On Saturday, a Hezbollah rocket attack on a soccer field in the Druze town of Madjal Shams in the Golan Heights left at least 12 children dead. The Lebanese militant group denies responsibility for the attack, but both Israel and the United States have attributed it to them. After ten months of clashes between Israel and Hezbollah, in which Israel has killed hundreds of Hezbollah militants and numerous senior Hezbollah commanders, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said the IDF’s response to Saturday’s attack “will come and it will be severe.” The United States and France have spent months trying to mediate between the two sides, making major efforts to deter the conflict from escalating to full-blown war, but the situation threatens to spiral out of control.
The ongoing war in the north has left some 100,000 Israelis displaced from their homes and has decimated now-abandoned villages near the border. Saturday’s strike highlights two major issues in Israel today, the place of the Druze, an Arabic-speaking religious minority group, in Israeli society, and perhaps most salient, the international status of the Golan Heights.
The Golan Heights are a rocky plateau northeast of the Sea of Galilee. They were captured by Israel from Syria during the 1967 Six Day War and contested again in 1973, after which Syria unilaterally ended negotiations over the return of the territory. In 1981 Israel de facto annexed the Golan with the passage of the Golan Heights Law, which applied Israeli law to the territory, a move condemned by the UN Security Council. For decades Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights was recognized by Israel alone, until U.S. President Donald Trump formally recognized it as part of Israel in 2019. The rest of the international community views the region as Syrian territory under Israeli occupation.
The reality on the ground is complex, with the population of the Golan roughly split between Jewish Israelis and Golan Druze, who, unlike Israeli Druze, traditionally identify as Syrian but are increasingly acquiring Israeli citizenship in the wake of the Syrian civil war. The Hezbollah attack has brought renewed attention to the status of Druze in the Golan Heights and their relationship with the Israeli state.
International media reactions to the attacks have been varied, with outlets attempting to walk the line between sympathy for the victims and attempts to contextualize the geopolitical dispute over the status of the territory. International outlets like Al Jazeera and The Guardian, as well as left-wing American outlets like MSNBC, have highlighted the Golan Heights, disputed status in their coverage, referring to the region as the “Israeli-occupied Golan Heights” in their headlines. The New York Times and NPR notably used the wording “Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.” Other publications, like Reuters, The Washington Post, and CNN, use similar terminology in the body of their stories if not the headline. Meanwhile, Jewish and Israeli publications and news agencies like The Times of Israel and JTA, as well as non-Jewish but pro-Israel outlets like The Free Press, have refrained from using the “Israeli-occupied” or “Israeli-controlled” language in their coverage.
For his part, President Biden has continued Trump-era policy on the status of the Golan Heights. On Monday, White House officials affirmed that the “Golan Heights is part of Northern Israel” in a statement expressing solidarity with Israel and the victims of the attack. And while other Western leaders have remained largely mum on the status of the territory in the wake of the Hezbollah strike, it remains unlikely that the international status quo on the issue will change anytime soon. In the meantime, Israel is left to grapple with how to respond, both in terms of its military operations and the state’s relationship with its Druze inhabitants.
Photo credit: M. Z. Wojalski via Wikimedia (CC-BY-SA-3.0).