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OPINION:
The Arab Spring was the media’s name for a wave of protests — some peaceful, some violent — against various Middle Eastern dictatorships from 2010 to 2012.
Demonstrations against Syrian dictator Bashar Assad began in 2011. With unbridled brutality, he attempted to suppress them.
In what soon became a full-blown civil war, Mr. Assad slaughtered an estimated 600,000 Syrians and displaced more than 13 million.
Participating in these crimes were Hezbollah, Tehran’s Lebanon-based proxy, and forces deployed by Vladimir Putin, Russia’s longtime ruler.
The fall of the Assad regime in December was an unintended consequence of the war that Hamas, another Tehran proxy, launched against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Hezbollah soon began rocketing Israel’s northern regions. One year ago, on July 27, 2024, a Hezbollah attack on the Golan village of Majdal Shams killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field.
Soon afterward, Israel decimated Hezbollah. Mr. Putin, meanwhile, was continuing to wage war on Ukraine. Left on their own, Mr. Assad’s forces were no match for Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and affiliated Islamist factions.
This coalition was led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, aka Abu Mohammed al-Golani, who for years had headed the Nusra Front, an al Qaeda affiliate.
Mr. al-Sharaa and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have been backed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and, as I’m not the first to observe, a neo-Ottoman. For centuries, Syria was a possession of the Ottoman Empire.
On Jan. 29, the rebel factions’ general command declared Mr. al-Sharaa Syria’s interim president. Trading his black turban and fatigues for a suit and tie, he has been projecting the image of a statesman intent on rebuilding his country under the slogan “One Syria for All Syrians.”
His diplomatic outreach included a meeting in May in Riyadh with President Trump, who afterward praised Mr. al-Sharaa as a “tough guy” with the skills to “hold Syria together.”
That assessment is now being tested.
Syria’s Sweida governate, in the country’s south, bordering Jordan, is home to roughly 700,000 Druze, the largest concentration of this unique ethno-religious community in the Middle East.
The Druze don’t want to rule Syria.
They do not want to be persecuted but rather to preserve their way of life, traditions and customs.
In late April, armed groups affiliated with the new Syrian government attacked Druze villages in Sweida.
On July 13, a Druze vegetable truck on the Sweida-Damascus highway was ambushed by Sunni Bedouin Arabs. Druze reprisals against Bedouins followed.
Mr. al-Sharaa sent his troops to restore order. Before long, however, at least some of those troops were attacking the Druze.
According to a report by the Druze Documentation Nexus, what followed was “a multi-day campaign characterized by targeted killings, acts of sexual violence, use of Turkish drones to bomb civilians, mass executions, looting, burning down houses, and widespread desecration of cultural and religious sites.”
The number of Druze casualties climbed well beyond 1,000, and many times that number were left homeless.
The report concludes: “Despite official state media narratives portraying the conflict as a Druze-Bedouin conflict and portraying government efforts to restore order, independent documentation and footage confirm active participation of Government authorities in the atrocities and ethnic cleansing.”
Many American and European commentators have echoed Damascus’ line, attributing the carnage to “sectarianism” and employing such phrases as “tit-for-tat violence” to suggest moral equivalence.
I don’t doubt that Syria suffers from tribal rivalries, land disputes and grievances galore. No people — Druze, Jews, Arabs or Americans — is monolithic.
For generations, however, the many ethnic and religious minorities of the Middle East have been subject to slaughter, slavery, forced conversions and expulsions at the hands of Islamic supremacists and jihadis.
Those minorities deserve concern, support and protection, much more than they have received from the “international community” and the Western media.
Israelis, by contrast, have been paying close attention to what’s happening next door. To many, the assaults in Sweida look eerily like the atrocities carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel is home to roughly 150,000 Druze. Most are intensely patriotic citizens of the Jewish-majority state. They serve prominently in the military, participate in politics, teach in universities and run businesses.
As the violence mounted in Sweida, Israeli Druze leaders turned to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and asked him to take action in defense of their endangered brethren.
He ordered airstrikes against Syrian tanks and convoys approaching Druze villages in Sweida and against Syria’s military headquarters in Damascus.
The White House was displeased. Commentators accused Israel of “fueling the fires.”
I would suggest Mr. Netanyahu was sending a clear message to Mr. al-Sharaa: Rein in the jihadis in your coalition, or else.
A case can be made that by defending Syria’s Druze, Israel also helps prevent jihadis from gaining ground near Israel’s eastern border, a national security benefit.
Since then, the Trump administration has facilitated a fragile ceasefire in Sweida and direct negotiations between Syria and Israel.
More progress is possible if Mr. al-Sharaa demonstrates pragmatism.
That implies that he prioritize the reconstruction of Syria’s shattered economy, does not become Mr. Erdogan’s handmaiden (the Saudis will ask less and can give more), work out a modus vivendi with Israel, and show tolerance toward the Druze in the south and the Kurds in the northeast (where Kurdish troops allied with American forces have been fighting the Islamic State group), as well as toward Christians, Alawites, Turkmen and other Syrian minorities.
The Arab Spring never bore fruit. No one expects a Jeffersonian flowering in Syria anytime soon.
However, peace, quiet and a path out of poverty in a gradually unifying nation-state are not beyond imagining. Is that what Mr. al-Shaara wants? We should know soon.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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