Golan Druze rally at border in support of Syria’s Assad

Dozens of Druze rallied in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from the Israeli side of the Golan Heights on Saturday.

Waving Syrian flags and dressed in their traditional black garb, the demonstrators chanted slogans pledging loyalty to the Assad regime, whose soldiers stationed on the other side of the border fence several hundred meters away shouted back words of encouragement.

The ralliers told Reuters that they were commemorating the 45th anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War — a battle that some Arab countries still contend to have been a defeat for the Jewish state, which was caught off guard at the onset but fought back and prevented any loss of land.

Additionally, demonstrators said that the rally was also a celebration of the Assad regime’s defeat of the Islamic State and other rebel groups in Syria.

Israeli officials say there are about 20,000 Druze on the 1,200 square kilometer (460 square mile) strategic plateau which Israel captured from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War and formally annexed in 1981, in a move not recognized by the international community.

Israel and Syria are still officially in a state of war.

The vast majority of the Israel’s Golan Druze retain Syrian nationality and have family ties to Druze in Syrian government-controlled territory. However a growing number of younger Druze are opting into Israeli citizenship and are less supportive of Assad’s actions in Syria.

Another 110,000 Druze live in the Galilee district of northern Israel, where most have Israeli nationality and perform compulsory military service, unlike other Arab citizens.

Israeli Druze leaders traveled to Damascus on last month for meetings with their compatriots from Syria and Lebanon in a trip that was apparently not coordinated with Israeli authorities and stands in violation of Israeli national security law.

The delegation of 54 Druze clerics and sheikhs, or communal leaders, all hail from villages and towns in the Galilee and Carmel regions of northern Israel. They were received by Syrian government officials in Damascus, the Haaretz daily reported, then traveled to the Sweida region, which is home to most of the Syrian Druze community. There, they visited the families of those killed in the recent wave of Islamic State attacks in the area and with the families of those who were kidnapped by the jihadist group.

Members of the Druze community, especially from villages on the Israeli Golan who remain publicly loyal to Syria 51 years after the area was captured by Israel in the 1967 war, used to travel across the border on occasion with approval of both governments.

Some went to study in Syria, others to meet families and co-religionists across the heavily fortified Golan divide. But no Israeli citizens are known to have made the journey since the outbreak of Syria’s civil war in 2011, with the exception of a handful of Arab Israeli jihadists seeking to join the Islamic State, some of whom have since returned and been prosecuted by Israeli authorities.

The trip could land the Israeli Druze delegation in hot water, as it violates Israel’s Prevention of Infiltration Law, which forbids Israeli citizens from visiting Syria and a handful of other nations that are officially at war with the Jewish state.

Israeli Druze clerics last visited Syria in 2007 and 2010. In both cases, Israeli authorities filed indictments against the delegations, even sentencing former MK Said Nafa to a one-year prison sentence for arranging the trips. Israeli officials have tried to be lenient, with the Nazareth Magistrate’s Court overturning the convictions of 16 Druze sheikhs in 2014 for visiting enemy states.

Under a plea deal, the sheikhs all agreed not to repeat the visits. According to Haaretz, some of the Druze leaders taking part in the current visit also took part in past ones.