Corruption is corruption, no matter in which community. We have had
enough!
Salman Masalha ||
Of Turbans and Turbines
The country was in a frenzy last week due to the protest by Druze
in the Golan Heights against the start of the construction of a farm of wind
turbines on lands that belong to them. This protest elicited considerable
solidarity among the Druze in the Galilee and on the Carmel as well,
unleashing the suppressed rage among members of the community going back to
the days of the despicable Nation State Law passed in by Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in 2018, a Basic Law, which has
quasi-constitutional status, that defines Israel as “the nation-state of the
Jewish people,” with no reference to equality, democracy or minority rights,
as well to the passage in 2017 of the Kaminitz Law imposing harsh punishments
on illegal construction, aimed particularly at non-Jewish locales.
At the outset, it is necessary to distinguish between the Golan
Druze and the Druze in the state of Israel within the Green Line, the 1948
Armistice Line, on several parameters. With few exceptions, the Druze in the
Golan Heights, an area Israel annexed in 1981 but which is recognized by the
United Nations only as Syrian territory under Israeli military occupation, do
not see themselves as citizens of Israel. However, the Druze in Israel proper
are citizens who fulfill all the obligations citizenship entails, including
military and civilian service. The solidarity of the Druze in Israel with the
residents of the Golan Heights is only natural, just as has happened in the
past with the Druze in Syria or the Druze in Lebanon or anywhere else in the
world. This solidarity is comparable to the Jewish solidarity with Jews
who suffer from persecution in some other place, and all the more so, as in
the case of the Druze now, when the injustice is just around the corner.
I
have followed the claims raised on the pages of this newspaper and many of
them are justified, beginning with the absence of a master plan in Druze
locales to shaky infrastructures and ever-increasing population density and
overcrowding. The rate of natural increase in a situation in which there are
no approved plans for construction of additional housing is impelling young
couples to build their homes on lands privately-owned by their families and
wherever possible, without permits. Thus, everyone becomes a lawbreaker who,
under the Kaminitz Law, must repeatedly pay heavy fines.
The
protest by the Druze in the Golan is a completely different story. For years
now the Golan Druze have been in conflict with the global renewable energy
company Energix, which is supposed to operate the turbines. They are
struggling against a small number of landowners in the community who were
lured into leasing lands upon which to erect the turbines. At Energix, they
claim that they have advanced the project over many years in
coordination with the “spiritual” leader of the Druze community in Israel,
Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif. Sheikh Tarif is now saying that the spiritual leadership
of the community “supports the struggle of the Golan Druze, and the claim by
the Energix company that the entire project was advanced in coordination with
him is incorrect.”
A look at the succession of events indicates
that apparently the sheikh’s statements would not pass a polygraph test. It
turns out that since 2015 the “spiritual” leader himself was acting to promote
the establishment of the wind turbine farm in the Golan Heights, and in an
interview to the Hebrew-language news site Ynet he said that the state was
discriminating against the Druze in the Golan Heights in that it was not
permitting them to establish a wind turbine farm. “Instead of making positive
use of the situation at this difficult time and helping the Druze in the Golan
Heights, the state is creating more discrimination and more alienation,“
charged the sheikh. He expressed anger at the fact that only Jewish businesses
were being allowed to establish wind farms. He apparently wanted to urge Druze
entrepreneurs to take up the project as well.
It turns out that
Energix not only worked in coordination with the sheikh himself but also
employed an associate of his and member of his family. We learn this from a
manifesto published in 2019 by Druze inhabitants of the Golan Heights against
the plan for the turbine and the people behind it. It was published as a
response to a statement published in Arabic and directed at the inhabitants of
the Golan on behalf of the Energix company and signed by two people: The one
signatory was its CEO Asa Levinger and the other, who boasted the title of
president of the company, was none other than Saleh Tarif, the former Knesset
member and minister without portfolio, who was forced to resign in the wake of
a corruption scandal – a cousin of Sheikh Tarif, who since then has been
following the sheikh around in Israel and abroad, like a shadow.
In that statement signed by Saleh Tarif, he tried to indicate the
turbines’ great benefits for the inhabitants of the Golan Heights. Among the
many lures he enumerated: “Taxes that will be paid to the local councils and
scholarships for Druze students.” He was also able to add that the project
will lead to “strengthening of the connection to the Druze tradition.”
Spiritual
leaders with turbans on their heads are supposed to deal with spiritual
matters and saving souls, and not with winning converts on behalf of their
close associates and turbine entrepreneurs destined to rake in profits at the
expense of destroying the lives and villages of the Druze in the Golan
Heights. Corruption is corruption, no matter in which community. We have had
enough!
Haaretz, June 29, 2023
For Hebrew,
press here
Salman Masalha
