By Michael Karadjis

In horrible news on July 27, 12 young Druze, mostly children, in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights were killed by rocket fire, while playing football in a sports ground. The first thing to say of course is, regardless of who turns out to be responsible, that this is horrific, and our thoughts are first with the children and their families and community. Children like these, and like the 15,000 children that Israel has massacred in Gaza over the last 10 months, should not have to be killed in wars.

Second, while Israel has blamed Hezbollah firing from southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah has categorically denied this, and instead blamed Israeli interceptor fire gone wrong, at this stage we just don’t know for sure. But whichever it turns out to be, one thing is certain: either way it was a mistake. The occupied Golan has not been a theatre in the conflict between Israel and a number of Lebanese and Palestinian groups in southern Lebanon, led by Hezbollah, over the last 10 months. That conflict has been restricted to the southern Lebanese border with northern Israel. The Israeli-occupied Golan is nearby, to the east of this area, but has not been part of the hostilities.

Therefore, given Hezbollah’s emphatic denials, and Israel’s well-known penchant for lying, Israel’s accusation that it was Hezbollah has to be taken with bucket-loads of salt until we get better information; and even if it does turn out to have been a misfired Hezbollah rocket, Israeli leaders’ current use of such a tragic mistake to threaten a far bigger tragedy by launching full-scale war on Lebanon and turning it “into Gaza” as these leaders so charmingly offer, has to be fought against tooth and nail.

All wings of the Israeli regime – from open neo-Nazis Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, through Netanyahu’s genocidal clique to alleged “centrist” but equally war-crazed Benny Gantz, have called for war on Lebanon. Israel has already attacked a number of towns throughout southern Lebanon as of July 28, but so far nothing out of the ordinary. Of course there has been a border conflict for 10 months now, but it has been largely well-contained on both sides, restricted to a small border region – though it must be said that while some 21 Israelis, mostly troops, have been killed in 1258 attacks on Israel, over 25 times that number, some 543 Lebanese, including about 100 civilians, have been killed in 6142 Israeli attacks on Lebanon, so it is rather obvious who is trying to escalate.

What are the Druze saying?

The Druze, a religiously defined community that are neither Muslim, Christian or Jewish, are the majority in the occupied Golan, and a minority population in Israel, Syria and Lebanon. It is important to first note what they are saying. The overwhelming message appears to be for everyone to leave them alone to their grief; according to Suweida24, a voice from the Syrian Druze community, “The families of the victims in Majdal Shams, in a frank position during the funeral ceremonies, rejected any political exploitation of their tragedy.”

Ghalib Saif, head of the Druze Initiative for Al-Risala, blamed Israel, claiming that “the missiles that fall on the Druze villages in the Golan and Galilee are Israeli interceptor missiles, and they always cause great damage to places and lives. We see every day the Iron Dome missiles miss their target and fall on us.” Lebanese Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, condemned the targeting of civilians as unacceptable, whether in occupied Palestine, the occupied Golan Heights, or southern Lebanon; though an opponent of Hezbollah in Lebanese politics, in light of Hezbollah’s denials, he warned people in Lebanon and occupied Golan to be vigilant against “any slippage or incitement within the enemy’s [Israel’s] destructive project, calling for support to “the resistance and all resistance fighters” against any resurfacing “Israeli project,” ie, any attempt by Israel to re-occupy southern Lebanon. Notably, when Israeli government ministers, including the fascist-extremist Finance minister Smotrich, defied the community’s express requests that they keep away from the funeral and showed up anyway, they were jeered and sworn at, and Smotrich told frankly “Get out of here, you criminal. We don’t want you in the Golan.” Yasser Gadban, chairman of the Forum of Druze and Circassian Authorities, when demanding in writing they do not turn up, also requested “that you not turn a massacre event into a political event.” The following day Netanyahu also turned up uninvited, and was greeted with signs saying “War criminal” and “Down with the killing of children” and chants of “Killer! Killer!” and “You’re not welcome here!”

This total rejection of Israeli authorities should not be misconstrued as indicating support for Hezbollah. Sheikh Hikmat Salman Al-Hijri, of the United Druze Muslims sect in Syria, strongly condemned “the heinous crime perpetrated against the innocents and children in the peaceful village of Majdal Shams,” demanding “the prosecution of the criminal party” through international law, whoever it is found to be. Implicitly taking aim at both sides, he stated that “our children are neither training sites nor testing sites, our skies are not battlefields for anyone, nor the fulfillment of anyone’s goals through the blood of our children.” According to Suweida24, the position of the victims’ families and community is “is one of sadness, mourning and reverence, and we condemn the targeting of civilians everywhere, at all times and from any side.” Another resident they spoke to stated that “The two sides [Hezbollah and Israel] are in a war that has been raging since last year, and its rules and regulations are drawn in the blood of innocents in this wretched Middle East; the strong message regarding the threat to escalate the war in their name is “Leave us to grieve for our children, and we do not want the death of other children anywhere in this world.”

The Israel-Lebanon border conflict

While I certainly hold no brief for Hezbollah, at all, whose intervention in Syria as a tool of the Iranian theocracy’s support for Assad’s genocide regime in Syria was outrageous, where despite acting largely an Iranian tool, they played quite a generous role of their own in some of the regime-led slaughter of Syrian civilians as agents of this counterrevolution, and who also played a decisive role in saving all the sectarian Lebanese elites by using violence against Lebanon’s own anti-sectarian uprising in 2019, nevertheless, the conflict on the Israel-Lebanon border has its own dynamic which is very distinct from these two events.

Firstly, southern Lebanon was under direct Israeli occupation from 1978 to 2000, and though Israel withdrew then, the border has not been finally demarcated; Lebanon disputes certain areas, particularly the Shebaa Farms region. The fact that Israel and Lebanon (under a government including Hezbollah) just recently demarcated their sea borders (and hence borders of gas fields), in an agreement backed by Iran, demonstrates that there are potential ‘national’ issues involved here. Secondly, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in southern Lebanon – refugees from 1948 Palestine (Israel) who cannot return – are a permanent factor in southern Lebanese politics, who would have taken action even if Hezbollah hadn’t (for example, in April 2023, Palestinian fighters in southern Lebanon had fired rockets at Israel in retaliation against Israel’s attack on the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, while Hezbollah remained quiet; Israel retaliated only against the Palestinians). In fact, southern Lebanon basically merges into northern Palestine. While the resistance to Israel’s long occupation in the south had involved an array of different parties and militias, it is not surprising that Hezbollah emerged as the leading party, given the overwhelmingly Shiite population of the region.

All these factors give the southern Lebanon-northern Israel region a specific character; thus while Hezbollah is the leading force in the current border skirmishes, this should not be seen as an essentially ‘Iranian-inspired’ conflict (if anything, Iran has tended to attempt to restrain Hezbollah). The battles against Israel have also involved the anti-Hezbollah al-Fajr Forces, of the Sunni organisation Jamaa al-Islamiya, which had supported the Syrian uprising, but sees the battle against Israel and in support of Gaza as primary, as well as Palestinian forces (including Hamas, who also fought against the Assad regime in Syria and thus were on the opposite side to Hezbollah there).

And in this conflict, as opposed to other, unrelated, conflicts, the Hezbollah-led side has not been targeting civilians, but rather Israeli military forces; this is a simple observation of the data. So there is no reason whatsoever for Hezbollah to suddenly decide to kill a dozen Syrian Druze children in a region that is not part of their conflict; in contrast to southern Lebanon, the Assad regime has kept the Golan ‘border’ dead silent (indeed, Israeli leaders’ and strategists’ continually-expressed preference for Assad to defeat the uprising was in part due to their trust in Assad keeping the ‘border’ that way; as Netanyahu stated as he, Trump and Putin connived to facilitate Assad’s reconquest of southern Syria in 2018, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights”).

There is even less reason for Hezbollah to want to kill Syrian Druze given that they are for the most part anti-Israel; indeed in June last year there were major anti-occupation disturbances involving thousands of Druze, with Israeli forces using tear gas, bullets and water cannon against them. Indeed the same Smotrich, who tried to turn up to the funeral, at the time released a statement welcoming the police attacks on the Druze, stressing there would be no “giving in to violence” by the occupation authorities.

Of course, none of this makes it impossible that the terrible mistake was made by Hezbollah rather than Israeli rocket fire.

Golan Heights: Sovereign Syrian land

Israeli leaders assertions that Hezbollah has just killed a dozen “Israeli” children are both incredibly hypocritical and bald-faced lies. Firstly, this occurred a day after Israel just killed another 30 civilians, mostly children, in an attack on a UN school in Gaza; this is the eighth time since 6 July that a school had been hit, leaving a total of more than 100 people dead. A genocidal regime which has killed 15,000 Palestinian children in Gaza – just one almost inconceivable fact within its Gaza holocaust – does not care about children’s lives, to state the obvious.

But just as importantly, these are not “Israeli” children. The Golan Heights is sovereign Syrian territory that was conquered in 1967 during Israel’s unprovoked aggression against all its neighbours, when it also conquered the Egyptian Sinai, and the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Some 130,000 people lived in the part of Golan conquered by Israel at the time, the vast majority Sunni Muslims, in 139 towns and villages; following Israeli conquest, nearly all were expelled or fled into Syria, and are still unable to return, leaving only 6396 people, mostly Druze, in four remaining villages. The now 20,000 Druze share the territory with some 25,000 Israeli colonists (“settlers”) in 30 illegal settlements. In 1981, Israel formally annexed the Golan (and East Jerusalem), ie, declared it simply part of Israel, in much the same way as Russia annexed Crimea, and later four eastern Ukrainian oblasts. Israeli rule in Golan is rejected by the UN and by every country in the world (and, for that matter, by the Syrian anti-Assad opposition as well as regime), with the sole exception of Donald Trump’s rogue US regime which recognised Israeli “sovereignty” while last in power (and the Biden regime has shamefully not reversed this).

The Golan Druze population have overwhelmingly remained loyal to their Syrian citizenship. While there has been incremental growth in recent years of some Druze accepting Israeli citizenship for very practical purposes (eg, otherwise they have no passports etc), still only 20 percent have done so; 80 percent still see themselves as Syrian citizens, as of 2022 data. This ratio is the same in this town, Majdam Shams, where this tragedy took place. And if some take Israeli citizenship for practical purposes, even this does not mean loyalty to Zionism or the Israeli occupation; for example, in local elections in Majdam Shams in 2018, of 12,000 residents, only 282 voted in local elections. Incidentally, loyalty to Syria has nothing to do with loyalty to the Syrian regime (the article linked in this paragraph seems to suggest this, though it may merely journalistic laziness); opinions among Golan Druze are divided between Syrian regime and opposition; indeed, during large-scale Druze-led protests against the Assad regime in 2020 in southern Syrian province Suweida, there were demonstrations among Golan Druze in support of their brothers and sisters on the other side of the Israeli-occupation boundary, and this occurred again during the Druze-led uprising against Assad in Suweida in mid-2023.

Green light from Trump?

Finally there is the question of whether this was an Israeli “false flag” operation to justify war on Lebanon. This is probably unlikely; the fact is that convenient errors can occur. But it is awfully convenient. For months, Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir have been threatening to escalate the border conflict with Hezbollah into a full-scale war. While it may seem mad that they would want a two-front war (when to date Hezbollah’s actions have been largely symbolic and had no effect on Israel’s ability to carry out genocide in Gaza whatsoever) – and indeed it is quite likely that even this time it will once again blow over after some harsh rhetoric and mild escalation – there are other factors at play.

One is simply Netanyahu’s own stake in ongoing war – he knows that if the Gaza war winds down due to pressure for a ceasefire and hostage exchange, he is finished, and the high-level corruption charges against him may land him in jail, so ongoing war is a temporary saviour. More broadly, Israel’s already escalatory actions in Lebanon are widely seen as aiming to create a larger regional conflagration, to bring in both Iran and the US, so that the US, it hopes, could do its job for it keeping Lebanon, and perhaps Iran, busy, and Israel could then get on with and perhaps complete the genocide in Gaza under the cover of this much larger regional apocalypse; in other words, it is not that Israel wants to fight Hezbollah (and still less Iran), rather it wants the US to do that as a sideshow – Israel’s actual war remains the extermination of Palestine. To date, the Biden administration has shown no interest in being involved in this game, and has been working feverishly to bring about a new Israel-Lebanon borer agreement in which both sides could save face; even after Majdal Shams, the first statements by Blinken have been calling for restraint.

But it seems no coincidence that this new wave of loud Israeli aggressiveness towards Lebanon is taking place just after Netanyahu’s meeting with Trump, and after his speech to Congress was received with rapturous applause from US leaders on both sides, but especially from the fanatical Republican side. While some have mistakenly seen Trump’s ‘muscular realism’ as ‘isolationism’, this is both an error in general, but above all total myopia with regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict, where Trumpism and traditional ‘Reaganite’ or ‘neoconservative’ Republicanism are in total agreement in support of Israeli extremism. Consider Trump’s record in office: recognition of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and Golan, moving the US embassy to East Jerusalem, declaring that the US no longer sees the occupied Palestinian territories as occupied, the ‘deal of the century’ which proposed to bring ‘peace’ to the region by giving Israel everything and Palestine nothing, cutting off funding for UNWRA etc.

Trump and co almost certainly gave Netanyahu to go-ahead for an invasion of, or at least a bigger attack on, of Lebanon. Of course, they are not in power, but creating a crisis for Biden-Harris before the US elections would be an added bonus, for Trump, and for Netanyahu who wants another Trump regime. While false flags and conspiracies are generally the least likely possibilities, this tragedy in the Golan has come at an incredibly fortuitous time for Netanyahu’s thugs.