“The people of Majdal Shams were scared to normalize or become citizens of Israel because of the Assad regime,” Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif told JNS. “Now the situation is different.”
The fall of Bashar Assad in Syria is opening new doors for the Druze community in the Israeli Golan Heights, Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, the spiritual leader of the Druze community in Israel, told JNS on Wednesday.
Speaking in Arabic via a translator at a Hudson Institute event in Washington, Tarif said fear of the Assads had limited the hand of the Druze in their four villages in the Golan. Under the new Syrian leader Abu Mohammad al-Julani, there is an opportunity for engagement, according to Tarif.
“We cannot forget that the previous regime was merciless,” he said. “When the 1973 war started, the first thing they struck was the Druze. Before they even struck the army.”
Israel captured the Golan Heights in June 1967, and with it, four predominantly Druze towns that maintain close relations with the Druze community across the border in Syria. Unlike the Druze communities that became part of Israel in 1948 and are integrated into Israeli society as citizens and often as volunteer soldiers, most of the Druze in the Golan Heights, in towns like Majdal Shams, rejected Israeli citizenship.
A Hezbollah rocket launched from Lebanon in July that fell in Majdal Shams, striking a soccer field and killing 12 Druze children, coupled with Assad’s fall in December, has raised the question of whether Druze in the Golan might be open to a new relationship with the Jewish state.
“The people of Majdal Shams were scared to normalize or become citizens of Israel because of the Assad regime,” Tarif said. “Now the situation is different.”
“The barriers are broken. There are no more barriers,” he said. “Some of them I used to talk to in secret. Now they’re talking to me in public.”
“They’re saying ‘When are you coming to visit?’ and ‘When are we going to go visit?’ You didn’t hear that before,” Tarif added. “Julani has a golden opportunity to show the world that he is capable of change.”
‘Islam is different’
The status of minorities, including Druze, Christians and Alawites, in Julani’s Syria is one of the most pressing questions after the fall of Assad. Syria’s approximately 700,000 Druze make up about 3% of the nation’s population, with most living in the southeastern province of Suwayda, where they are a majority of the population, or around the capital Damascus.
They have long faced oppression as an ethno-religious minority, which is usually described as a distinct Abrahamic religion separate from Islam. In recent years, they have faced persecution—ranging from forced conversion to massacres—from Sunni Islamist groups.
In 2018, ISIS carried out a string of suicide bombings and other attacks in Suwayda that killed more than 250 Druze, and the terrorist group kidnapped more than 30 Druze women and children.
In 2015, members of the Nusrah Front, which was Syria’s al-Qaeda branch and the predecessor to Julani’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group, shot 20 Druze in the northwest province of Idlib after accusing them of being infidels.
Officials from the new government have said that they “guarantee” the religious rights of all Syrians, but many remain skeptical.
Tarif told JNS that after the fall of Assad, the Druze of Syria want a society that respects minority rights and is free from religious compulsion.
“Islam is different. For example, for us Druze, we don’t allow polygamy, but Julani calls for it,” Tarif said. “They’re going around telling people to wear scarves, and not everybody is religious. I have two other brothers. One brother is not religious.”
“The important thing that the Druze practice is that nothing is to be done by force,” he added. “You do not force anyone into a belief or a practice.”
Image - JNS/Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, the spiritual leader of the Druze community in Israel, speaks at a Hudson Institute event in Washington, D.C., Jan. 8, 2025. Photo by Andrew Bernard.