Although comparatively restricted of their length and destruction, Israel’s airstrikes on Syria final month had been conspicuous for his or her rationale. This was no act of self-defense. It was, in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s telling, an act of safety: Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s authorities, in energy for the reason that fall of Bashar al-Assad in December, failed to guard the Druze from Sunni violence, compelling Israel to intervene on the minority’s behalf.
Similar to that, Netanyahu unearthed what looks like a relic from a bygone period: the Duty to Defend, a precept hardly ever talked about nowadays outdoors specialised humanitarian circles. Israel’s self-declared accountability to guard the Syrian Druze means that speak of the doctrine’s demise was untimely.
The Duty to Defend stays as related as ever — and as problematic. It isn’t simply that Netanyahu’s pretensions to humanitarianism in Syria ring hole amid the cacophony of struggling in Gaza, the place famine claims extra Palestinian lives every day. As vital, the framework lends itself to noble rhetoric of disinterested humanitarianism, enabling the likes of Netanyahu to drape strategic ambitions — particularly, asserting primacy over a fractured Syria — within the garb of minority safety. This echoes the minority safety regimes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when European powers pursued hegemony within the Center East beneath the guise of defending favored ethnic and spiritual teams. The Assad dictatorship could also be a factor of the previous, however final month’s occasions sign that the divisive legacy of extraterritorial safety could be very a lot alive. Failing to reckon with that historical past dangers condemning the area to a way forward for additional fragmentation and sectarian violence.
Sarcastically, the Duty to Defend factors a method ahead. The doctrine holds that states have a accountability to assist others construct the capability to guard their very own populations earlier than resorting to drive. To make certain, this oft-neglected side of the Duty to Defend is prone to political weaponization, too. However humanitarianism is rarely devoid of politics. Moderately than fake in any other case, the USA, Syria’s neighbors, and worldwide organizations ought to help Sharaa’s authorities because it embarks on the trail of constitutional reform, nationwide reconciliation, and reconstruction. In the end, a united, sovereign Syria that governs inclusively and accountably — not selective, militarized humanitarianism and balkanization — gives essentially the most credible, sustainable type of safety for all Syrians.
The Politics of Safety in a Fractured Syria
All through the Syrian civil battle, Assad’s apologists routinely claimed that the one factor stopping the decimation of Syria’s ethnic and spiritual minorities by the hands of Islamist terrorists was the regime’s iron-fisted rule. Disingenuous although it was, that narrative obtained a brand new lease on life after Assad’s ouster final yr. Sharaa, in any case, was the chief of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni insurgent faction that splintered from al-Qaeda’s Syrian department in 2017. Regardless of his pledge to type an “inclusive transitional authorities that displays Syria’s variety,” observers within the area and past had been fast to warn that this reformed Islamist was unable — or worse, unwilling — to control on behalf of all Syrians.
These anxieties solely deepened with time. In March, Assad loyalists within the predominantly Alawite coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus launched an insurgency towards the brand new authorities. Segments of the armed forces and numerous insurgent factions massacred 1,500 Alawites in retaliation. Whereas Sharaa vowed to carry the perpetrators accountable, final month’s violence towards the Druze reignited debate about his health to control the nation inclusively. The episode started on July 11, when Sunni Bedouins kidnapped a Druze vegetable service provider on the freeway connecting Damascus and Suweida, the predominantly Druze metropolis within the southern province of the identical identify. Druze reprisals triggered wider clashes in Suweida and its environs. Trying to comprise the violence, Sharaa deployed the army to Suweida and started negotiating a ceasefire. Then got here the Israeli airstrikes — first on Syrian forces advancing south, after which on the Ministry of Protection and presidential palace within the coronary heart of Damascus. By the point a ceasefire got here into impact on July 19, an estimated 1,400 civilians — largely Druze, but additionally Bedouins — had been killed and hundreds extra displaced.
Netanyahu rationalized the intervention by invoking a accountability to guard the Syrian Druze. Israel is dwelling to 150,000 Druze residents, not together with 25,000 Druze residing within the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981. Regardless of the authorized discrimination they endure, Israeli Druze are deeply built-in within the Jewish state and serve loyally within the army. For months, Netanyahu had maintained that Israel wouldn’t enable “any risk” to the Druze in southern Syria. Amid the violence in Suweida, Sheikh Muwaffaq Tarif, the non secular chief of the Israeli Druze, implored Netanyahu to intervene on the group’s behalf. “Through the Holocaust, whenever you had been being slaughtered, you, the Jews, cried for assist and nobody got here,” he reportedly advised the prime minister. “Right now we, the Druze, are being slaughtered and we’re calling for the assistance of the State of Israel.” Netanyahu assented, citing his accountability to guard “the brothers of our brothers.”
Nearly instantly, voices from throughout the Israeli political spectrum touted their newfound position as their brother’s keeper. “For the primary time, Israel is deciding not simply to defend itself however to defend others,” learn one attribute column within the Jerusalem Put up. Sawsan Natour-Hason, an Israeli Druze official on the Israeli embassy in Washington, forged the intervention as an expression of Israeli exceptionalism. “As the one democracy within the Center East that actively protects minority rights, Israel has not stood idly by,” she wrote. “This isn’t about energy projection,” added Amos Yadlin, a outstanding commentator and former head of Israeli army intelligence. “It’s about regional accountability.” Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s far-right minister of nationwide safety, has gone as far as to argue that Sunni violence towards the Druze provides Israel license to “remove” Sharaa.
There isn’t any query that the Israeli Druze worry for the security of their relations and coreligionists throughout the border. Nonetheless, it’s tough to disregard this Israeli authorities’s cynicism. How can Netanyahu profess humanitarian concern for the Druze on the similar second that he limits help to ravenous Palestinians in Gaza and his far-right ministers champion ethnic cleaning and resettlement within the strip?
To dismiss the Israeli intervention in Syria as mere hypocrisy, nonetheless, could be to overlook a bigger level: Netanyahu’s declare to guard the Druze doesn’t sign some perversion of the Duty to Defend, as if the doctrine had been untainted by politics to start with. Humanitarianism is at all times political, and the Israeli intervention in Syria is not any exception. Inside hours of Assad’s fall final December, Israel seized the buffer zone east of the Golan Heights, patrolled by the United Nations since 1974. Within the months since, Netanyahu has repeatedly demanded the demilitarization of southern Syria — which means, in apply, truncated sovereignty for the brand new central authorities in Damascus, if not the outright cantonization of Syria. And opposite to the trope of Netanyahu the “madman,” as one Trump administration official lately described him, the airstrikes on Suweida and Damascus had a transparent — if cynical — geopolitical logic: they provide Netanyahu leverage over Sharaa at exactly the second that Israeli-Syrian normalization talks are ramping up. Seen on this gentle, the intervention was much less humanitarian than coercive.
Taking Netanyahu’s humanitarian pretense at face worth additionally silences the voices of these he purports to guard. Two of the Syrian Druze group’s three main non secular figures, Sheikhs Hammoud al-Hinnawi and Yusuf Jarbou, have expressed help for Sharaa and advocate for the mixing of the Druze in a united Syria. The third, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, staunchly opposes Sharaa’s authorities. Amid the violence in Suweida, Hijri referred to as on Israel to intervene on his group’s behalf. The overwhelming majority of Syrian Druze reject Israeli intervention and Hijri’s separatism, rightly fearing that identification with Israel dangers fueling the impression that the Druze are fifth columnists.
Echoes from the Previous
What we see in Suweida, then, is the resurgence of the identical dilemmas which have dogged proponents of humanitarian intervention on behalf of minorities all through fashionable historical past: Who will get safety? Who will get sovereignty? And who will get to determine?
These questions loom particularly giant within the Center East, the place the safety of minorities has lengthy been a pretext for overseas intervention and, consequently, a proxy for wider debates about sovereignty and nationwide belonging. Within the grand scheme of the area’s historical past, the notion of minority safety and of minorities themselves — is of pretty latest provenance. As historians have amply demonstrated, the time period “minority” — within the sense of numerically inferior, politically deprived non secular, ethnic, or linguistic teams – had no buy within the pluralistic Ottoman Empire till the nineteenth century, when territorial losses, liberal political reforms, and European meddling started to imbue non secular, ethnic, and linguistic distinction with new political salience.
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the nation-state within the Center East after World Battle I, minorities totally acquired their present-day significance. Hanging a compromise between Wilsonian self-determination and imperial conquest, the brand new League of Nations positioned the previous Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire beneath British and French necessary rule. Solely beneath the tutelage of enlightened Europeans may the peoples of the Levant study to “stand by themselves beneath the strenuous circumstances of the fashionable world,” because the League infamously put it. Not in contrast to its minorities treaties — a collection of postwar agreements that conditioned the sovereignty of recent Japanese European nation-states on internationally monitored minority rights – the League took up the safety of minorities as a foundational rationale for the mandates system.
The Syrian case is illustrative of the pitfalls and false pretenses of the minority protections regime. The French carved out autonomous “statelets” for the Druze, Alawites, and Kurds, reinforcing the notion that these communities — now normal as minorities — required territorial separation and exterior safety from an ostensibly hostile Sunni majority. Cantonization and heavy-handed French colonial rule sparked a nationwide rebellion. Precisely 100 years in the past, the Nice Syrian Revolt was spearheaded by the Druze chief Sultan al-Atrash in Jabal al-Druze — sarcastically sufficient, the very website of final month’s violence. “Bear in mind,” Atrash wrote in a missive to his compatriots, “that civilized nations which are united can’t be destroyed. The imperialists have stolen what’s yours. They’ve laid palms on the very sources of your wealth and raised obstacles and divided your indivisible homeland.” Over the following two years, the French quelled the rebellion with brute drive, making a mockery of the declare that necessary tutelage was a progressive various to colonial rule. Greater than that, the League’s Everlasting Mandates Fee, formally tasked with overseeing the territories, completely failed to carry the French to account for his or her brutality and misrule.
To make certain, the causes and penalties of the Nice Syrian Revolt had been multifaceted. But it’s a merciless irony that the Druze, who as soon as stood on the vanguard of an rebellion that rejected cantonization in favor of a pluralistic Syrian nationalism, now discover themselves on the heart of a overseas intervention premised on a equally divisive logic.
Again to the Future?
Like all concepts, the Duty to Defend was a product of its instances. The tip of the Chilly Battle, the ascent of the transnational human rights motion, mass displacement, the appearance of so-called failed states, and the proliferation of humanitarian emergencies all coalesced within the Nineties to create an surroundings ripe for contemporary fascinated with sovereignty, intervention, and atrocity prevention.
Whereas the doctrine’s architects weren’t involved with the safety of minorities alone, most of the atrocities that might animate their considering sprang from the plights of particular ethnic and spiritual teams — typically minorities — all through the last decade: Saddam Hussein’s persecution of the Iraqi Kurds in 1991; the 1994 Hutu genocide towards the Tutsi minority in Rwanda; the 1995 genocide of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica; and the unsanctioned NATO intervention in Kosovo on behalf of Kosovar Albanians. It was on this context that UN Secretary-Basic Kofi Annan requested the query on everybody’s thoughts: “If humanitarian intervention is, certainly, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how ought to we reply to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica — to gross and systematic violations of human rights that have an effect on each principle of our widespread humanity?” In 2001, the Worldwide Fee on Intervention and State Sovereignty — a cosmopolitan group of politicians, legal professionals, and activists assembled by the Canadian authorities — proposed a solution: the Duty to Defend.
In a exceptional present of unity, world leaders unanimously endorsed the brand new doctrine in 2005. The “worldwide group” had an obligation to behave, it was stated, the place governments had been unable or unwilling to guard their populations from genocide, battle crimes, ethnic cleaning, and crimes towards humanity. No sooner had the Duty to Defend reached its zenith, nonetheless, than it out of the blue fell out of favor. The 2011 NATO intervention towards Muammar al-Gadhafi in Libya —licensed by the UN Safety Council within the language of safety — shortly morphed right into a battle for regime change, triggering a brutal civil battle that endures immediately. The Libya debacle appeared to verify suspicions that the Duty to Defend was a fig leaf for Western, and particularly U.S.-led, interventionism. By the point Assad deployed chemical weapons towards his personal inhabitants in 2013, the world had no urge for food for an additional intervention beneath the banner of safety.
On the time of its unveiling and within the years since, proponents and opponents alike heralded the doctrine as a radical departure from the normal conception of absolute sovereignty, ostensibly courting again to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. That interpretation was inaccurate. The Westphalian ultimate was at all times extra delusion than actuality, and early fashionable political theorists had lengthy argued that sovereignty entailed tasks to the ruled, not merely freedom from exterior intervention. However the Duty to Defend augured different, extra troubling historic continuities. By conditioning sovereignty on sure requirements of internationally monitored state conduct, the mechanisms of atrocity prevention enshrined within the Duty to Defend bore a putting resemblance to the minority protections of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And simply because the League was powerless to carry the European powers accountable for his or her mistreatment of the populations they had been mandated to safeguard, there is no such thing as a single arbiter to find out which atrocities are past the pale, which populations advantage safety, and which states can declare the mantle of guardian — to not point out any framework to carry self-anointed protectors accountable. For that very cause, Russian President Vladimir Putin was capable of painting his annexation of Crimea in 2014 and full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as acts of humanitarian intervention on behalf of ethnic Russians or Russian audio system, mutilating the Duty to Defend past recognition within the course of.
One thing comparable is enjoying out in Syria immediately. Rising from 14 years of civil battle that fractured the nation, killed a whole bunch of hundreds, and displaced tens of millions, Syrians have a historic alternative to forge a brand new imaginative and prescient for nationwide unity. On the similar time, the centrifugal forces of sectarianism — then as now, exacerbated by self-proclaimed protectors — maintain it mired in a painful previous. This isn’t to say that Sharaa is unimpeachable, or that the street to nationwide reconciliation can be clean. Neither is this to recommend that outdoors actors haven’t any position to play in a brand new Syria. Fairly the alternative. Moderately than resort to militarized humanitarianism, as Netanyahu has achieved, Syria’s neighbors ought to search its integration into the regional economic system, help upcoming parliamentary elections, and again transitional justice initiatives as long-term investments within the rule of legislation and accountability. Even the Trump administration, whose overseas coverage has been characterised by chaos and cruelty on so many fronts, has acknowledged the promise of this second. The White Home lifted sanctions on Damascus in June, and Trump’s envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, has emerged as a vocal advocate for the nation’s unity and sovereignty.
Within the best-case state of affairs, army interventions just like the one Israel launched final month will defend the Druze within the narrowest sense: offering short-term deterrence towards renewed violence in Suweida. However that definition of safety is grossly insufficient. Certainly, it’s more likely to beget a far worse state of affairs: allegations of Druze disloyalty to the Syrian state, zero-sum identitarian politics, and maybe even the return of a full-scale civil battle marked by exterior intervention. In the long run, actual safety — for the Druze as for all Syrians — ought to come from nationwide reconciliation, not ethnic and spiritual cantons policed on the level of a overseas army’s weapons. That could be a imaginative and prescient value defending.
Daniel Chardell is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale College’s Jackson College of World Affairs and a nonresident fellow on the Institute for World Affairs at Eurasia Group.
Picture: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit by way of Wikimedia Commons
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