The Druze in Israel

 As I walked the dog the other day, three large young men overtook me, returning home from the supermarket. They looked very typical for our neighborhood, in the sense that they were very well dressed, I guessed they were students living in the area, which is unusual - Its an expensive area outside the center of town. Students with money usually prefer the city center. 

I let them pass me and realized they were talking Arabic, then I watched them enter a very nice ground floor apartment nearby.  There was a large Israeli flag outside the apartment and from that I gathered that they must be Druze. All over Israel there are Druze matrons at strategic spots close to nature reserves, selling thin pitta that they make on the spot and which you can have with chocolate spread or houmus and tea or coffee and sometimes other foods. They always fly the Israeli flag and they often fly the Druze flag too which is a rainbow flag, distinct from, but not unlike the gay pride flag.   

Watching them brought back to me two events:

The first event was in the mid 1970s: I went to a Scouts summer camp in a forest in the Carmel mountain range and one morning we were taken into a local Druze village (now a town), I remember that it was Usafiya. I would have been about 13. We were told to wander round and knock on people's doors and ask them about their religion / lives or something like that. I assume this had all been arranged beforehand. Anyway I did just that, I walked up a flight of stairs to the door of a very nice house, knocked and a nice woman greeted me and invited me in. I am pretty sure she gave me a cup of tea and some biscuits and told me about the Druze.  That's all I really remember.  

The second event would have been nearly ten years later in about 1984, I was at Sussex University and talking to my personal tutor (Doctor Michael Johnson), who had done his Phd in Beirut a few years earlier. We must have discussed the Druze, and I told him this story and I remember that he was stunned by it.  That's why I suddenly though it was worth recounting.

This is the Wikipedia entry for the town: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isfiya .

Images of Isfiya in Shutterstock:https://www.shutterstock.com/search/isfiya?image_type=photo

 Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia came to Israel once and addressed a gathering of editors at Tel Aviv University which I attended. There was a young Druze woman there, who told him how she had set up a page for a Lebanese Druze matriarch who had led the community in the 19th century. She told him how grateful she was to Israel (and possibly also Wikipedia) for making it possible for her to do such things. All of us Tel Aviv liberals shuffled  uncomfortably in our seats at the praise, but what she said made sense.