Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Knesset Bill Funds Druze and Circassian Communities

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will submit a plan to the Knesset for significant investments in the Arab Druze and Muslim Circassian communities.

The plan will include funds for education, infrastructure, and employment “in order to reduce the existing disparities,” Netanyahu announced Saturday night on his Facebook page, an on Sunday in an official announcement from his office

Netanyahu met last week with leaders of the Druze community, where he told them about plans to submit the bill.

During the meeting, Netanyahu also told the leaders that the nationality, or Israel as a Jewish nation-state, bill set to be voted on next week would not harm their status and would even entrench their equality in Israeli society.

About 130,000 Druze live in northern Israel. There are about 4,000 Israeli Circassians living in two villages in northern Israel. The Circassians in Israel are Sunni Muslims who were expelled in the late 1800s by the Russians from the Caucasus Mountains.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.