The Druze people of Syria have expressed a desire to be annexed and protected by the State of Israel. This is not merely a moral issue, but a very strategic one that can have important benefits for Israel as it re-postures itself as the dominant military force in the Middle East. Aside from providing Israel with a northern buffer zone from Syria and Turkey, there is a much more critical function that the Druze annexation can serve to enhance Israel's strategic interests.
Israel’s display of dazzling military, technical and intelligence feats against foreign enemies in the current war seems incongruous with its inability to act decisively against the local threat, i.e. the Palestinian Arabs. Israel has spent a year and a half, losing hundreds of troops in Gaza, without being able to put down Hamas completely (due to the Biden Administration's threats), while still barely scratching the surface in its battle against terror in the Judea and Samaria, aka 'West Bank'.
This failure to take care of localized threats has less to do with Israel’s lack of military abilities and more to do with the outlook and predispositions of its society and military leadership. While Israeli soldiers are proud to give up their lives for their country, that is only when the enemy is clearly defined with a uniform and badge.
Israelis, like their western liberal counterparts, can not fathom the concept of an “enemy society”. One of the most basic premises of western pre-Progressive/woke liberal thinking is that people should never be generalized based on their society, nationality or religion, but should only be judged as individuals solely by their actions. In western thinking, it is inconceivable that an entire society can be evil.
But the Palestinian Arabs are just that- an entirely evil society that glorifies death and sacrifices its own children for the sake of killing Jews. They are an enemy of the Jewish people. They don’t deny this, in fact they are proud of this fact and broadcast it for the world to hear. While not all Palestinian Arabs perpetrate terror attacks, hating Jews and seeking their destruction is ingrained in their religion and culture which affects all Palestinian Arabs. Hatred of Jews is broadcast on Palestinian Arab radio, tv, in school textbooks and 5 times a day in their mosques. They are an enemy society- plain and simple, albeit not all its members in uniform.
As a result, when the Palestinian Arabs decided to expand their war against Israel on October 7th, Israelis were morally and philosophically unprepared to fight this war- a war against an entire enemy society. Israel has been prosecuting this war through tactics which can only provide tactical wins but no strategic victory. The reason for this is that even if Israel were to find every Hamas member and every Hamas building and eliminate them all, the war would continue since the entire Palestinian Arab society supports Hamas’ goal of annihilating Israel.
If Hamas were to be fully destroyed, the Palestinian Arabs would regenerate and rebuild a new Hamas very quickly, maybe under a different name. This is true both in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. None of the Palestinian Arabs are interested in compromise or sharing the land with Israel. They all believe Israelis must go and there can be only one state, a Palestinian Arab one. They admit this openly despite the West’s curious unwillingness to listen to them on this point. As a result, as long as we continue to coexist on the same piece of land, we will never achieve peace. The war will go on until we decide to put an end to their goal of removing us, by removing them. This is a very difficult bridge for Israelis, as westerners, to cross.
But aside from it being a western thing, it's also a Jewish thing. The Talmud says that the Jewish people are defined by three character traits: humility, compassion and bestowing kindness. It just doesn’t feel Jewish to fight a war against non-uniformed people including women and children. We are not intrinsically a cold-hearted warrior nation and as a result we don’t have the heart to fight and win a war against an entire society, even one that has been trying to win a war against us.
This is where the Druze come in.
The Druze recognize Israel as the military superpower of the Middle East both in terms of our conventional, non-conventional and world class defensive capabilities. They see Israel as the only force that is strong enough and dependable enough to protect them from the Islamist government in Syria. For Israel, a military alliance would mean Israeli boots on the ground as well as access to our most sophisticated defensive and offensive weapons. The buffer zone which we would receive from the Druze, while important and strategic, would only be as good as our ability to defend it.
A much more practical “payment” that the Druze can provide in exchange for our military alliance would be to offer something that we don’t currently have- the willingness to help us win the war against the Palestinian Arabs in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. We have the weapons and the intelligence to win this war, but we don’t have the temperament and moral clarity. If the Syrian Druze helped us take care of this problem, much like the Lebanese Christians helped us fight the Palestinian Arabs during the first Lebanon War, it would prove they are a true, trusted ally, worthy of a long-term military alliance between our two peoples.