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IDF Military Funeral in Golan Druze Town Signals Historic Shift
(Ha'aretz) Adi Hashmonai - For decades, the community center in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights was covered with a huge Syrian flag. This week, that flag was nowhere to be seen. The hundreds who filled the community center came to console the family of Master Sgt. Maher Khatar, a native of the town and an IDF combat soldier, who was killed in Lebanon. In the 1980s, those few Golan Druze with Israeli ID cards were victims of a religious and social boycott, considered to have betrayed the Syrian nation. Dr. Ramzi Halabi, from the Israeli Druze town of Daliat al-Carmel, said this moment symbolizes the breaking of the last barriers between the residents of the Druze villages in the Golan and the State of Israel. "The Druze in Israel...have long since defined ourselves first of all as Israelis, and hope that in the next stage the identification with Israel will reach the Golan Heights." Dr. Salim Barik, a political scientist who studies the Druze, said the process of the Israelization of the Druze in the Golan began with the outbreak of the civil war in Syria. "It started in 2011 when people said, 'Syria is falling apart, so it's clear we won't return to Syria and it won't be able to liberate the Golan Heights. The story is over - we're Israelis, let's become part of Israel.'" "What strengthened this trend most was the massacre in Sweida.... About 800 Druze were slaughtered there, thousands were wounded and displaced, and villages were torched. Today there's a genuine fear of Muslims." Sheikh Zahir al-Din said, "Israel stood by our side in Sweida when accursed people massacred our brothers, and we'll never forget that. I asked someone here who was pro-Syrian how he agreed to let his son enlist in the IDF. He replied: 'At the time, we had children and relatives in the Syrian army. Now there aren't any, and if my son enlists he'll fight ISIS, and I'm very pleased about that.'"