Israel repurposes the colonial logic of sectarianism in Syria

In Syria’s southern provinces, sectarian identity once fuelled by Ottoman modernisation reform and European encroachment is again weaponized—this time by Israel.

In the past few weeks, Syria’s Druze community has been thrust back into the spotlight. The town of Suwayda—home to the country’s largest Druze population—witnessed violent clashes after an incendiary audio recording, reportedly insulting to Islam, circulated online. More than a hundred people were killed. Armed groups descended, homes were looted, and retaliatory strikes followed.

In mid-March 2025, dozens of Syrian Druze clerics had crossed into Israel to undertake their community’s first pilgrimage to a revered shrine since Israel’s founding in 1948. Src: AP.

Israel, invoking a protective posture, carried out airstrikes near Damascus, including around key regime and military installations, claiming to shield the Druze minority from Islamist militias aligned with the new government. Israeli helicopters evacuated wounded Druze fighters across the border, and senior Israeli Druze leaders called publicly for international intervention. Far from a humanitarian gesture alone, Israel’s involvement signalled its deepening role in the Syrian theatre—framed as minority protection, but functioning also as strategic deterrence against the new government in Damascus. Israel prefers a fractured Syria to a unified one and makes no effort to conceal it. From lobbying in Washington to launching airstrikes across Syrian territory, it pursues this goal by every means available.

The Druze spiritual leader in Syria, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, denounced the new government’s role in the bloodshed, accusing it of failing to protect the Druze and allowing sectarian tensions to spiral. Israeli Druze leaders appealed to the international community, demanding that “massacres” not go unpunished.

What is happening here? Are we witnessing primordial sectarianism springing back on stage or another chapter in a much older play?

Aleppo, Mount Lebanon and Damascus, 1850-1860

I had written about the pivotal event of 1850 and 1860 in Aleppo, Mount Lebanon and Damascus before. Let’s go a bit further now.

In mid-June 1860, a brutal civil conflict broke out between Druzes and Maronites in Mount Lebanon. It quickly spilled into Damascus, where Muslim crowds, incited by rumors and resentments, turned on Christians—slaughtering them, burning homes, and destroying entire neighborhoods. These were not cities with a long history of intercommunal violence. So why then? And why so violently?

One dominant narrative blamed age-old sectarian divisions. Ottoman officials saw the violence as a backward reaction to their modernization reforms—the Tanzimat decrees of 1839 and 1856—that promised equality before the law to all imperial subjects, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. European powers, ever eager to justify their intervention, painted the Ottoman East as a cauldron of fanatical intolerance in need of Western supervision. Christian elites accused the Ottoman state of inaction; Muslim notables blamed European interference. All of these views held a grain of truth—and missed the deeper shift underway.

What changed in the mid-19th century was not merely attitudes, but structures: trade routes, military service, property law, taxation, and most crucially, the hierarchy between religious communities. The incorporation of the Ottoman economy into the capitalist world system meant that Christian groups—particularly Uniates—grew wealthier through their links with Europe. Muhammad Ali’s Egyptian occupation of Syria in the 1830s had already set a precedent, arming Christians and exempting them from conscription. When Ottoman rule returned, the imbalance remained. Muslims, now stripped of their legal privileges and anxious about their social standing, began to see Christian liberties not as progress, but provocation.

The Tanzimat reforms—while couched in the language of equality—were experienced unevenly. In cities like Aleppo, riots erupted in 1850 when rumors spread that Muslims would be forcibly conscripted. Christian economic success and European protection, coupled with declining Muslim authority, created a volatile social configuration. What followed in 1860 was not a relapse into tribal savagery. It was the consequence of an empire modernizing under pressure, and communities being reshuffled in status and power.

Sectarianism as a tool, not a truth

Required reading for anyone serious about this topic.

As historian Ussama Makdisi argues in his landmark book¹, sectarianism in the Ottoman context was not an ancient condition. It was a form of modern knowledge, produced by the joint logics of imperial reform (Ottoman Tanzimat) and colonial encroachment. Sectarian identity became a language through which both empire and resistance could be narrated. The European powers, particularly France and Britain, used Christian grievances to justify intervention. The Ottoman state, in turn, framed Muslim violence as an excuse to expand its control over provincial elites and justify deeper centralization. Christian notables used it to align with external patrons. And Muslims, increasingly alienated, viewed it as a betrayal of Islam and imperial cohesion.

Eugene Rogan highlights one particularly revealing case²: Mikhail Mishaqa, the U.S. Vice Consul in Damascus, wrote two accounts of the 1860 massacres. One blamed Muslims for a timeless hatred of Christians—tailored for a Western audience eager to see confirmation of their biases. The second, written years later for a local readership, emphasized intercommunal harmony and the dangers of disobedience. (For more on Mishaqa’s world and a deeper understanding of the 1860 Damascus events and making of the modern Middle East, read Rogan’s beautifully written recent book of the same name.)

Mishaqa’s shifting tone is not a contradiction—it’s a demonstration of how sectarianism itself became a medium of politics. This is how sectarianism operates—as a political tool, not a primordial truth. It allows state actors, foreign powers, and local elites to explain away complex social upheavals in the language of ancient hatreds. But such hatreds are rarely ancient. They are manufactured, curated, and deployed when convenient.

Much like the European powers who once claimed to “protect” Christians in the Ottoman Levant, Israel now positions itself as the defender of Syria’s Druze. It is an old game with new actors—and familiar consequences.

There are roughly 700,000 Druze in Syria, with smaller communities in Lebanon, Jordan, and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Many Druze in the Golan continue to identify as Syrian and have long rejected Israeli citizenship. In Israel proper, Druze citizens serve in the military at disproportionately high rates—over 80% of eligible men enlist, many in combat roles. This peculiar integration of one Arab community into the Israeli security establishment has created a dynamic ripe for manipulation. Since 1957, Druze men have been conscripted, and this historical tie is now being exploited beyond Israel’s borders.

Following Assad’s ouster in late 2024, Israel swiftly expanded its presence in southern Syria—seizing a strategic buffer zone and establishing nine permanent military posts. Defense Minister Israel Katz has stated that these forces will remain “indefinitely.” Prime Minister Netanyahu has framed these actions as a moral obligation to defend Druze communities in places like Suwayda and Jaramana. But as one local Druze man, al-Talhouni, told Ryan Biller of New Lines Magazine, such claims are hollow: “None of us want to be part of Israel. We are Syrians. We are not Israelis. And we never will be.”

The symbolism of protection masks a broader project. Reports from southern Syria allege that Israeli forces have killed livestock, bombed civilian areas, and intimidated residents—actions that undercut the humanitarian veneer. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s government has floated a pilot scheme to import Syrian Druze laborers into Israeli-controlled towns in the Golan, echoing colonial labor dynamics dressed in the language of economic opportunity.

But this tactic is not new for Israel either. As Joseph Massad argues, Israel’s approach to the Druze in Syria is part of a century-long Zionist strategy: to fragment the Arab world along sectarian lines and co-opt minority communities in order to weaken collective national cohesion.

This logic of fragmentation mirrors the British and French mandates of the early 20th century, where religion and ethnicity became levers of imperial control. All in all, Israel’s role today—framed as protector of the Druze—is not a spontaneous gesture of solidarity, but a geopolitical calculus rooted in decades-old Zionist designs to divide and dominate.

Then, as now, the invocation of sectarian identity serves as cover for strategic intervention. The Druze, once shielded by France and now by Israel, become political instruments in someone else’s campaign.

But more important I want to make is that the events in Suwayda today do not spring from some timeless Druze-Muslim antagonism. Like the bloodshed in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in late 19th century Ottoman Empire, they are consequences of a world remade by war, change and foreign manipulation. The label of sectarianism functions as both diagnosis and disguise. It tells us what to see and what to ignore.

History offers no comfort. But it does offer clarity. Sectarianism is not the cause of the Middle East’s woes. It is the product. And like all products, it can be dismantled if we have the will to see through it.

1. Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

2. Eugene L. Rogan, “Sectarianism and Social Conflict in Damascus: The 1860 Events Reconsidered,” Arabica 51, no. 4 (2004): 493–511.