While Israel has been bombing Syria under the pretext of protecting Syria’s Druze minority, it has been simultaneously engaged in genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, two Palestinian territories under its control and occupation. On the one hand, it attacks others to protect minorities. On the other, it refuses to recognise or treat Palestinians as a minority under its care.
The fear of a majority annihilating a minority is writ deep in the Israeli psyche, a shared Jewish memory of pogroms in Russia and Europe, culminating in the industrial genocide of the Holocaust. This fear, and the memory of past trauma, forms a foundational pillar of the Israeli state, played a critical role in moving large numbers of Jews from across Europe, and laid the ideological groundwork for Zionism in the latter half of the 19th century.
Since then, Israeli discourse—whether under Labour, Likud, or any coalition within its political spectrum—has consistently employed the rhetoric of self-defence against the supposed tyranny of an Arab-Muslim majority seeking to drive the Jews into the sea and obliterate their state. This is propaganda, but it has long benefited from a level of political naivety in the Arab world that borders on wilful complicity.
Building relations
Even before the State of Israel’s establishment, the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement administration) worked assiduously to build relations with religious and ethnic minorities in historic Palestine, like Bedouins, Circassians, Druze, and Christians. Some—like the Druze—were open to it, others were not, while others still engaged in pragmatic bargaining.
