How Israel weaponizes education in occupied Golan Heights
Matt Broomfield The Electronic Intifada 4 April 2018
Druze residents of the Ioccupied Syrian Golan Heights gather to contact
relatives in Syria.
(Ammar Awad / Reuters)
Since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, classrooms in the
Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights have become a target for concerted
Zionist propaganda and Israeli military recruitment efforts.
The 26,000 Syrian Druze residents of the Heights have long resisted
assimilationist overtures from Tel Aviv. Prior to the 2011 unrest in Syria,
less than 10 percent accepted the offer of Israeli citizenship, first made
when the Golan was formally annexed in 1981.
However, the war that imperils Druze communities a few yards over the
boundary has spurred newly intensified Israeli efforts to entice Druze youth
deeper into Israeli life, according to a new report by the Al-Marsad Arab
Human Rights Centre, exclusively seen by The Electronic Intifada.
Syria's conflict has provoked a rise in Israeli citizenship applications
among the Golan Druze, from an average of just 11 a year to more than 100 in
2015 and then to nearly 200 in 2016 - a significant increase, though still a
modest number.
And Israel has sought to exploit this unease through extracurricular
entities like the Israel Druze Boy and Girl Scout Association and the
General Federation of Working and Studying Youth, or No'al. Both funnel
graduates to the Israeli military, and both have expanded in the Golan as
the Syrian conflict has spread to the United Nations buffer zone between the
Israeli-occupied territory and Syria. A 2015 report on the No'al website
touts its first Druze group, but also evinces dismay at the lack of Druze
participation in Zionist youth activities, vowing to correct this.
Decades of deceit
Wael Tarabieh, 50, first experienced the Israeli-dominated Golan education
system as a student and the son of a Druze schoolmaster in the fraught 1970s
and 1980s. Now he has two children going through the system.
"It's ridiculous [for] Syrian kids to be Zionist within their own homeland,"
Tarabieh told The Electronic Intifada. He and other parents on school
committees have spent the last two years lobbying through meetings with
teachers, in public debates and the local media to keep No'al and the Scouts
out of the Golan educational system.
The school committees have succeeded in blocking the two organizations from
launching programs during school hours, Tarabieh says.
But from a promotional campaign which filmed Druze youth reading a script
describing themselves as "living in the north of Israel," through
propagandizing trips to the occupied West Bank under the misnomer of "the
desert of Judea and Samaria," to a visit to a Druze holy place in the
Galilee where a cleric spouted anti-Sunni rhetoric, young children like
Tarabieh's are now regularly experiencing fresh propaganda efforts.
Another link to Arab heritage was severed with the outbreak of war.
Previously, hundreds of Golan Druze students were permitted to cross the
boundary each year for government-funded study in Damascus.
With war raging now, Druze students are turning in increasing numbers to
foreign universities. Israeli university tuition fees are often forbidding
not least since Syrian Druze do not benefit from grants or scholarships
offered to those who have served in the Israeli military. But the vast
majority of Golan Druze who refuse to relinquish their Syrian identity hold
only a laissez-passer reading "citizenship: undefined," also posing an
obstacle to studying abroad.
"Some EU states, such as Ukraine, are demanding an Israeli passport,"
Tarabieh said. "And in all cases if you have Israeli citizenship it's much
easier, because [now] we have this travel document which is [seen as]
suspicious all around the world."
A history of propaganda
The attempts to militarize and assimilate Druze youth have precedents.
Tarabieh told The Electronic Intifada that when he was "in primary school we
even celebrated Israeli Independence Day."
That celebration is synonymous across the Arab world with the day marking
the Nakba, or "catastrophe," in 1948 with the displacement of more than
750,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands and the massacres of
thousands of civilians as the Israeli state burst violently into life.
The image of Arab children encouraged to cheerlead the exodus of their kin
gives a picture of the last 50 years of what Al-Marsad calls the "Forgotten
Occupation" of the Golan, the title of a new report examining
"discriminatory Israeli policies" aimed at the full economic, cultural and
political annexation of the Golan to Israel.
For many Syrian families, the expulsion of some 130,000 people from the
Golan in the 1967 War was an equally catastrophic event. Thereafter only the
mostly Druze inhabitants of five villages in the far north of the Golan
remained, today numbering about 26,000.
Israel swiftly seized control of the classroom, according to Al-Marsad. Head
teachers were fired and replaced by stooges directly appointed by and
answerable to the military occupation, with ties to the Israeli security
apparatus.
"Two Israeli soldiers taught me English and Hebrew," Tarabieh recalled.
"Both were Druze soldiers [on active] service, from Galilee villages in the
north of Israel."
This uniformed presence in the classroom was only the most obvious
manifestation of a subtle attempt to divorce the Syrian Druze here from
their Arab heritage. From 1975 onward, control of the education system was
handed to a separate Druze authority.
Ever since, the Israeli authorities have ensured students in the Golan focus
on Druze authors and historical figures, sit for Arabic examinations with
Druze students separate from other Arabic language speakers, and go on
exchange programs only with Druze- and Jewish-Israeli schools (as opposed to
those for Palestinian citizens of Israel).
"It's not a direct pressure on teachers," Tarabieh said. "The curriculum is
built to portray the Israeli narrative of history. Palestine is not
mentioned here, [nor] the wars this century between Israel and the Arab
states."
Severing of Arab identity
As Tarabieh pointed out, a focus on Druze heritage is actually intended to
"separate us from our roots, from our Arab citizenship." Israeli educators
align Druze in the Golan with their brethren across northern Israel. Druze
men are required to serve in the military and some 60 percent do or have.
"It's a narrative that you, as Druze, are different. You are not Arab, you
are not Syrian, because we have Druze friends that serve in the army,"
Tarabieh said.
Tarabieh recalled "embarrassment" in the classroom as teachers glossed over
the region's actual history, while he said of his own father that "there was
a sense of fear . [Teachers] had to act by the book in order to keep their
jobs."
During the 1980s, Al-Marsad finds, members of the Golan Academic
Association, a group comprising academics and those interested in politics,
were even detained, interrogated and imprisoned for organizing summer camps
and extracurricular educational programs that painted a fuller picture of
Druze identity and regional geopolitics.
More often, as Druze mother Fadwa Abujabel Shoufi told Al-Marsad, it is
"left to the parents" to explain Syrian heritage to their children. But the
forcible displacement of Golan Heights Syrians who, along with their
descendants, now number up to 500,000 - and the imposition of viciously
restrictive blockades on travel between Israel and Syria - has broken up
families and made it more difficult for older generations to pass on this
knowledge.
Tarabieh compared Israel to both the Islamic State, for fostering
sectarianism among Druze youth, and Bashar al-Assad, Syria's president, for
"using the fears of minorities [to] pretend they are their defender in this
conflict."
What is certain is that the Druze of the occupied Golan have a foothold in a
pivotal region, and have long learned that even friendly overtures can mask
an intention to absorb and thus eradicate their identity.
Matt Broomfield is a freelance journalist. He reports for VICE, the New
Statesman and the New Arab, as well as publishing poetry and fiction.
Twitter: @hashtagbroom. Website:
