For a thousand years, the Druze community played a central role in the history of Mount Lebanon. It shaped the face of the mountain, and, consequently, influenced, and sometimes even dictated, the course of events there. However, the establishment of greater Lebanon in September 1920, which joined Mt. Lebanon with the coastal cities, led to the emergence of a new reality on the ground. It was based on the amalgamation of two political traditions, that of Mount Lebanon and that of the coast, as Albert Hourani explained in an article published in 1976.1 This new reality alienated the Druze community and denied it the leading and authoritative role it had played over the centuries.Two factors connected with the establishment of Greater Lebanon in 1920 greatly affected the political position of the Druze. The first was that the Lebanese entity's center of gravity shifted from the mountain, Mount Lebanon, to the coast, with Beirut at its center. The second factor was that a major demographic change occurred. The Druze community's proportion in the population of the state was reduced to about 5 percent, exceeding only that of the ʿAlawi community, which amounted to only about 1 percent of the total population.And yet, whenever tensions mounted or violent conflict erupted, the Druze continued to stand out as important and influential actors in Lebanese politics. This can be attributed to their communal cohesiveness, to the martial tradition of their culture, and perhaps also to the charisma of their leaders, especially those from the Junblat clan, who have presided over the community for several centuries. Kamal Junblat, and following his assassination, his son Walid, are notable examples of this phenomenon.The new reality of the Druze in Greater Lebanon—as a community fallen on hard times, with its assets and greatness reduced, finding itself forced into a political structure not of its choosing—led to virtually unavoidable tensions in the community's relations with the Lebanese state, in regard to both the underlying conception of the state and the state's institutions. These tensions are a central feature of Yusri Hazran's book, The Druze Community and the Lebanese State, between Confrontation and Reconciliation, which examines the path taken by the Druze community in Lebanon—from its efforts to integrate and its need to deal with interconfessional rivalries and political alienation.Nevertheless, the author makes an important point at the very beginning of the book when he points out the uniqueness of the Druze and in comparison to the cases of other minorities in the Middle East. Later, Hazran observes that: Orientalists commonly presuppose that at the heart of the experience of minority groups in the Middle East lies the issue of their survival within a hostile environment. This is not the case with the Druze in Lebanon, however. While the Lebanese Druze do comprise a heterodox minority, they have not experienced the psycho-political effect of being a self-defensive minority, never having been subject to direct control by an antagonistic majority. On the contrary, they have developed a long-standing tradition of autonomous control which has strengthened their sentiment of belonging to a country which they at one time ruled. Two fundamental assumptions have taken root in Druze consciousness which continue to influence the community's attitude towards Lebanon until today: a) their indigenousness …; and b) their ruling superiority. (p. 268)Indeed, in this context, the words uttered by Kamal Junblat in 1975, when civil war broke out in Lebanon, come vividly to mind. According to Junblat, the Druze were the driving force and leaders in bringing about the establishment of the Lebanese state. He was hinting at the Druze being the masters of Mount Lebanon and the founders of the Lebanese emirate, from which the Lebanese state eventually emerged, and this presumably gave them copyright privileges and rights of ownership over the country. However, Hazran also adds that: The theoretical model of political alienation that describes a community's political experience of alienation … does describe the Druze community's political experience. That community's alienation is two-dimensional, including both a sense of estrangement from the political establishment and their incapacity to change the existing reality. In effect, Druze political conduct during the period under investigation constituted a protracted attempt to meet these duel challenges. The estrangement and alienation that historically characterized the Druze attitude towards the Lebanese state derived from three principal, and interwoven, factors: the community's unique history in Lebanon, the historical rivalry with the Maronites, and Lebanon's confessional political system. Also, and in a certain sense, the Druze attitude towards the state structure has implied a sort of political cynicism, given that the Druze perceived confessionalism as a sign of incompetence and immorality and the antithesis of an authentic Lebanon. The variation in consequences was the most outstanding characteristic of the Druze alienation. Although no empirical measurement of alienation was available for this study, the expressive reactions to alienation are not limited to political activism. The recruitment of Druze to the PPS [Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party] and Junblat's creation of the PSP [Progressive Socialist Party] were in fact early indications of a growing alienation process among the Druze. The decline in political power of the Yazbaki faction can be read in the same way. The intellectuals' debate against confessionalism and the project of rewriting the history of Lebanon were incorporated into the same context of alienation and motivated by a conscious and genuine sense of estrangement from the Lebanese public sphere. Junblat's coronation as the uncontested leader of the anti-establishment forces marked the peak of the process of alienation. This did not, however, produce separatist or irredentist tendencies within the Druze community … the political behaviors of the Druze between the years 1943 and 1975 varied between conformism, reformism, and revolutionarism. (p. 267)Hazran's book attempts to integrate the course of events inside the Druze political arena with the course of events in the broader Lebanese arena, and at the same time contextualize this history with the background of the events taking place on the regional and international levels. The book systematically reviews the history of Lebanon. It begins with the founding of the entity in the 1920s, continues to the period of Lebanese independence and the rivalry between France and Britain in the early 1940s, and then turns to the crystallization of the National Pact in 1943, and the civil war of 1958, which broke out in the shadow of two other conflicts: one, the inter-Arab struggle—the Baghdad Pact states versus Egypt's ruler, Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasser—and the other, the clash between the Cold War blocs. The book also addresses Lebanese President Fouad Shehab's unsuccessful efforts to establish a new Lebanon in the 1960s, and concludes with the outbreak of the civil war of the 1970s.This is a well thought out and well executed study that follows, step-by-step, the paths taken by the Druze community and the Lebanese state, separately and together, beginning with the establishment of the state and the formulation of its character and institutions. It discusses the ensuing political tensions and conflicts, and concludes with the civil war that threatened to overwhelm Lebanon and destroy the state.Hazran's study comes after several waves of books that focused on Lebanon's other confessional communities. The first wave of research was devoted to the Maronites, who were perceived as the group that paved the way for the establishment of the Lebanese state. The next wave looked at the Sunnis, who were perceived as the primary opponents of the Maronites in the struggle for the leadership of Lebanon. This was followed, in recent decades, by a number of studies devoted to Lebanon's Shiʿis, who emerged as an important part of Lebanese society and politics and today constitute a major community that claims the right to shape contemporary Lebanon.It is to be hoped that Hazran's book heralds the beginning of a new wave of research that will address Lebanon's other communities as well, including, in the present context, the Druze in Lebanon. There is need to build on Hazran's work and address the historical development of the Druze in Lebanon, including the economic and social aspects of the Druze community. There is a need for more research on the religious institutions of the Druze, the distinguished and influential families, relations between the elites and the members of their communities, the economic aspect of the community's political and social development, and more. It is to be hoped that new research on these issues will shed light on both the processes that actually unfolded, as well as those that were blocked within the community, in the same way that similar issues have been discussed in regard to the Shiʿi community. In the Shiʿi case, issues such as migration from the countryside to the city, religious radicalization, and the status of the clergy have been studied. This research has broadened our understanding of how the Shiʿis moved from the margins of Lebanese society and politics to the center. There is no doubt that these issues also deserve to be systematically examined with respect to Lebanon's Druze community.Hazran's book ends with the year 2008, in the shadow of the Second Lebanon War and after Hizballah's takeover of West Beirut in May 2008, which was aimed at forcing Lebanon's power brokers to accept the organization's leading role in the state. The year 2008 was also marked by Junblat's defeat, which forced him “to walk to Canossa,” to the “People's Palace,” the palace of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus. Even before this, he was compelled to come to understandings with Hizballah and withdraw from the March 14 Camp that he had established with Saʿad al-Din al-Hariri after the murder of Rafik al-Hariri in February 2005. However, when the civil war broke out in Syria in March 2011, Junblat changed direction once more, like a weathervane, and returned to the path of defiance of Bashar al-Asad's regime. This, incidentally, was contrary to the position exhibited by most of the Druze in the region, especially those residing in Syria. The latter continued support to Bashar's regime for fear of the radical Islamic groups, like the Islamic State (IS) or Jabhat al-Nusra (JN). The Druze support for the Asad regime deepened in face of the rebels' successes during the summer of 2015, when they took control of large areas in southern Syria, near the areas inhabited by the Druze. With this, a new chapter seems to be opening, reflecting, like its predecessors, the complexity of the relations between the state and the communities living in it, the complexity of the relations between the various confessional communities themselves, and, of course, the complexity of the dynamics operating within the Druze community itself, whether in Lebanon or the neighboring states of Syria and Israel.