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Though relatively limited in their duration and destruction, Israel’s airstrikes on Syria last month were conspicuous for their rationale. This was no act of self-defense. It was, in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s telling, an act of protection: Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government, in power since the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December, failed to protect the Druze from Sunni violence, compelling Israel to intervene on the minority’s behalf.

Just like that, Netanyahu unearthed what seems like a relic from a bygone era: the Responsibility to Protect, a principle rarely mentioned these days outside specialized humanitarian circles. Israel’s self-declared responsibility to protect the Syrian Druze suggests that talk of the doctrine’s demise was premature.

The Responsibility to Protect remains as relevant as ever — and as problematic. It is not just that Netanyahu’s pretensions to humanitarianism in Syria ring hollow amid the cacophony of suffering in Gaza, where famine claims more Palestinian lives each day. As important, the framework lends itself to noble rhetoric of disinterested humanitarianism, enabling the likes of Netanyahu to drape strategic ambitions — namely, asserting primacy over a fractured Syria — in the garb of minority protection. This echoes the minority protection regimes of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when European powers pursued hegemony in the Middle East under the guise of defending favored ethnic and religious groups. The Assad dictatorship may be a thing of the past, but last month’s events signal that the divisive legacy of extraterritorial protection is very much alive. Failing to reckon with that history risks condemning the region to a future of further fragmentation and sectarian violence.

Ironically, the Responsibility to Protect points a way forward. The doctrine holds that states have a responsibility to help others build the capacity to protect their own populations before resorting to force. To be sure, this oft-neglected facet of the Responsibility to Protect is susceptible to political weaponization, too. But humanitarianism is never devoid of politics. Rather than pretend otherwise, the United States, Syria’s neighbors, and international organizations should support Sharaa’s government as it embarks on the path of constitutional reform, national reconciliation, and reconstruction. Ultimately, a united, sovereign Syria that governs inclusively and accountably — not selective, militarized humanitarianism and balkanization — offers the most credible, sustainable form of protection for all Syrians.

The Politics of Protection in a Fractured Syria

Throughout the Syrian civil war, Assad’s apologists routinely claimed that the only thing preventing the decimation of Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities at the hands of Islamist terrorists was the regime’s iron-fisted rule. Disingenuous though it was, that narrative got a new lease on life after Assad’s ouster last year. Sharaa, after all, was the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni rebel faction that splintered from al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch in 2017. Despite his pledge to form an “inclusive transitional government that reflects Syria’s diversity,” observers in the region and beyond were quick to warn that this reformed Islamist was unable — or worse, unwilling — to govern on behalf of all Syrians.

Those anxieties only deepened with time. In March, Assad loyalists in the predominantly Alawite coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus launched an insurgency against the new government. Segments of the armed forces and various rebel factions massacred 1,500 Alawites in retaliation. While Sharaa vowed to hold the perpetrators accountable, last month’s violence against the Druze reignited debate about his fitness to govern the country inclusively. The episode began on July 11, when Sunni Bedouins kidnapped a Druze vegetable merchant on the highway connecting Damascus and Suweida, the predominantly Druze city in the southern province of the same name. Druze reprisals triggered wider clashes in Suweida and its environs. Attempting to contain the violence, Sharaa deployed the military to Suweida and began negotiating a ceasefire. Then came the Israeli airstrikes — first on Syrian forces advancing south, and then on the Ministry of Defense and presidential palace in the heart of Damascus. By the time a ceasefire came into effect on July 19, an estimated 1,400 civilians — mostly Druze, but also Bedouins — had been killed and thousands more displaced.

Netanyahu rationalized the intervention by invoking a responsibility to protect the Syrian Druze. Israel is home to 150,000 Druze citizens, not including 25,000 Druze residing in the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967 and annexed in 1981. Despite the legal discrimination they endure, Israeli Druze are deeply integrated in the Jewish state and serve loyally in the military. For months, Netanyahu had maintained that Israel would not allow “any threat” to the Druze in southern Syria. Amid the violence in Suweida, Sheikh Muwaffaq Tarif, the spiritual leader of the Israeli Druze, implored Netanyahu to intervene on the community’s behalf. “During the Holocaust, when you were being slaughtered, you, the Jews, cried for help and no one came,” he reportedly told the prime minister. “Today we, the Druze, are being slaughtered and we are calling for the help of the State of Israel.” Netanyahu assented, citing his responsibility to protect “the brothers of our brothers.”

Almost immediately, voices from across the Israeli political spectrum touted their newfound role as their brother’s keeper. “For the first time, Israel is deciding not just to defend itself but to defend others,” read one characteristic column in the Jerusalem Post. Sawsan Natour-Hason, an Israeli Druze official at the Israeli embassy in Washington, cast the intervention as an expression of Israeli exceptionalism. “As the only democracy in the Middle East that actively protects minority rights, Israel has not stood idly by,” she wrote. “This is not about power projection,” added Amos Yadlin, a prominent commentator and former head of Israeli military intelligence. “It is about regional responsibility.” Itamar Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu’s far-right minister of national security, has gone so far as to argue that Sunni violence against the Druze gives Israel license to “eliminate” Sharaa.

There is no question that the Israeli Druze fear for the safety of their family members and coreligionists across the border. Still, it is difficult to ignore this Israeli government’s cynicism. How can Netanyahu profess humanitarian concern for the Druze at the same moment that he limits aid to starving Palestinians in Gaza and his far-right ministers champion ethnic cleansing and resettlement in the strip?

To dismiss the Israeli intervention in Syria as mere hypocrisy, however, would be to miss a larger point: Netanyahu’s claim to protect the Druze does not signal some perversion of the Responsibility to Protect, as if the doctrine were untainted by politics to begin with. Humanitarianism is always political, and the Israeli intervention in Syria is no exception. Within hours of Assad’s fall last December, Israel seized the buffer zone east of the Golan Heights, patrolled by the United Nations since 1974. In the months since, Netanyahu has repeatedly demanded the demilitarization of southern Syria — meaning, in practice, truncated sovereignty for the new central government in Damascus, if not the outright cantonization of Syria. And contrary to the trope of Netanyahu the “madman,” as one Trump administration official recently described him, the airstrikes on Suweida and Damascus had a clear — if cynical — geopolitical logic: they offer Netanyahu leverage over Sharaa at precisely the moment that Israeli-Syrian normalization talks are ramping up. Seen in this light, the intervention was less humanitarian than coercive.

Taking Netanyahu’s humanitarian pretense at face value also silences the voices of those he purports to protect. Two of the Syrian Druze community’s three leading spiritual figures, Sheikhs Hammoud al-Hinnawi and Yusuf Jarbou, have expressed support for Sharaa and advocate for the integration of the Druze in a united Syria. The third, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, staunchly opposes Sharaa’s government. Amid the violence in Suweida, Hijri called on Israel to intervene on his community’s behalf. The vast majority of Syrian Druze reject Israeli intervention and Hijri’s separatism, rightly fearing that identification with Israel risks fueling the impression that the Druze are fifth columnists.

Echoes from the Past

What we see in Suweida, then, is the resurgence of the same dilemmas that have dogged proponents of humanitarian intervention on behalf of minorities throughout modern history: Who gets protection? Who gets sovereignty? And who gets to decide?

These questions loom especially large in the Middle East, where the protection of minorities has long been a pretext for foreign intervention and, consequently, a proxy for wider debates about sovereignty and national belonging. In the grand scheme of the region’s history, the notion of minority protection and of minorities themselves — is of fairly recent provenance. As historians have amply demonstrated, the term “minority” — in the sense of numerically inferior, politically disadvantaged religious, ethnic, or linguistic groups – had no purchase in the pluralistic Ottoman Empire until the 19th century, when territorial losses, liberal political reforms, and European meddling began to imbue religious, ethnic, and linguistic difference with new political salience.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of the nation-state in the Middle East after World War I, minorities fully acquired their present-day significance. Striking a compromise between Wilsonian self-determination and imperial conquest, the new League of Nations placed the former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire under British and French mandatory rule. Only under the tutelage of enlightened Europeans could the peoples of the Levant learn to “stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world,” as the League infamously put it. Not unlike its minorities treaties — a series of postwar agreements that conditioned the sovereignty of new Eastern European nation-states on internationally monitored minority rights – the League took up the protection 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 fashioned as minorities — required territorial separation and external protection from an ostensibly hostile Sunni majority. Cantonization and heavy-handed French colonial rule sparked a national uprising. Exactly 100 years ago, the Great Syrian Revolt was spearheaded by the Druze leader Sultan al-Atrash in Jabal al-Druze — ironically enough, the very site of last month’s violence. “Remember,” Atrash wrote in a missive to his compatriots, “that civilized nations that are united cannot be destroyed. The imperialists have stolen what is yours. They have laid hands on the very sources of your wealth and raised barriers and divided your indivisible homeland.” Over the next two years, the French quelled the uprising with brute force, making a mockery of the claim that mandatory tutelage was a progressive alternative to colonial rule. More than that, the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission, formally tasked with overseeing the territories, utterly failed to hold the French to account for their brutality and misrule.

To be sure, the causes and consequences of the Great Syrian Revolt were multifaceted. Yet it is a cruel irony that the Druze, who once stood at the vanguard of an uprising that rejected cantonization in favor of a pluralistic Syrian nationalism, now find themselves at the center of a foreign intervention premised on a similarly divisive logic.

Back to the Future?

Like all ideas, the Responsibility to Protect was a product of its times. The end of the Cold War, the ascent of the transnational human rights movement, mass displacement, the advent of so-called failed states, and the proliferation of humanitarian emergencies all coalesced in the 1990s to create an environment ripe for fresh thinking about sovereignty, intervention, and atrocity prevention.

While the doctrine’s architects were not concerned with the protection of minorities alone, many of the atrocities that would animate their thinking sprang from the plights of specific ethnic and religious groups — often minorities — throughout the decade: Saddam Hussein’s persecution of the Iraqi Kurds in 1991; the 1994 Hutu genocide against 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 in this context that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked the question on everyone’s mind: “If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica — to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?” In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty — a cosmopolitan group of politicians, lawyers, and activists assembled by the Canadian government — proposed an answer: the Responsibility to Protect.

In a remarkable show of unity, world leaders unanimously endorsed the new doctrine in 2005. The “international community” had a duty to act, it was said, where governments were unable or unwilling to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. No sooner had the Responsibility to Protect reached its zenith, however, than it suddenly fell out of favor. The 2011 NATO intervention against Muammar al-Gadhafi in Libya —authorized by the UN Security Council in the language of protection — quickly morphed into a war for regime change, triggering a brutal civil war that endures today. The Libya debacle appeared to confirm suspicions that the Responsibility to Protect was a fig leaf for Western, and especially U.S.-led, interventionism. By the time Assad deployed chemical weapons against his own population in 2013, the world had no appetite for another intervention under the banner of protection.

At the time of its unveiling and in the years since, proponents and opponents alike heralded the doctrine as a radical departure from the traditional conception of absolute sovereignty, ostensibly dating back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. That interpretation was inaccurate. The Westphalian ideal was always more myth than reality, and early modern political theorists had long argued that sovereignty entailed responsibilities to the governed, not merely freedom from external intervention. But the Responsibility to Protect augured other, more troubling historical continuities. By conditioning sovereignty on certain standards of internationally monitored state behavior, the mechanisms of atrocity prevention enshrined in the Responsibility to Protect bore a striking resemblance to the minority protections of the 19th and early 20th centuries. And just as the League was powerless to hold the European powers accountable for their mistreatment of the populations they were mandated to safeguard, there is no single arbiter to determine which atrocities are beyond the pale, which populations merit protection, and which states can claim the mantle of guardian — not to mention any framework to hold self-anointed protectors accountable. For that very reason, Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to portray 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 speakers, mutilating the Responsibility to Protect beyond recognition in the process.

Something similar is playing out in Syria today. Emerging from 14 years of civil war that fractured the country, killed hundreds of thousands, and displaced millions, Syrians have a historic opportunity to forge a new vision for national unity. At the same time, the centrifugal forces of sectarianism — then as now, exacerbated by self-proclaimed protectors — keep it mired in a painful past. This is not to say that Sharaa is unimpeachable, or that the road to national reconciliation will be smooth. Nor is this to suggest that outside actors have no role to play in a new Syria. Quite the opposite. Rather than resort to militarized humanitarianism, as Netanyahu has done, Syria’s neighbors should seek its integration into the regional economy, support upcoming parliamentary elections, and back transitional justice initiatives as long-term investments in the rule of law and accountability. Even the Trump administration, whose foreign policy has been characterized by chaos and cruelty on so many fronts, has recognized the promise of this moment. The White House lifted sanctions on Damascus in June, and Trump’s envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, has emerged as a vocal advocate for the country’s unity and sovereignty.

In the best-case scenario, military interventions like the one Israel launched last month will protect the Druze in the narrowest sense: providing short-term deterrence against renewed violence in Suweida. But that definition of protection is grossly inadequate. Indeed, it is likely to beget a far worse scenario: allegations of Druze disloyalty to the Syrian state, zero-sum identitarian politics, and perhaps even the return of a full-scale civil war marked by external intervention. In the long term, real protection — for the Druze as for all Syrians — should come from national reconciliation, not ethnic and religious cantons policed at the point of a foreign military’s guns. That is a vision worth protecting.

Daniel Chardell is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and a nonresident fellow at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs.

Image: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit via Wikimedia Commons