Tower of the Sun: Stories From the Middle East and North Africa (16 page)

Of course it’s impossible for Jews to live in Syria on the basis of civil rights and equality under the current regime. Nobody can, and Jews perhaps least of all. And it might not be much easier under the next government, either, especially if radical Islamists take over.

“If I were a good Zionist,” he said, “I’d say trade peace for the Golan and the security situation would be resolved.”

“But Assad won’t exchange peace for the Golan,” I said.

“Of course he will,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Last year when I visited Lebanon, Walid Jumblatt said something very interesting when I met him for lunch at his house.”

Taiseer’s eyes widened. Faiz’s eyes widened even more. They had no idea I know Walid Jumblatt, the famous leader of Lebanon’s Druze. I wasn’t trying to drop names or impress him. I just wanted to know how he’d react when I held up his quintessentially Druze-like analysis next to somebody else’s different but equally Druze-like analysis.

“Assad doesn’t care about the Golan,” Jumblatt had told me. “Suppose we go ultimately to the so-called peace. Then later on, what is the purpose of the Syrian regime? What is he going to tell his people? Especially, mind you, he is a member of the Alawite minority. This minority could be accused of treason. It’s not like Egypt or Jordan, whereby the government has some legitimacy. Here you get accused of treason by the masses, by the Sunnis. So using classic slogans like ‘Palestine will liberate the Golan with Hezbollah’ is a must for him to stay in power.

“I had a friend at the time—he is still my friend—when I was in Syria,” Jumblatt continued. “He was the chief of staff of the Syrian army and is now living in Los Angeles. He was quite an important guy and honest with the media. He was a Sunni from a big family in Aleppo. And when Hafez al-Assad was about to fix up the so-called settlement through Bill Clinton, and before they met him in Geneva, a prominent Alawite officer in the Syrian army came to Assad and said, ‘What are you doing? We will be lost if you make peace. We will be accused of treason.’”

Taiseer and Faiz didn’t know what to say when I brought that up. Perhaps they knew it was true but couldn’t say so in public. Maybe they didn’t want to contradict Walid Jumblatt even if they thought he was wrong. Whatever the explanation, they neither agreed nor disagreed with Jumblatt’s analysis.

Assad and his Alawite community have some things in common with the Druze. They, too, are religious minorities who emerged long ago from Islam and became something else. They, too, have to be sensitive to the majority where they live. If Syria’s Alawite rulers made peace with Israel, they may well face a Sunni insurgency as Jumblatt suggested—and it would not be the first time.

Years ago I visited an Alawite village in Lebanon with a Shia woman from the south named Leena. She took me down to her home region from Beirut to show me around. One place we both wanted to visit was a village called Ghajar, a pinpoint on the map where three nations converge and form the strangest of knots. The northern half of the village is in Lebanon. The southern half is controlled by Israel. All of it once belonged to Syria.

After Israel captured the Golan in 1967, Ghajar was stranded in a no-man’s-land between Lebanon and Israeli-occupied Syria. The residents couldn’t live suspended in limbo between the two countries forever, so they petitioned the state of Israel and asked to be annexed. They were Syrians—Arabs—not Jews or Israelis, but they would rather live in “Syria” under Israeli occupation than in Lebanon.

The Lebanese-Syrian border, though, wasn’t marked. Over time, Ghajar expanded northward, without anyone even knowing it, into Lebanon. And in the year 2000, when Israel withdrew its soldiers from the “security zone” in South Lebanon, the village was thrown into turmoil. The United Nations wouldn’t certify the Israeli withdrawal unless the northern half of the village was ceded to Lebanon—which, in the real world, meant to Hezbollah.

Ghajar’s residents had been living under Israeli jurisdiction since 1967, and—unlike the Druze of the Golan—most of them took Israeli citizenship in 1981. So when Leena and I arrived in 2005, the northern half of Ghajar was populated with Syrians in Lebanon with Israeli ID cards.

The complexity still makes my head hurt, but that’s the Levant for you.

Leena intended to take me there, but in hindsight I believe she mistakenly took me to a different village right next to Ghajar called Arab al-Luweiza.

Ghajar had been under Israeli control for decades, but the place Leena showed me was utterly destitute, in worse shape by far than anything else in the area, whether Jewish, Druze, Christian or Shia. Some houses were crumbling boxes made out of cinder blocks. Others were shanties with tin roofs and walls. Barren ground was strewn with rubble and rocks.

A handful of barefoot children dressed in dirty clothes and playing in filthy streets ran up to us when we stepped out of the car. Somehow they managed to smile.

“What is wrong with this place?” I said to Leena. The conditions were worse than in the Hezbollah areas. “Who lives here? Are these people Shias?”

Leena wasn’t sure, so she asked one of the boys.

“Alawi!” he said.

The Alawi—Alawite—sect makes up about 10 percent of Syria’s population and a tiny percentage of Lebanon’s. Most Alawites live along the Mediterranean coast in Syria and Northern Lebanon, but a few live as far south as the Golan Heights area. They are descendants of the followers of Muhammad ibn Nusayr, who took them out of mainstream Twelver Shia Islam in the 10th century. Their religion has as much in common with Christianity and Gnosticism as it does with Islam, and both Sunnis and Shias have long considered them infidels.

The strangest thing about the Alawites is that they have made themselves rulers of Syria. It’s as unlikely as the Druze lording over Lebanon, the Kurds seizing control of Iraq or Coptic Christians mounting a successful coup in Egypt, but it happened. Since the Assad clan is Alawite, most of the elites in the Baath Party, the bureaucracy and the military are Alawites too.

Imam Musa Sadr, founder of the Shia movement Amal in Lebanon, struck a deal with Hafez al-Assad in 1974 and issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, implausibly declaring Alawites part of the Shia community.

Yet the Alawites are not Shias. They’re Alawites. The two communities need religious cover for their political alliance, however, and Sadr’s fatwa gives it to them. The relationship between Hezbollah and Damascus’ Alawite regime is strictly one of convenience. The two feel little or no warmth for each other.

While Hezbollah and Amal are politically aligned with the Alawite government, the Sunnis are not, and Sunnis make up about 70 percent of Syria’s population. The fundamentalists among them have long detested Assad’s Baath Party regime, not only because it is secular and oppressive but also because its leaders are “heretics.”

So the Assad family ended up supporting terrorist groups in Syria’s war against Israel for some of the same reasons the Khomeinists do in Iran. As minorities in the region, neither can be rulers of or hegemons over Sunnis without street cred.

In 1982, the same year Israel invaded Lebanon and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps founded the prototype of Hezbollah, Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood took up arms against Hafez al-Assad’s government in the Syrian city of Hama. Assad dispatched the Alawite-dominated military and destroyed most of the old city with air strikes, tanks and artillery. Rifaat al-Assad, the former president’s younger brother, boasted that the regime killed 38,000 people in a single day.

In his book
From Beirut to Jerusalem
, Thomas Friedman dubbed the senior Assad’s rules of engagement “Hama Rules.” They are the Syrian stick. The carrot is Assad’s steadfast “resistance” against Israel. No Arab government in the world is as stridently anti-Israel, in both action and rhetoric, as his. There is no better way for a detested minority regime to curry favor with Sunnis in Syria and the larger Arab world than by adopting the anti-Zionist cause as its own.

As “infidels,” Syria’s Alawites don’t feel they have the legitimacy to force Sunnis to make peace with Israel. That’s a risky business even for Sunni leaders, as the assassination of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat showed after he signed a treaty with Israel’s Menachem Begin.

Because most of Syria’s Alawites live along the Mediterranean coast and away from the Sunni heartland, they could, at least theoretically, be separated from Syria into their own Alawite nation. The Middle East would probably be a safer place if they had their own state. Unlike the Druze, they once aspired to one. They did have their own semiautonomous government under the French Mandate from 1930 to 1937 and again from 1939 to 1944.

“The Alawites refuse to be annexed to Muslim Syria,” Suleiman al-Assad, grandfather of President Bashar al-Assad, wrote in a petition to France during the second period in 1943. “In Syria, the official religion of the state is Islam, and according to Islam, the Alawites are considered infidels … The spirit of hatred and fanaticism imbedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation.”

The Alawites’ semiautonomous government was dissolved back into French Mandate Syria in 1944, and their Latakia region has been an integral part of the country ever since. Had they declared and received independence, they might even have been natural allies of Israel for the same reasons the Middle East’s Christians and Kurds are. After all, when the Alawites of Ghajar were given a choice to live under a Lebanese or Israeli government, they chose Israel’s. And they made that choice when Lebanon was considered the Switzerland of the Middle East, years before it descended into chaos and horror and war. Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights freed them from tyrannical Syrian rule, and it freed them from the Sunni demand to resist the Zionists.

After Hadar and I said goodbye to Faiz and Taiseer and thanked them for talking with us, I dropped her off at her house before returning to Tel Aviv. We took the long way round, though, so she could show me a couple of things.

“There’s a destroyed Alawite village ahead,” she said before directing me to turn off the highway. The road to the ruins clearly had not been maintained since the ’60s. It is, like the village, in a state of advanced deterioration.

“It must have been lovely here once,” Hadar said. “They had this amazing view in a moderate climate and with all these trees above northern Israel. It’s a shame, really. We would have gotten along fine with them had they stayed.”

She was most likely right about that. The Israelis get along fine with the Golani Druze. And they get along even better with the Alawites living in Ghajar.

“I should have asked our Druze friends why they stayed when the Alawites fled,” she said.

“That’s a good question,” I said. Why did the Druze stay when the Alawites fled? “I don’t know why, but I can guess.”

“Why?” she said.

“Perhaps,” I said, “because they knew already that the Druze in Israel were treated well by the Israeli people and government. They knew they weren’t in any danger, but the Alawites had no idea what to expect. There was no precedent for Israelis and Alawites getting along. They would have been fine had they stayed, but they didn’t know that. So they left. But that’s just a guess.”

“I found something Faiz said very disturbing,” she said.

“What’s that?” I said.

“When he told you he wasn’t sure what his Israeli neighbors really think,” she said. “We’ve been telling them exactly what we think now for decades. We want them to join us and take citizenship. It’s not a trick. That’s exactly what we want and hope for, and we’ve never told them anything else.”

Faiz, like all the other Druze on the Golan, surely hears this message from the Israelis, but it seems he isn’t prepared to accept it at face value. Perhaps he suffers from cognitive egocentrism, what Professor Richard Landes describes as the tendency to project one’s own mentality on others.

“My guess is that he was projecting,” I said. “He doesn’t necessarily tell you what he really believes, for political reasons beyond his control, so maybe he thinks Israelis do the same thing. It’s completely normal behavior from his point of view. In his experience, everyone does it.”

“We’ve perfectly integrated Israeli Druze into our society,” she said, “and he knows that, so why doesn’t he think we could do the same with the Druze of the Golan?”

Israel has done a good job integrating even non–Middle Eastern minorities. “We accepted Vietnamese boat people as refugees in the 1970s,” she said. “They’re Israeli citizens, and their children are Israeli citizens. They aren’t Jewish, but they fit in very well. They speak Hebrew and they serve in the army.”

She was a little bit bothered by our entire conversation with Faiz and Taiseer. They told me more or less what I thought they would say, but she was uncomfortable with the differences between their point of view and that of her Israeli Druze friends.

“I just wish they would meet us halfway,” she said.

“They are,” I said, “compared with the Syrian Druze. If they lived under the authority of Assad and took their opinions from him, they wouldn’t say they’re more concerned with your welfare than the welfare of Egyptians. They wouldn’t say Israel has the right to occupy the Golan for security reasons as long as Israel doesn’t build settlements. They’d champion the ‘resistance’ and say you have no right to exist in this region at all.”

“That’s true,” she said. “I once saw them in Majdal Shams carrying placards demanding Israel leave the Golan. Only a tiny number of people showed up at the rally, and they looked terribly bored. It doesn’t cost them anything to protest against Israel, but they don’t dare protest the Syrian government even though they live here.”

She later sent me an email after she thought about our conversation some more.

“It’s no good from their point of view,” she said, “our being nice neighbors and offering them full citizenship if we don’t come out once and for all and make it very clear that we have no intention of ever giving up the Golan. As long as Israel does this silly peace dance with the Assads of any generation once every few years, Faiz and the rest of the Druze will still be in that impossible position. I can see entirely where he’s coming from and how unfair it is to them—all we’re offering them is something they can’t take. They need us to operate on the ‘strong horse’ principle, but it’s against our nature.”