EIN QINYA, Golan Heights — Sheikh Hayel Sharaf apologized for his wife’s absence as he entered the living room with a tray of coffee and biscuits. She had gone to visit her nephew, he explained, arrested by police the previous day for attacking an ambulance carrying “the terrorists.”

On June 22, a crowd of at least 100 residents, mostly Druze teenagers, stormed an Israeli military ambulance carrying two seriously injured Syrian opposition fighters to an Israeli hospital, outside the Druze town of Majdal Shams. The ambulance managed to escape to a parking lot at the entrance of the nearby town of Neve Ativ, where it was surrounded by the angry crowd.

The two injured Syrians were pulled out of the ambulance and beaten; one died of his wounds and the other rushed to a hospital in critical condition. The Israeli ambulance team suffered light injuries while apparently attempting to protect their charges.

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The incident, which shocked Israeli public opinion, drew harsh condemnation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the spiritual leader of the Druze community in Israel, Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, and other officials.

“It’s inconceivable that IDF soldiers and [Syrian] wounded are attacked by Israeli citizens,” IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot told the media at an emergency meeting called by the army shortly after the incident.

But the attackers, truth be told, never considered themselves Israeli. Seated beneath a framed embroidery of the national Syrian emblem and a map of the Golan Heights titled “the occupied Arab Syrian Golan,” Sheikh Sharaf, a retired Arabic teacher who spent his career in Haifa and Acre, said he understood where the attackers were coming from.

“How can you see people firing bullets and mortar shells at your brothers and loved ones and do nothing?” Sharaf wondered. “This was revenge, a reaction by excitable youth.”

Like most of the Golan’s 20,000 Druze, Sheikh Sharaf never accepted Israeli citizenship when Israel annexed the Golan by law in 1981. He is a Syrian patriot and a proud follower of Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, the Druze leader who led the revolt against French imperialists in the mid 1920s.

Ein Qinya, his village of 1,000 situated on the southern slopes of Mount Hermon, lies just 10 kilometers (6 miles) west of the Druze town of Hader, the only community on the Syrian side of the border not controlled by anti-Assad rebels.

Locals talk of a tacit agreement reached with Israel discouraging the Free Syrian Army from entering Hader which is being defended by local residents rather than the standing Syrian army.

For Sharaf, it makes little difference what faction the rebels in the ambulance belonged to. Ideological discrepancies between the Free Syrian Army and al-Nusra Front, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, are negligible, he said.

“It’s the difference between bad and worse,” he told The Times of Israel.

When it comes to the Syrian civil war, the Druze have good cause for concern. The commander of al-Nusra Front, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, told al-Jazeera in May that his group has begun sending Islamic proselytizers to Druze communities that have fallen under their control to “inform them of the doctrinal pitfalls they have fallen into.” Less than two weeks later, al-Nusra executed 20 Druze civilians in the village of Qalb Lawzah in northern Syria.

“If these people enter any [Druze] area and try to change people’s faith, it will be a catastrophe,” Sharaf said. “It would be a war between the 72 sects of Islam.”

In the nearby town of Majdal Shams, where most of the teenagers who attacked the ambulance originate from, some were sobered by the attack. Nizar Ayoub, an international law expert with a PhD from Moscow, directs al-Marsad, a local human rights organization that tracks Israeli appropriation of Druze land and the expansion of Israeli settlements.

“What happened was a crime, cold-blooded murder,” Ayoub told The Times of Israel. “You can’t control an incited mob carrying out a lynching.”

According to Ayoub, the two culprits responsible for agitating his community’s young generation are the Syrian and Israeli security establishments. “These groups are interested in exaggerating the danger posed by al-Nusra and IS.” By inflating the significance of Islamic radicalism, Ayoub reasoned, both the Assad regime and Israel are striving to weaken the fabric of Syrian society through a vision of “divide and conquer.”

Like Sheikh Sharaf, Ayoub doubted the official Israeli narrative whereby a Druze soldier serving in the IDF notified his community about the arriving ambulance. “I can’t accept the argument that the soldier acted on his own. Did he really? This should be investigated.” Ayoub accused Israel of funding al-Nusra and the Islamic State and providing them logistical support “to create panic and prepare the ground for future intervention in Syria,” a common claim made by Damascus.

Ayoub’s suspicion of Israeli and Western intentions toward Syria do not place him in the Assad camp, however. He was one of the first residents of Majdal Shams to take part in anti-Assad demonstrations in the early days of the uprising in 2011.

“Regime loyalists [in Majdal Shams] physically attacked us. They probably got their orders from Syria,” he said. Today, the community is divided, with people confused about which side to support in the war. “I’d like to see both Assad and the armed rebels before the International Criminal Court in the Hague,” Ayoub said.

For Taisseer Maray, director of a local development NGO, the attack should be understood on the backdrop of increasing sectarianism across the Middle East.

“Jews are constantly using the Jewish card, and now we see polarization between Sunni and Shia,” said the biologist trained at Haifa’s Technion. In this configuration, Druze are also finding themselves falling victim to emotional “group think” as a result of the perceived threat to their community, he noted.

“It’s not only the Druze who are feeling this, it’s also the Christians and even the moderate Sunnis,” Maray said.

“All democratic forces in the Middle East should unite against extremism rather than separate along sectarian lines. When there’s no democratic state or institution defending you, you return to your village and seek out the people who can empower you. That’s a completely normal reaction.”