Israel’s Trojan Horse: The Druze and the Weaponization of Minority Solidarity

Since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, Israel has launched a full-spectrum influence campaign across southern Syria, cloaked in the language of humanitarian intervention. Under the guise of protecting the Druze - a religious minority spread across Lebanon, Syria and Israel – Israel has carried out airstrikes, conducted landgrabs to create de facto buffer zone within Syria in an effort to advance Israeli security interests deep inside Syrian territory.

But this is no innocent protection mission. It is a textbook case of subversion: a weaponized narrative campaign, calibrated to mobilize one community’s trauma and historical alliances for the benefit of another state’s geo-political goals. Since late 2024, Israel has progressively cast itself as the sole defender of the Druze, manufacturing consent for territorial occupation, fragmenting Syria’s fragile societal equilibrium, and deploying its own minority - the Israeli Druze - as symbolic intermediaries to legitimate the campaign.

The Subversion Playbook

Such campaigns unfold below the threshold of war, in a space of “unpeace.” Subversion is the deliberate exploitation of cognitive and infrastructural vulnerabilities in the information environment to cause target audiences to voluntarily align their behaviour with the subverter’s intent. In Syria, Israel has deployed all the classic tools: the use of minority victimhood to justify military activity, the activation of pro-Israel information networks, and strategic ambiguity to gloss over blatant violations of Syrian sovereignty under international law.

Israel's campaign began with messaging. As Assad’s regime collapsed, Israel started an information campaign supporting an alleged call by Druze to secede from Syria. This campaign executed by a network of aligned pundits and influencers was an attempt to legitimize Israeli military landgrabs on Mount Hermon in December 2024. Though initially rejected by community leaders, Israel began engaging its domestic Druze community and their networks across the border.

In late February 2025, anonymous attacks on Druze in southern Damascus triggered sectarian clashes, prompting another Israeli narrative campaign highlighting Druze victimhood while promoting Israel as the protector of the community. Aside from Israeli official statements, pro-Israel information networks of pundits, influencers and agitators entered into what looked like a coordinated campaign to promote Druze minority rights and interests.

Following sectarian clashes on July 12, 2025, caused by the abduction and abuse of a Druze merchant by Bedouin tribesmen in the Druze area around Suweida in southern Syria, Israel decided to back its rhetoric with action. This localized violence became a convenient ignition point. Israel quickly framed it as ethnic cleansing, while state-aligned clerics and pundits ramped up a media offensive. Israel – itself accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza - was allegedly stepping in to prevent genocide against its Druze "cousins," who make up just 1.2% of its population but serve at disproportionately high rates in the IDF. On 16 July Israeli Defence Minister Katz ordered strikes on Syrian government forces and the Ministry of Defence in Damascus.

Manufactured Solidarity

To understand the cynicism of this campaign, one must recall Israel’s long, instrumentalist relationship with its own Druze citizens. Contrary to the myth of an unshakable Druze-Zionist covenant, critical scholarship research shows that the Israeli state has consistently manipulated Druze identity, separating them administratively and socially from other Arab citizens to neutralize Palestinian solidarity and secure loyal military service.

From education to conscription, Israeli policy has constructed a “Druze ethnicity” distinct from Arab or Palestinian identity. This ethnogenesis creates a pliable node for state influence over a community that inhabits a key strategic buffer zone between Israel and Syria. Through selective inclusion and symbolic elevation, the Druze minority has been used in Israel to legitimize Israeli territorial claims over the Golan and build transnational social networks into southern Syria.

Israel’s subversion of Druze communities at home has been exported into Syria since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024. Here, Israel amplifies the voices of Druze clerics like increasingly secessionist Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, who opposes the new HTS-led Syrian government and has openly welcomed Israeli support. Meanwhile, leaders like Sheikh Youssef Jarbouav and Laith al-Balous - who favour negotiation with Damascus and reject foreign intervention - are sidelined. The complexity of the Druze political spectrum is flattened into binaries: good Druze welcome Israel; bad Druze aligns with the “jihadist state”.

This selective visibility is core to subversion. It reframes internal Syrian communal dynamics as a morality play between enlightened Israel and a “jihadist state” in Damascus. Paradoxically it was not long ago when Israel aided Islamist rebel groups in the border area when it served its interests to project influence inside Syria. The reality now is that deeply, divided Druze politics are being further polarized by Israeli information campaigns while Israeli airstrike kill dozens of innocent civilians in Damascus as the IDF’s salami tactics cause ever more Syrian territory being occupied.

Land Grabs as Humanitarianism

The humanitarian pretext hides a darker logic. Israel has now occupied the UN-administered buffer zone between Israel and Syria, extending deep into Quneitra and parts of Mount Hermon. The IDF calls this a “sterile defence zone,” but its permanence was made clear when the occupation was extended indefinitely in July 2025. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu reinforced demand of a complete demilitarization of southern Syria while granting further support to Druze vigilantes in the area, suggests Israel’s control over the corridor is going to expand.

Under the pretext of a humanitarian cause to protect Druze more than 70 kilometres into Syrian territory, Israel continues a salami-slicing campaign of annexation. By incrementally expanding military presence under the cover of humanitarianism, Israel avoids outright condemnation while achieving irreversible facts on the ground. And by linking this expansion to the protection of a vulnerable minority, it compels silence or even tacit support from allies like the United States—especially within the disjointed Trump administration, whose own strategic drift leaves space for regional actors to shape realities unilaterally.

Druze fighters raising an Israeli flag in Suweida beg the question whether Israel is providing more than just air support and humanitarian aid. But this is about far more than controlling territory, it is about controlling perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of a community Israel is trying to disconnect socially and cognitively from their Arab fellow countrymen. Israel’s use of the Druze narrative has enabled it to carry out strategic depth-building in Syria while portraying itself as an unlikely defender of minority rights. It is almost cynical that pro-Israel talking heads are suddenly discovering their humanitarian side after cheerleading Israel’s disproportionate violence following the 7^th of October attacks of 2023, in Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank leaving 10,000s of civilians dead and 100,000s of civilian displaced. But it is precisely this inconsistency that reveals the narrative campaign’s true intent.

The Danger Ahead

Israel’s weaponization of the Druze issue is not without consequences. By privileging one faction within a fragmented community, it risks deepening intra-Druze tensions and framing the entire group as collaborators. Already, Syrian voices are warning that Israel’s interventions could provoke retaliatory violence against Druze civilians, and regional actors like Russia and Turkey have condemned the Golan incursions.

Moreover, this subversion strategy undermines longer-term efforts at Syrian stabilization. U.S.-mediated normalization talks between Syria and Israel, which are quietly backed by Trump but undermined by Netanyahu’s maximalism, may collapse under the weight of these incursions. For Israel, a weak Syria is ideal. For the region, it is a recipe for another decade of instability.

The Druze, long caught in the crossfire of regional power plays, now find themselves once again instrumentalized by Israel as playing regional hegemon projecting force under the cover of kinship. What started as a narrative campaign on social media in late 2024 is not about protecting minority rights but the appropriation of a minority cause to advance Israeli security interests.

Conclusion

Israel’s subversion of the Druze cause illustrates the evolving landscape of Middle Eastern conflict, where military action is increasingly secondary to narrative dominance. The Druze are being reduced to pawns in a simple morality tale, brushing over the fact that they are a deeply complex community, with multiple leaders, interests, and grievances.

By reducing them to tokens in a strategy of annexation and control, Israel undermines not only Syrian sovereignty but further deepens fears in Turkey and the Gulf about an unchecked and unhinged Israel out of its depth to build a stable regional order. True solidarity with minorities means supporting their agency, not exploiting their vulnerabilities. Until then, Israel’s humanitarianism over the last week, will be remembered not as a rescue but as a ruse.