Broken hearts club: Northern Druze soccer club mourns teen members blown up by Hezbollah

Sixteen-year-old Majdal Shams resident Ameer Abu Saleh was the left-back on the Bnei HaGolan VeHaGalil (MMBA) Football Club’s youth team and an outstanding student in Kiryat Shmona. He was one of the team’s stars and was predicted to have a promising future as a soccer player in the club and beyond.

At the end of last season, Ameer was photographed with a trophy his team’s won when it was promoted to a higher league, and he looked like any other player who reached a milestone: overjoyed, smiling, and laidback.

Thirteen-year-old Johnny Ibrahim also played on the club’s youth team and was a dominant and energetic character. Fifteen-year-old Hazem Abu Saleh had played on the team for two years and was set to return to it this summer.

Ameer, Johnny, and Hazem were killed on July 27 together with nine other boys and girls when a rocket landed on the soccer field in the heart of Majdal Shams. The sliver of green grass amid the town’s concrete maze was a center of life and sports for its residents.

“It’s a blow to the community, the Golan Heights, the state, soccer, and the club,” said Wajdi Al-Kish, the MMBA club’s founder, on July 28. “We are only 24 hours after the disaster and are still in pain and shock. They were wonderful, educated, and polite children. Special children.”

Living in Israel, identifying with Syria

MMBA is not a normal club. Founded in 2015, the club’s origin story reflects the life of the Druze community in the Golan and the Middle East — a people between states and wars who have the simple desire to play, to fit in and to be appreciated.

(Top row, L-R) Ameer Rabeea Abu Saleh, 16, Iseel Nasha’at Ayoub, 12, Hazem Akram Abu Saleh, 15, Milad Muadad Alsha’ar, 10 (Middle row, L-R) Alma Ayman Fakher Eldin, 11, Naji Taher Alhalabi, 11, Johnny Wadeea Ibrahim, 13, Yazan Nayeif Abu Saleh, 12 (Bottom row, L-R) Fajer Laith Abu Saleh, 16, Vinees Adham Alsafadi, 11 Nathem Fakher Saeb, 16, and Gevara Ebraheem, 11, who were killed in a Hezbollah rocket attack on Majdal Shams on July 27, 2024.

The Druze are a denomination that branched off from Islam in the 11th century and have lived as their own religion since.

“They suffered persecution from Muslims because they were considered heretics; therefore, they live in mountainous settlements,” explained Dr. Salim Brake from the Open University of Israel.

They’re scattered around the Middle East and some 135,000 live in Israel, with large groups also living in the United States, Canada and Colombia.

According to their religious teachings, “the Druze are not allowed to establish their own military, and they have to be loyal to the country they live in. The religion prohibits establishing their own nation,” said Brake.

This restriction has defined the lives of Druze people in Israel. Most of them are loyal to the State of Israel, serve in the security forces, and are described as part of a “blood alliance” with the state — especially those who live in the Galilee. Some, however, describe feeling discriminated against and debased by the 2018 Nation-State Law, which defined Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

While the Druze in the Golan Heights have actively integrated into Israeli life since the 1967 Six Day War and work with Israelis in fluent Hebrew, for decades they remained loyal to their Syrian homeland.

Syrian flags and portraits of Syria’s President Bashar Assad hang in the Druze village of Majdal Shams on June 8, 2014. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)

The names of four Druze villages in the Golan — Majdal Shams, Mas’ade, Buq’ata and Ein Qiniyye — make up the abbreviation of the soccer club’s name in Hebrew. They were among the few villages that remained in the Golan Heights after the Six Day War when the rest of the Syrian citizens ran away or were expelled.

The four villages were meant to serve as a Druze buffer zone. The plan failed, and Israel found itself with a Druze population that was loyal to Syria. There were religious and cultural but also practical reasons for this: Israel negotiated with Syria for years about returning the Golan and it seemed clear that the villages would not stay under Israeli governance, so the Druze residents felt that it was preferable to continue showing loyalty to the Syrians.

In 1981, Israel annexed the Golan and protests broke out in the villages where the residents refused to accept Israeli citizenship. Those who did were boycotted and isolated by their fellow Druze villagers.

But slowly the reality of living under Israeli sovereignty forced them to get closer to Israel and Israelis. Young people who were born into life in Israel grew up with Israelis, spoke Hebrew, studied and worked with Israelis, and even declared they felt Israeli rather than Syrian.

“I was surprised when young people told me they felt Israeli and didn’t know anything about Syria,” said the Open University’s Brake.

Opposition to Israel dissipated, and there remained only one symbol of refusal to accept full integration into Israeli society that the older generation held on to after 50 years: soccer.

Druze from Syria demonstrate near the border fence with Israel, against the annexation of the Golan Heights in 1981, in the northern Golan Heights on February 14, 2022. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)

A years-long dream

A local soccer club that would play in an Israeli league was the final taboo for the denomination’s elderly, and the villages’ residents had to make do with an internally limited league of four teams, which didn’t meet the desire to compete as equals in Israel.

In 2013, a first attempt was made to establish a team in Majdal Shams that would compete in Israeli leagues, but protesters told the youth that “this is Syrian land and uniting with Israeli soccer has no authority here.”

Team coach Nadib Ayoub said at the time that it was “a disaster for us and especially for our kids. It was supposed to be a historic game for us, a first home game. Nothing prepared us for this situation.”

But the process was already underway and two years later, MMBA was founded. This time, it succeeded in planting roots in the Golan’s basalt.

One of the founders was Al-Kish, a 41-year-old sports teacher from Buq’ata and a former player for Hapoel Kiryat Shmona.

“I dreamed of it for years,” he told The Times of Israel a few years ago. “I saw that there were a lot of good players in the villages and that if we united, we could put together a strong team. It’s no secret that some people opposed the idea and tried to kill the initiative, but the war in Syria gave us a push. Time did its work. What is allowed today was not in the past.”

The civil war in Syria was waged on the other side of Majdal Shams’s fence, within earshot of Mas’ade. Every one of the villages’ residents has relatives in Syria and concern for relatives is one of the pillars of Druze life.

Between the threat of Islamic terrorism on the one hand and Syrian President Bashar Assad’s barbaric regime and the Russian forces in Syria on the other, Israel suddenly became the saner, and definitely safer, option.

“There is an existential threat to Druze people in the Middle East except in Israel, including the Golan, paradoxically,” said Brake.

The chances of the villages going back to Syria get smaller every year, the emotional ties to the old homeland have gotten weaker among the youth who never even knew it, and the power of the village elders has also weakened. The time was right to form a soccer club that would play in Israel.

A former player and coach, Al-Kish is the face of MMBA.

“Just as there are Israelis with Moroccan or Yemeni roots, so am I a Druze of Syrian roots who lives in Israel honorably, and I love my life here,” he said.

In order to convince the conservatives, he needed to bring in the big guns.

Photos of the12 children and teens, killed in a rocket strike at a soccer field, and chairs with their names written on it, are seen displayed on a roundabout in the village of Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights, July 30, 2024. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

Samih Samara is a mango farmer and another founder of the club. He named his kids Fidel and Havana and attended Fidel Castro’s funeral in Cuba.

“I’m a revolutionary,” Samara said.

He is an extrovert who likes provocations and has been imprisoned in the past for weapons smuggling.

“People change,” Samara said. “Yitzhak Rabin of 1987 was not the Rabin of 1992, and Samih of 2001 was not the Samih of 2018. I was 20 and smuggled weapons, I sat in prison, learned, and changed. I work with Jews every day and almost all of them understand me. Yes, I was in prison, but I never murdered anyone. I didn’t do something unforgivable.

“People asked me why I wanted a team in Israeli leagues, and I responded, ‘You tell me why not.’ The Druze in the Golan work with the Defense Ministry, teach in Israeli schools, and are lawyers in Israeli courts, but playing soccer with the Israelis was the only thing that wasn’t allowed,” Samara said.

The big change came when Israel’s Druze saw their brethren in Syria being displaced and slaughtered by the regime.

“The war in Syria made it clear that we needed to take care of ourselves. The Druze in the Golan want to live somewhere that will give them security despite the ties to Syria. And where is that place? In Israel. A person cannot feel like they belong in the place where their son was murdered, their family abducted, and where they don’t have food and a roof over their head,” said Samara.

“I’m a leader in my nature, and with my charisma and rhetoric skills, I succeeded in convincing people who said, ‘Well alright, if Samih the politician supports the club, the one who sat in prison for crimes against Israel, then maybe it’s a good thing.’

“I know that our fate isn’t in our hands. There has been an occupation since 1967 and uncertainty is a permanent element in our lives. We didn’t choose to live in Israel, and it won’t be us who decide if we go back to Syria. In the meantime, I live my life like any other citizen. The occupation began in 1967, and I don’t think it will end anytime soon. Until then, I cannot live without soccer.”

And that’s MMBA’s simple principle: Put people in a place and they’ll start a team that will represent them and their identity. Forty-eight years without a soccer team to support, love, follow, or be proud of or disappointed in is a heavy price for a conflict in which no one cares about the Druze residents in the Golan.

A local soccer team is an important symbol, a hub of social and sporting activity, and a business far too important to put in the hands of politicians.

The team began playing in the fifth league and rose to the fourth in its second year, and that’s where it plays today in a field in Buq’ata at the foot of Mount Hermon. Some days, that is the most beautiful backdrop in Israel for a soccer game.

The club’s pinnacle was its performance in the 2018 championships when it surprised everyone and played Maccabi Tel Aviv in the final in Netanya after a series of victories. The game earned the club publicity and recognition when it was aired on TV, and MMBA became the Golan’s team. The vision of a united team was realized.

Since then, the club has become an important social institution. More teen and children’s teams were created, including girls’ teams. It supplies an athletic structure for the residents of the villages as well as the team members. In addition to the inactive volcanoes, the memorial sites, the tank skeletons, and the wildlife, MMBA has become part of the Golan’s scenery.

A critical blow

In 2018, in the club’s heyday, this reporter watched the youth team play against a team from Tamra on Kiryat Shmona’s synthetic grass fields. The players from both teams played in mixed formations, shouted in Hebrew and Arabic, and on the bench sat three girls in trendy clothes and a man with the traditional Druze wide pants and big white head covering.

But today, Kiryat Shmona is a ghost town, its soccer fields blown up and scarred, and the same youths are in mourning at home, or maybe are in the hospital fighting for their lives.

The game in Majdal Shams that Saturday was not an official training session — that was supposed to be held the following week. But the youth from Majdal Shams would often gather for a soccer game on the weekends.

Druze residents at the scene of the deadly missile attack at a soccer field in the Druze village of Majdal Shams, in the Golan Heights, July 31, 2024. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)

When the siren sounded, they ran to the bomb shelter that was set up on the edge of the field at the beginning of the war, but they didn’t make it there before the explosion and the massacre.

Ameer, Johnny, and Hazem died wearing the MMBA uniform.

“We lost 12 children, a terrible disaster for everyone, the whole state, and personally, I don’t know how to deal with it,” said Al-Kish the day after the disaster. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to register teams for the youth divisions for next season. People don’t want to play soccer or go out to the field.

“The blow was severe,” said Al-Kish. “We’ll gather ourselves and prepare for what’s next.”