After seven months fighting Hamas terrorists in Gaza with his elite military reserve unit, 32-year-old Eyal Ghanam is now heading to the country’s volatile northern border for a two-month stint.
For Ghanam, a member of Israel’s small and strongly patriotic Druze community, military service runs deep in the family; his father’s 25-year Israel Defense Forces career saw him rise to become infantry brigade commander of the northern Gaza Strip before Israel’s unilateral pullout from the coastal territory two decades ago. He then served as an Israeli military attache in Europe.
The native Arabic speaker says he is astounded by the inversions being played out in the world regarding Israel’s war against Hamas, now in its eleventh month.
“As someone who served in combat, I don’t need the world and the media to tell me what’s wrong and what’s right,” Ghanam told JNS in an interview at his home in this northern Israeli mixed city. “I saw everything with my own eyes—how the Israelis and the Jews would in every single operation work to minimize the casualties even at risk to ourselves.”
Israel, he said, “is the only place in the Middle East fighting the Western war against Shariah [Islamic] law,” he added in English. “What is not to get about that?”
From Bucharest to the IDF
Two decades and a lifetime away, the younger Ghanam was at an international school in Bucharest while his father was capping his military career as Israel’s military attache to Romania, Ukraine and Bulgaria. He then made the abrupt switch, along with his older brother, to a boarding school in the northern Israeli city of Acre run by the Israeli Navy.
“We went from the sons of a diplomat, with bodyguards, to full military life, getting up at 6 a.m., in uniform, saluting the flag and working out,” he recalled.
But this kind of life, he found, suited him, leading him to enlist in the “most combat unit possible,” which for him meant the Givati Reconnaissance Brigade.
“Because of my father’s service, we saw in the military a source of inspiration,” he said. “From as long as I know myself he educated us to give to the country and contribute,” ticking off all his family members, including his grandfather, an uncle and three brothers, who served in the military or the police, as well as an uncle who fell in battle.
Druze make international headlines
The Druze community in Israel made international headlines last month when a Hezbollah rocket killed 12 Druze children in a village on the Golan Heights, in an attack that prompted Israel to kill a top Hezbollah commander in Beirut.
A religious sect that began about a thousand years ago in Egypt as an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam, the Druze, who number about one million worldwide, primarily live in Syria, Lebanon and Israel, as well as in smaller communities in Western cities around the globe.
More than 150,000 Druze live in Israel, primarily in the Galilee, representing less than 2% of the population.
Notably loyal to the country in which they live, high numbers of Israeli Druze men from the Galilee serve in the IDF, where they excel and have long been known for their high (85%) rate of enlistment in combat units and careers in the military.
“The tragic attack on the Golan Heights showed how the State of Israel was at one,” said Col. (res.) Hamada Ghanam. “There was complete and total solidarity.”
He said that time would work to bring the Druze community in the Golan—which unlike their brethren in the Galilee previously had a cool relationship with the Jewish state due to uncertainty over their future— closer to Israel.
The elder Ghanam, who visited his son in Gaza during his reserve service, lamented how Israel misread Hamas’s intent over the past few decades.
“The writing was on the wall: Hamas never spoke of peace with Israel and exploited any opportunity to attack us,” he said. “Our leaders should have understood this,” he said, adding that he was surprised only by the intensity of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre. His son, who works as an insurance agent in civilian life, rushed out of their northern Israel home that fateful morning, crisscrossing the country straight to the southern border.
Looking at his son, the former commander said he senses continuity in his life’s work and mission.
“I hear all these things that are said about the IDF in the United States, in Europe, in Australia and I think to myself ‘how wrong can you be,’” said the younger Ghanam. “When I go abroad I am proud to say I am Israeli.”