Druzes in the Jewish State

Following the war of 1948 Palestine's Druzes became part of the state of Israel. Overwhelmingly rural, they sought to safeguard their community's age-old ethnic independence by holding on to their traditional ethno-religious particularism. Ethnicity and ethnic issues, however, were ready tools for the Zionists in the pursuit of their policy aims vis-a-vis the state's Arab population. Central among these was the cooptation of part of the Druze elite in an obvious effort to alienate the Druzes from the other Arabs - creating "e;good"e; Arabs and "e;bad"e; Arabs served the Jewish state as a foil for its ongoing policy of dispossession and control. The author painstakingly documents the political, social and economic factors that ensured the "e;success"e; of these Zionist policies, but concludes that the fissured identity of Israel's Druzes today bespeaks a feeling of musiba, tragedy, within the community itself.