One of his reasons is domestic politics. Benjamin Netanyahu came to the aid of the Syrian Druze because the Druze in Israel are patriots, often serving in the security forces, and the Prime Minister felt he had to show his gratitude by defending their cousins across the border.
Failure to do so would have compromised national solidarity, but obviously his main reason was to tilt the regional balance in his favour. Many of Syria’s Druze live south of Damascus, in the Druze mountain range that stretches between the annexed Golan Heights and the rest of the country. By responding to their call for help after Sunni fanatics massacred around 100 of them, the Israelis have detached a Druze area from Syria that is now off-limits to the Syrian army.
Israel has just created a protectorate on Syrian territory that redraws the map of the Middle East without formally changing Syria’s borders.
This is a major development because it reflects the difficulty that the new Syrian regime is facing and will increasingly face in maintaining the unity of the country.
Syria is falling apart. It continues to fall apart, as the Arab Spring of 2011 had already split it into a Kurdish zone in the north and a Christian and Alawite zone on the coast and in Damascus. Benjamin Netanyahu can be accused of invoking the protection of the Druze to further weaken Syria and create a buffer zone there. We would not be mistaken if we did so, but we must first recognise that Israel is merely taking advantage of a very profound and irreversible change in the Middle East.
With its three states in one – Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni – Iraq has never been so fragile since the British and French empires drew its borders in the aftermath of the First World War. The same is true of Lebanon, because now that Christians and Sunnis are no longer able to govern it in the face of Shiites whose demographic weight has grown, the ‘Switzerland of the Middle East’, as it had long been called, is also falling apart.
As for Syria, we can see what is happening there today.
Artificially created just over a century ago by European empires on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, these states are living out the final chapter of their history. They will survive for a few years or decades, of course, but they are dying before our very eyes, and trying to keep them alive at all costs will only fuel civil wars, the worst kind of all.
After so much bloodshed, the Kurds are entitled to a state and will eventually get one. The Druze will soon come to realise that they too must pursue this ambition. Israel will separate from Palestine and will have to accept that it, too, will become a state. The few Christians who remain will seek allies – Kurds, Druze, Shiites or Israelis – to live within secure borders.
The Middle East is seeking nation states. Whether or not we regret the failure of multi-confessional states, we must prepare for this disruption so that we can try to channel it rather than make it worse by denying it.
(Map: Michael Izady / Columbia University)
