She’s Leading a Revolution in Her Traditional Israeli Druze Community. And She’s Not Alone

Samira Azzam. “The mission I have taken on myself – to serve my people and my society – is what saved me. As long as I’m alive, I’m going to exploit life to the hilt.”Credit: Fadi Amun

“The whole system perpetuates social hierarchy, inequality – women being pushed out of the political arena,” Azzam says. “Druze women today are educated, they have made their mark in many places. In our society, 70 percent of the students [in higher education] are women. Doctors, lawyers, engineers. We even had one who got into NASA. So why not in a local council? What is there in a local council that is beyond women’s capabilities?”

As in many Arab local authorities, there is little room for maneuver in this fall’s election in Isfiya. Every hamula, or clan, knows how many votes it can mobilize and how many are needed per council seat; their local government has 11 members. Clans that cannot muster enough votes for a seat come to an agreement whereby they share seats with another clan. These representatives, usually men, rotate among themselves several times during their five-year terms. The automatic, proportional voting system and the rotations make the council’s conference table largely a symbolic meeting place, without a proper agenda or the ability to get things done. But Samira Azzam decided to end all that.

An Arabic teacher by profession, she has always been a social activist by avocation. In her younger days, she established women’s clubs in Isfiya, including the local branch of the WIZO international women’s organization. “The whole time I had to beg for donations from outside sources,” she recalls.

She first started to think about politics when she went with her husband as observers to a council meeting, out of curiosity. The room was filled with men sitting around a table; at the far end, all but hidden, were two women. Azzam sat down next to them.

“I heard what was being discussed and I just felt like disappearing,” she recalls. “I said to myself, ‘I’m sitting behind a pillar – and these men are managing us?’ And then I realized that the problem isn’t with them, but with us. We [women] think that our place is behind a pillar. That was the moment I said that the day would come and I would be sitting at the table.”

She organized a group about eight years ago – six women who started to meet regularly (“There was no ego involved, we never quarreled”) and became the nucleus of her groundbreaking New Isfiya slate, which from the outset sought to upset the male-dominated clan system of political power sharing. They recruited supporters, held dozens of parlor meetings, set up neighborhood committees and came up with work plans. In the 2018 election, Azzam was the only one from the all-woman list to make it onto the council.

Is there such a thing as women’s politics?

Azzam: “My view is that women are better managers than men. Men focus on one thing, whereas women can see not only 180 degrees but 360 degrees. Women are practical, they see problems and they make plans and implement them. Men? Blah, blah, blah – and they never take responsibility.”

As a member of the council – she was the only one who served a complete term, without rotation – Azzam initiated a number of pioneering projects. One was a scholarship program for local women over the age of 30, in cooperation with the University of Haifa: Today more than 40 of them are pursuing an undergraduate degree there, among them Asmahan Swietat, a grandmother of 59.

“At the age of 18, because of a dire economic situation, I gave up the idea of school and got married,” Swietat says in a promotional clip for the project. “I devoted 41 years to the house and to the children, and now it’s my turn to realize the dream of that 18-year-old.”

Personally, the issue of Druze integration into Israeli society in general amuses Azzam. “You have to understand, you’re talking to a mother of four children,” she says. “The eldest, a daughter, is an economist at the Bank of Israel; the second, a son, is an engineer; the third, a daughter, has a B.A. in geography; and the youngest, another son, is a soldier. And they all speak with the right Israeli ‘r.’ How much more can you expect? My children feel they are an integral part of the state, and yet the state is contemptuous of them.”

Two incidents on Memorial Day last month vividly reflect the atmosphere in Druze society today. On one hand, one of the ceremonies during the community’s annual Nabi Shu’aib pilgrimage holiday – commemorating the biblical figure of Jethro, the Midianite father-in-law of Moses – was called off because, according to the Druze calendar, it fell close to the day for remembering Israel’s fallen soldiers. On the other hand, residents of Isfiya blocked the entry of Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel into their local cemetery on Memorial Day, where she was to represent the government; Gamliel was forced to stay in her car when the commemorative siren was sounded.

“I was very pleased with that,” Azzam says. “How long can they go on lying to us? How many times can they tell us the same despicable things: ‘We’re blood brothers,’ ‘we’re brothers-in-arms’? You must understand, we’ve already managed to develop a bit of intelligence, enough to understand that things are not working. We’re stuck when it comes to planning and construction, we are encircled in a way that prevents us from being able to expand. We understand that there is a racist policy against us, that our country is moving toward apartheid with a one-way ticket. Anyone who is not Jewish doesn’t count. And she [Gamliel] comes to sell us all that nonsense on the graves of our dear ones? That day is also one of soul-searching, a day on which we need to contemplate what our children died for.”

What does that say about the future?

“There are voices today in the community – and no one can silence them – that are asking why we do army service. If other, Muslim Arabs don’t serve, but we [who do serve] are accorded exactly the same status [as them] in this country, then why do we need to be killed? And you know what? It’s right that they are asking such question. You [Israeli Jewish society] and I made an agreement; I am honoring it and you are not. It’s high time we told the politicians just that. It’s time for us to look them in the eye and tell them the truth.

“That’s it,” she continues. “We are fed up with the scornful attitude, with the lie you tell us. We are not brothers, we are not brothers-in-arms, we are not blood brothers. We are not brothers at all. Because no brother does to another brother what Israeli governments do to the Druze.”

But the state has taken a racist approach toward you for 75 years, discriminating especially in matters concerning budgets and town planning and construction – any expansion of your locales is considered illegal. And then the nation-state law [aimed at enshrining Israel’s Jewish national values] came along, too. You didn’t understand what was going on before?

“We understood. But there are a great many groups within our community who have narrow interests, and leaders who forged some sort of agreement with the state… You know how the State of Israel works. We even have the ‘Druze-Zionist Movement’ (laughs). Do me a favor – I mean, what’s that all about?”

So you were naïve all these years?

“Yes. We were naïve and we were subordinate to self-interested leaders of our own.”

Whom you would like to replace.

“Yes.”

“We are looking to her,” says Shahrazad Hassoun-kamal, a public policy expert and activist from the Druze town of Daliat al-Carmel, referring to Azzam. “She has succeeded where other women did not dare even to try. Completely. Maybe our society here is still digesting it, but if we take a historical perspective we will realize that she is groundbreaking, she has done something formative.”

Daliat al-Carmel, which is not far from Isfiya, is a bastion of secular Druze society, but not a single woman serves on its local council, she notes: “Look at the Arab local authorities and at local government in general – immediately stigmas come to mind about how it’s corrupt, obsolete, sickly. Young men and women are leery of getting involved.” (The day before Azzam spoke to Haaretz, the head of the Isfiya local council, together with three other Arab council heads, were arrested on suspicions of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, money laundering and tax offenses.)

Hassoun-kamal doesn’t know what makes Azzam and the Isfiya women tick, but apparently the reasons behind the rise of their movement are more prosaic than one might suppose. In 2015, Azzam became involved in the Kayan Feminist Organization, whose aim is to empower Arab women in Israel to assert their rights in both their communities and their families/clans, and to assume leadership roles on the local and national levels.

“Without Kayan,” she notes, “we would not have reached the place we are at today. We went to training sessions and seminars about local politics, learned how to understand budgetary information and how the local council functions. Beyond that, we learned how to read a budget from a gender perspective – to see the needs of women within the budget.” In addition, Azzam says, Kayan activists taught the women skills such as how to conduct a meeting, how to recruit people and so on.

During this period, the women in Kayan joined forces with a Jordanian feminist organization, two of whose leaders arrived to help train the wannabe leaders. “Both women studied at Harvard under Marshall Ganz, the father of the theory of community organization, and had established an organization that works with movements across the Arab world,” Azzam says. Prof. Ganz, who developed a model for grassroots organization that was adapted by Kayan, consults unions, nonprofits and political campaigns – such as that of Barack Obama in 2008.

Former Labor MK Ibtisam Mara’ana.Credit: Meged Gozani

In advance of the last municipal elections in 2018, Kayan established a Women in Politics project, through which it supported and trained female candidates who wanted to run in four Druze and Arab locales: Isfiya, Ma’aleh Iron, Shfaram and Arabeh. Of them, one was victorious: Samira Azzam. Kayan’s staff subsequently worked with Azzam when fine-tuning its own vision and objectives.

“I don’t think any of the men in Arab society have done anything like that,” says Rafah Anabtawi, general director of Kayan, referring to the grooming of potential political candidates in advance of elections. “Training sessions are essential, as we’ve learned from the studies we’ve conducted. And also ongoing receipt of advice and support. That’s obligatory.

“We advocate constant, long-term investment from below, based on the belief that change can occur only if one works with the relevant individuals themselves, not for them. They are part of the change,” she continues. “The women Samira led underwent a very intense training process. At the same time, they started to work toward forging social change in Isfiya, and gradually broadened their activity to encompass all segments of the population – young people, specific neighborhoods. That, from our viewpoint, is the work of feminism. A sensitive, gender point of view is sensitive to the entire society – not just to women.”

“Programs that train and prepare women for political life are the only tool that generates results in that realm,” agrees Anat Nir, a social activist and a founder of Program 51 – School of Politics. That organization, whose name refers to the proportion of women in the general population and their potential level of political representation, teaches leadersip and other organizational skills.

“Many Arab women who are elected to office went through programs like these,” Nir says. “Program 51 is first of all based on an axis of mutual reinforcement. Beyond that, we provide our participants with theoretical knowledge that they lack, as women are not present in the public domain as men are. In the end, the program also focuses on imparting practical knowledge about running a campaign. The feminist point of view covers these three axes.”

Such training is not only beneficial for women on the local level. “Our society is failing big-time because of exclusive masculine rule,” says former Labor MK Ibtisam Mara’ana, who embarked on her own career via Program 51, in 2021. “I got involved because I had an old dream of being the council head of my town, Fureidis,” she says. “In the 1990s, I was active and supported Ibtisam Mahameed, who was 20 years older than me and was running for council head. That was a huge failure, because in the end it wasn’t a real possibility. She came out of it totally battered – she didn’t stand a chance. There has never been a woman on the Fureidis council.

“The training was super-professional,” says Mara’ana, who only served for about a year as a legislator, during the brief Bennett-Lapid government, “and included lectures and meetings with women in local government, who described how they started and what kind of work they do. I became very enthusiastic. I realized that I too have a political dream, that I have the motivation and power [to pursue it]. The program made me believe that I could really do it, and during the studies I already started to engage in politics. In the next class I was invited to speak as a politician. It was a type of magic.”

Zainab Abu Swaid, the first Bedouin woman to serve on a local council. Attributes her success to the training and support she received before entering politics.Credit: Fadi Amun

Most of the founders of Program 51 participated in a project run by Shaharit, a nonprofit think tank whose “120 Program” promotes and grooms national leaders from both Jewish and Arab communities. One of its participants was Zainab Abu Swaid, from the Galilee Bedouin town of Kaabiyah-Tabash-Hajjajra – who went on to shatter a number of glass ceilings: A 39-year-old divorcee and mother of a special-needs child, Abu Swaid is the first Bedouin woman to be elected to a local council in the country and serves as director of the employment division for minorities in the Welfare and Social Affairs Ministry. Last year she founded Manda College in the Arab town of that name, in Lower Galilee.

Abu Swaid: “In the 120 Program I encountered Israel society, and there I kept practicing saying ‘I want to be a politician.’ We were given an exercise where we had to write where we’d be in another five years, and I didn’t have the courage to write it. To say I wanted to be a pitiful council member! A voluntary position! But thanks to my training, and practicing that statement – ‘I want, I want, I want’ – I started to dare.”

Like other women interviewed here, Abu Swaid stresses the immense importance of the formal training for novice female politicians. “One of the factors that defines women is the need to receive legitimization in order to run for office. I had to prove that I was qualified, to say that I was certified to do that. At the same time, nine men from my town with no education, who don’t care about the general good of society, had no trouble yelling to the heavens that they wanted to be council members. Training courses of the sort I took address this issue. Without the program I would not be where I am today.”

This may not be most glorious period in terms of social and political empowerment of Israeli Arab women, but initiatives to change that situation are flourishing. Within the framework of the Shaharit program, Abu Swaid founded Arkan (Foundations), a leadership course for young Arabs who hope to enter local and national politics. Half the participants are women and some are expected to announce that they will run for local office in October’s election, she says. At the same time, a coalition of civil society, nonprofit groups is working on the “Your [Woman’s] Voice is Power” campaign, to encourage women to participate in politics, providing then with practical preparation as well as post-election assistance.

Abu Swaid’s win of a local council seat in 2018 surprised everyone, including herself. Like Samira Azzam in Isfiya, she doesn’t really know who voted for her. On Election Day, she recalls, a woman of 80 who was on her way to the polling station accidentally dropped a package she was carrying – and among the items that fell out was a ballot for Abu Swaid’s slate.

“People were angry at her and boycotted her in her family,” Abu Swaid recalls. “‘Why should you vote for this slate of young people?’ For us it was inspiring, because we saw that even elderly women perhaps saw in us the realization of their dream which was never fulfilled.”

In fact, both she and Azzam note that the reactions they encountered after being voted in were far more positive than they had anticipated. “When we took the initiative, no one objected,” Azzam says. “We thought people would raise a ruckus. Nothing happened, our election went smoothly.” For one, her father, who’s 87, came out proudly in her defense in arguments at the day-care center he attends.

At present, in preparation for the upcoming municipal elections, and while dealing with council issues and an array of social initiatives – Azzam is also engaged in “exporting” her revolution and has created a group of wannabe female leaders in Daliat al-Carmel. “I don’t know if they will run for office, because there isn’t much time, but they are convinced that they need to enter politics,” she says. “So, as far as I am concerned, the spark is already there.”

Where do you get the energy and strength to fight all these seemingly impossible battles?

Azzam: “Okay, now we’ll get to the drama. I have been ill with cancer twice. The second time was at the beginning of this term of office; I got the prognosis 11 days after taking over. And not only that. My daughter got intestinal cancer. Less than a year ago my son was diagnosed with brain cancer, and from all the grief and anguish, my husband had a heart attack. I don’t know where I get the strength from, but it’s there. And if it’s there, you have to know how to channel it into the most positive places possible. That’s the best medicine.

“Giving of myself keeps me alive. When I fell ill the first time, I was the mother of a boy of 3, and he kept me alive. Maternal feelings saved me. This time the mission I have taken on myself – to serve my people and my society – is what saved me. As long as I’m alive, I’m going to exploit life to the hilt.”

This article is reproduced in its entirety.