Syrian Druse Pilgrims Pay Rare Visit to Israel

A delegation of Syrian Druse made a rare trip to Israel this week and visited a shrine revered by the faith as Israel seeks to extend its influence inside Syria after the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad.

Both Israel and Syria have sizable communities of Druse — an Arabic-speaking religious minority scattered across the Levant region. But with the two countries formally at war for decades, Syrian Druse were generally unable to enter Israel to visit sites holy to their faith.

Sheikh Muwafaq Tarif, a Druse leader in Israel who helped organize the two-day visit, said roughly 100 people arrived on Friday in a convoy from Syrian territory. They visited the Tomb of the Prophet Shuaib in the northern Galilee region of Israel, a site holy to the sect.

“After being cut off for decades, to see our people arriving in our country — it’s a moment of great joy,” said Mr. Tarif, adding that he knew most of the visitors only from phone conversations because of the great difficulty of traveling between the two countries.

Oren Marmorstein, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, wrote on social media that the pilgrimage was the first of its kind in decades.

In Israel, many Druse hold Israeli passports, serve in the national military and are viewed as loyal “brothers in arms.” Other Druse who live in the Golan Heights, territory that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed, still consider themselves Syrian and tend to have Israeli residency cards, but not citizenship.