In the high-powered, well-researched world of Middle Eastern border politics, everyone knows about the Golan Heights, the Litani River, and the Sinai Peninsula. But nobody’s ever heard of Ghajar.
A bucolic riverside village of 2,000 in the Galilee’s far north, Ghajar could fit inconspicuously anywhere on the Syrian, Lebanese, or Israeli landscape. Until regional tumult during 1967’s Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, it did. Originally citizens of Syria, the residents of Ghajar accepted Israeli occupation and many became citizens under the Golan Heights Law in 1981.
Natural growth expanded the village across the border into Israeli-occupied South Lebanon – a fact that split the village in half when the UN drew a ceasefire line down the middle of Ghajar upon Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon. In what’s perceived as a diplomatic gesture, the Israeli army has recently announced its intention to withdraw from the northern half of the village. Although villagers don’t feel particularly Israeli, many feel hard-pressed by the prospect of a divided existence.
And if that weren’t difficult enough for the residents of Ghajar, they also happen to be Alawites, members of a quasi-Shiite sect that most conservative Muslims reject as heretical. In Lebanon, where many Sunnis and Christians resent Syrian puppetry in the government, Alawites are distrusted as the scions of the Syrian ruling family (the Assads, against all odds, are members of the sect). And in Israel, despite harmony among neighbors in the Golan Heights, there isn’t a single other Alawite community in the entire country.
This quintessentially Middle Eastern problem of identity is not only the problem of Ghajar’s 2,000 Alawite villagers. In the midst of controversy over Jews and Palestinians, Hezbollah and Hamas, Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi Arabs – a colorful cast of embattled third-party minorities falls through the cracks.
Take the Druze, a basically Arab ethnoreligious group straddling the contentious borders between Israel, Syria, and Lebanon. Following in the theology of 11th century preacher named Anushkatin ad-Darazi, they practice a secret offshoot of Islam that reveres the biblical Jethro and believes in reincarnation.
Numbering perhaps one million, the Druze have managed to do the impossible: among Jews and Arabs alike, they’ve lived in peace as loyal citizens.
In Israel, while most Arab citizens vote for ethnic-interest parties and are happily exempted from military service, the Druze defy prediction – serving in the army with distinction and voting for right-wing Jewish politicians.
As you move away from the cradle of Abrahamic religion, the strange minority permutations of Middle Eastern culture get stranger. In Iraq, up to 500,000 Kurds and a handful of Arabs practice Yazidism, an Indo-Iranian polytheistic faith that gives special acclaim to Melek Taus, the peacock angel. Eastern Turkey is dotted with communities of Turks and Kurds who self-describe as Alevi, a syncretic, liberal religion that draws on both Islam and Tengriism, the old religion of the Turkic shamans. Just before you hit the Khyber Pass, you meet the Kalash – a blue-eyed mountain people numbering 6,000 who worship a pantheon of protector-gods in the Taliban’s backyard.
Like Ghajar, it seems like nobody making policy in Iraq or AfPak has heard of the Yezidis or the Kalash. But amidst the bombs and the religious zealotry, it comes as no surprise that the rich, arcane ways of life that they’ve preserved are under assault.
And whatever we think about peace between Jews and Arabs or Kurds and Turks, there’s a banner that every sensible person can take up: the rights of the Middle East’s ancient minorities. The first step, of course, would be acknowledging their existence.
Because after all, not everyone in the Middle East accepts the revelations of Mohammed, Jesus, or Moses. Some still worship bulls. Some even worship peacocks.
Brave? Arguably so. At the very least, I think it’s pretty cool. It certainly has me on the side of Ghajar’s villagers, who never chose to straddle the border between two countries that are barely their own.
Photo source: Wikimedia
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