Netanyahu, the Druze, and the Kurdish Omission
Those who fought barbarism left stranded at history’s edge again
Benjamin Netanyahu prefers policies that can be barked into a microphone. On Syria, his formula is blunt: clear the south of hostile forces and stand guard over the Druze. Israel, he says, will not tolerate threatening troops near the Golan. The message is that Israel is willing to redraw the security map of southern Syria in the name of a single community.
Israel’s bond with its Druze citizens is close to familial; they have served in its army, guarded its borders, and buried their dead beneath its flag. Genuine sentiment is already being turned into diplomatic small change. Export that loyalty across a shattered frontier and you arrive at the present line: airstrikes and deployments as a protective curtain for Druze towns, and a Syrian policy boiled down to demilitarisation in the south and safety for the Druze.
The missiles are padded with charity. Israel sends aid into Suwayda and invites the cameras to admire the tableau: a loyal mountain people and a Jewish state honouring an old debt. The difficulty is not that this concern exists. It is that it seems to stop exactly where another claim begins.
While Jerusalem composes its rhetoric around Druze hillsides, the most consequential minority in Syria is kept at the edge of the frame. The Kurdish-led administration has spent more than a decade constructing something rare: a decentralized, multi-ethnic order in which power is shared and women are formal co-leaders. Its fighters were indispensable in breaking the ISIS caliphate, a force thanked with one hand and written out of the script with the other.
The Kurds call this area Rojava, “the west”, Western Kurdistan. The term itself is a quiet map of a wider Kurdistan and a condensed national claim. It is exactly the kind of self-definition a state born from exilic dream ought to recognize rather than ignore.
One might imagine that a country which never stops reminding the world of its beginnings as a dispersed and stateless people would acknowledge this when it speaks about minorities and justice. Instead, when Netanyahu’s government mentions the Kurds, it tends to do so as a passing note about American deployments or Turkish nerves. It finds it easier to praise Kurdish courage in retrospect than to name Kurdish rights in any prospective settlement.
Netanyahu has chosen to construct his Syrian catechism around Druze rights alone. Any understanding with Damascus is presented as conditional upon demilitarization in the south and safeguards for Druze communities. Kurds, if they appear at all, are pushed under the woolly heading of “other groups”. The result is moral incoherence masquerading as consistency.
Strategically, it is less realpolitik than vandalism. Rojava, Western Kurdistan, has been one of the few effective brakes on jihadist resurgence and on Iranian and regime control in eastern Syria. A regional arrangement that fixes a Druze enclave under Israeli protection, while leaving Western Kurdistan to be carved up by Damascus, Moscow and Ankara, weakens the counterweight to clerical barbarism and authoritarian restoration.
No serious person is asking Israel to abandon the Druze or forget what it owes them. But if Israel wishes to parade as protector of vulnerable communities, it cannot behave like an insurance firm that pays out only on the policies it finds convenient. A Syria in which Druze security is ring-fenced while Kurdish aspirations in Rojava are dissolved in conference rooms will not be a safer neighbor, only a brittle state held together by coercion and remembrance, leaving those who did the hardest work against barbarism stranded at the edge of the map.
