, along with a far wider strip of land that would meet the security interests of Israel,” Heitner wrote in his blog on Saturday.

He also analyzed the desire to come under Israeli control by some Druze Syrians, whose communities have family ties with the Israeli ones across the border.

“Over the past 58 years, the Druze of the eastern Golan witnessed the freedom and prosperity enjoyed by their brethren in the Golan in the thriving, democratic State of Israel, compared to their life under tyranny and financial stagnation, and then the decline during the civil war,” Heitner wrote.

But the main reason for seeking to come under Israeli control, he added, “is the fear of Syria becoming an ISIS- or Hamas-style Islamic state, where the Druze would be persecuted and oppressed in the best-case scenario, and end up as the Yazidis did in the worst one.”

Posted on December 16, 2024

Source: (This article was originally published by the Jewish News Syndicate on December 16, 2024. Time-related language has been modified to reflect our republication today. See original article at this link.)

Photo Credit: The IDF Spokesperson's Unit/jns.org