T. ☀️@levantophile
A small word of advice: do not try to reason with them by appealing to your innocence, or that of the Druze of Suwayda as a whole - or by reminding them of all the good that you, your father, or other Druze you know may have done for them. If anything, it only seems to deepen their resentment and makes them even more hostile.
Even we, as Lebanese Druze, can recount countless stories of solidarity during the Syrian war and the feeling of betrayal afterwards. We took in tens of thousands of Syrian refugees into our areas, sympathized with their suffering, and offered them shelter, stability, and work. In my own extended family alone, I could probably count dozens of Syrians who were employed over the years, most of them coming from Idlib, rural Homs and Hama, or Deir Ezzor - the very same regions from which many of those who invaded Suwayda came.
What shocked many of us last summer were the cases of betrayal by people who quite literally lived among us and benefited from our hospitality. Two examples immediately come to mind.
First, I know a Lebanese Druze contractor from my area who employed Syrian refugees as workers. He later told us that once the invasion of Suwayda began, a couple of them quietly slipped back into Syria to participate in it. He only discovered this through videos they themselves posted on social media. Think about the absurdity of that for a moment: they were actively earning a living from a Lebanese Druze man and still chose to return to Syria to take part in the massacre of Syrian Druze.
Second, last July, the teenage son of a Syrian refugee family living in my village was caught posting threats on social media about “plucking the moustaches” of Druze. This is a boy who quite literally grew up in a Lebanese Druze village, was taught by Lebanese Druze teachers in our local public school, and whose father works as a watchman for our neighbor while the family lives in the basement of their home. People in the village contacted the Lebanese security services, who arrested and questioned him before later releasing him with what I understood to be a stern warning.
I genuinely believe that decades of humiliation, violence, and victimhood have left deep psychological scars on many of these people. For some, the result seems to be a desire to reclaim dignity through domination and revenge, by inflicting on others what was once inflicted on them, even against those who treated them with kindness and solidarity. And unfortunately, their religious and ideological beliefs often do little to encourage the restraint of base impulses or the cultivation of mercy, forgiveness, and compassion, though that is a much larger conversation altogether.
So here we are. There is little else to say. Perhaps an old Arabic saying captures it best:
إن أكرمت الكريم ملكته وإن أكرمت اللئيم تمردا
