Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (15 page)

The largest Druze community is in Majdal Shams, high on the slopes of Mount Hermon, where about 9,000 people live. Majdal Shams is the Arabic adaptation of the village’s Aramaic name, which in English means Tower of the Sun.

It’s an apt name. It’s at the top of the Golan, nearest the sun, and it towers above the entire Middle Eastern Mediterranean where Israel, Lebanon and Syria converge.

Its residents are an unusual bunch. The Druze are monotheists who emerged from Islam a thousand years ago, but their religion changed so drastically it became something else. They don’t proselytize or wage wars of conversion or conquest. No one is even allowed to convert if they want to. That door closed in the year 1043. You’re either born a Druze or you aren’t a Druze. And if you die a Druze, they say you’ll be reincarnated as one.

Their religious texts are kept secret not only from non-Druze but also from most Druze. The “uninitiated” majority aren’t required to observe any rituals. They aren’t even allowed to know much about the religion.

There are only about 800,000 of them in the entire Middle East, and they live exclusively in the Levant. The Middle East beyond Israel’s borders is often thought of as a monolithic bloc of Arabs and Muslims, but it isn’t, especially not here. This part of the region is defined by diversity and disunity. Druze live chockablock next to Arab Christians who live alongside Armenians. Shias live near Jews and Maronite Catholics who often don’t even think of themselves as Arabs. Alawites live among Sunnis, Shias, Christians and Jews. Sectarian-ethnic maps look similar to those in the volatile Caucasus and the former Yugoslavia before it unraveled.

The Druze, like the Maronites, are too few to build their own state. They don’t even appear to want their own state, opting instead for caution to ensure themselves against persecution. Kamal Jumblatt, the father of Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, once explained his people this way: “Ever alert, [Druze] gauge their surroundings and choose their words carefully, assessing what must be said and what can be said.”

If the Golan Druze were to accept Israeli citizenship, and if the Israelis were to then hand the Golan back to Assad, they’d almost certainly be denounced as traitors for signing up with the “Zionist Entity.” Any number of bad things might happen. They could be imprisoned. They might be killed. They could be thrown off the Golan and permanently exiled to Israel. As far as I know, the Syrian government never once threatened anything of the sort, but it doesn’t have to. The Druze are more finely attuned to their political environment than anyone else in the Middle East, and they understand precisely the nature of the government in Damascus.

What distinguishes totalitarian regimes like Syria’s from garden-variety authoritarians like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is their ability to prevent citizens from even thinking like free individuals. When I visited the Balkans a couple of years earlier, I heard about a particularly chilling example from the communist era. “Under the regime of Enver Hoxha,” an Albanian human rights official told me, “people were afraid to look at churches and mosques. A friend told me she was too scared to even think about God because Hoxha would know and would throw her in prison.”

Assad still has a powerful effect on the minds of the people who live under his rule. He can even affect the minds of Druze on the Golan who were born after 1967 and haven’t experienced his rule directly for even a day. They effectively live in Israel and have never known anything else. They’ve never met a single Syrian policeman or intelligence officer. All they need to know is that someday they might.

“Why,” I said to Faiz, “don’t you just take Israeli citizenship?”

“We can’t think about these things,” he said. “We can’t take risks. There are only 20,000 of us.”

I asked him what he thought might happen to him if he did take out citizenship and was later handed over to Syria. He didn’t know. All he knew was that the notion was dangerous.

Israeli journalist and political analyst Jonathan Spyer noticed a similar phenomenon when he traveled from Israel to Lebanon after the war against Hezbollah in 2006. “People have an acute sense of this unseen power, which is both nowhere and everywhere,” he told me.

Beirut is a decadent, freewheeling Riviera on the Mediterranean. It has more in common with Tel Aviv than with any Arab capital, but much of South Lebanon is ruled by Iran’s proxy Hezbollah. Whenever Spyer mentioned to Beirutis that he had a mind to drive to the south, they strongly advised him against it.

“I’d be hanging out in these lovely bars and restaurants,” he said, “with lively people enjoying these nice airy evenings, and as soon as I’d mention that I was going down there, they’d suddenly become serious and say, ‘Don’t do it.’ And I’d say, ‘Why not? Tell me why I shouldn’t go down there.’ They’d just say, ‘You shouldn’t do that.’ To me, that’s power. It’s real unseen power. Any force that can put that kind of fear into people is something we need to look at.”

That’s the kind of power Assad has over the Golan even though his soldiers and his police cannot set foot there.

“What do you think of Assad and his government?” I asked Faiz.

I could tell by the look on his face that he wished I hadn’t said that.

“I’m not allowed to tell you if the Syrian government is good or bad,” he said. “I can say, though, that we want democracy.”

Look closely at those words. He’s actually telling me what he can say and what he cannot say. Rarely will people who are subject to totalitarian censorship speak with such candor. Usually, if they’re not defiant, they’ll just recite the party line and that’s it.

The feeling of powerlessness coming off him was palpable. His community is tiny and weak. They have no control over what happens to the Golan. No one in the “international community” asks them if they’d rather live in Israel or in Syria. Some individuals have taken out Israeli citizenship and moved to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, where Damascus can’t reach them, but those who want to remain in their home village live in the Assad family’s shadow.

“I feel Syrian,” he said. “The Israeli government is not our government. I don’t hate Israel or Jewish people, but my family comes from Syria. My land-ownership document is Syrian.”

Yet he has never visited Syria, at least not the part of Syria controlled by the Syrians. The only country he has ever traveled around and lived in is Israel. And he’s at odds enough with the government in Damascus that he says he wants democracy even if he won’t say anything bad about the Assads.

He studied economics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “It’s a great city,” he said. “Most of our professionals work in Tel Aviv and Haifa because there’s not enough of an economy on the Golan. We have to rely on ourselves. No one will help us, so we work hard—more than eight hours a day, believe me.”

His Druze community, he told me, produces more professionals per capita than Israel’s Jewish society does. I don’t know if that’s really true or if it isn’t, but he seems to think so.

I’m reasonably sure that an independent Druze state would differ markedly from most other Arab states if one existed. It would be prosperous. It would not start aggressive wars with its neighbors. It would not be a theocracy like Iran or Gaza—not when even most Druze aren’t allowed to know the details of their religion. The “uninitiated” majority live entirely secular lives.

“Any impulse for a Druze state?” my Israeli companion Hadar asked Faiz.

“No,” he said. “We are not a nationality. We are a religion.”

“And you’re Arabs,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “We speak Arabic. And we feel Arab.”

Yet I can’t help but wonder if they would still feel like Arabs if they had their own state. Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn’t. No matter. The question is entirely theoretical. They’ll never have their own state.

The border between the Golan Heights and Syria proper is strange. People and goods can cross, but only once and only one way. The Druze can export agricultural products to Syria, but Israelis can’t export or import anything. The Druze also can’t import goods from the Syrian side because there’s a chance the items would end up in Israel.

If a Golani Druze woman marries a Syrian Druze—and it happens sometimes—she can cross the border to join him, but it’s a one-way trip. She will never be allowed to return. She’ll get a Syrian identity card on arrival, and that will be that. Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis brought all this to life in his 2006 film
The Syrian Bride
.

I asked Faiz to explain his religion to me, though I knew the Druze aren’t allowed to say much about their religion to outsiders. Faiz laughed when I asked him, probably because he suspected I knew that already.

“You don’t need to know,” he said. “But if you want to know, you can find out a few things on Google.”

If I understand the Druze correctly—and I’m pretty sure that I do—the Druze of the Golan would become completely loyal to Israel if Syria were to relinquish its claim and if the rest of the world recognized the Golan Heights as Israeli.

They’d do it for the same reason the Druze of the Galilee are loyal to Israel and the Zionists. I wanted Faiz to admit this to me, but I knew he couldn’t. I was curious, though, what he would say if I put the question to him directly.

“What if Syria says Israel can keep the Golan?” I said. “Would you take Israeli citizenship then?”

“It’s not going to happen,” he said and laughed.

We both laughed. He knew what I was trying to get him to say, and he knew that I knew that he knew. In a way he was being evasive, but his answer was also on point. My question was so hypothetical there was no sense in his even considering it, as if I’d asked a man who lives in Nebraska what he’d think if Omaha were annexed to Canada.

I thought he handled my questions well, but he got increasingly fidgety and uncomfortable as I kept at it. He wasn’t frightened, as was a Syrian I once met in Beirut who was terrified that the Mukhabarat—the secret police—would overhear our conversation and send him to prison, but Faiz seemed a little unsure of himself. My questions were more direct than he was used to. Druze politics are subtle. Meaning is often found in the things left unsaid.

After a while he called a friend on his cell phone and asked for some backup.

Faiz’s English is pretty good, but his friend, Dr. Taiseer Maray from the Golan for Development organization, speaks it perfectly. He was all handshakes and smiles when he showed up. “What is it you’d like to know?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve spent the last two days talking to Israeli Jews about the Golan Heights, but you live here too.”

“And you don’t want only one side of the story,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “You know how this works. So tell me about the Golan Heights from your point of view.”

“I’m not sure what our Israeli neighbors really think,” Faiz interjected, “so if they tell you, please let us know.”

Hadar was stunned when she heard that, but she didn’t say anything in front of Faiz or Taiseer. She waited until we were back in the car.

“Like it or not,” Taiseer said, “the Golan is Syrian land. That’s just a fact. It has nothing to do with politics. There were Syrian farms and villages here. I’m not talking about whether Syria is a free country.”

I didn’t ask him about the dearth of Syrian freedom. He suggested right up front that he did not want to talk about it, but saying even that much was significant. We both know Syria isn’t free, and his bringing it up even in the neutral way that he did told me he was thinking about it, he wanted me to think about it, and he wanted me to know that he was thinking about it. He obviously wouldn’t have said that if Israel had a land dispute with, say, Denmark.

Like Faiz, he perfectly and precisely split his politics down the middle.

“I care about Israel,” he said, “much more than I care about, for example, Egypt. Israel is my neighbor. And I’m not just saying this to be nice. I want the best for my neighbors. If Israel needs to occupy the Golan Heights for security reasons, okay, but Israelis shouldn’t build settlements here.”

He and Faiz knew my companion Hadar lives on a Golan Heights settlement. She didn’t take offense at what Taiseer said, though. The spare room they let me sleep in was built entirely by Druze construction workers from Majdal Shams. She used to jokingly tell the contractor he was doing such a good job because he hoped to move in after Israel withdraws from the territory, but he once told her seriously that if that ever happens, he’ll take citizenship and relocate to Israel.

“The settlements are against international law, actually,” Taiseer said, “and should be evacuated during a handover. But I also think Jews should be able to live here, along with Christians and Muslims.”

Few Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza say Jews should be able to live in their future state. And no Syrian citizen who lives under the control of Bashar al-Assad would dare even suggest to an American journalist that Israel has the right to hold on to the Golan for security reasons. Yet Taiseer lives as a Syrian Druze under Israeli law and takes the “centrist” position.

He gets along perfectly well with Israeli Jews, but unlike Israeli Druze, he hasn’t signed on to Zionism. One reason is perfectly obvious: he must remain loyal to Syria, even if not to Assad, per se. Perhaps another reason, though, is because Druze everywhere eschew religion-based nationalism. They don’t yearn to have their own state, and they may have a hard time relating to others who do.

Taiseer thinks—or at least he says—that the safety of Middle Eastern Jews doesn’t require Jewish sovereignty.

“We tried that already,” Hadar said. “It didn’t work.”

“But Jews were treated far worse in Europe than they ever have been in the Middle East,” Taiseer said. “I’m not making excuses for anti-Semitism in the Middle East. I’m just saying it’s not forever impossible for Jews to live here with others. We Druze—like the Shias and Christians and Alawites—also have problems with the Sunni majority because we left Islam. But most of the time we are okay. We should be able to live together in the same state—whether it’s in Israel or in Syria—on the basis of civil rights and equality.”