Damascus and the Jabal Druze -- a Josh Landis Thread

How to Understand the battle between Damascus and the Jabal Druze

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History provides important context for the battle being waged today in the Jabal Druze

This is not the first time that the Druze demand regional autonomy and a federal system. Let's see what happened to them the first time they demanded autonomy in 1946.

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The leaders of the Druze demanded autonomy in 1946 at #Syrian independence.

President Quwatli refused it and relations between the two quickly turned to war, ending with the bombardment of the Jabal Druze by President Shishakli in 1954. Most issues were the same then as they are today.

(These events are quotes are taken from my article: "Shishakli and the Druze: Integration and Intransigence."

joshualandis.oucreate.com/Joshua_Landis_…

President Quwatli in 1946

Under the military leadership of Sultan Pasha al-Atrash, the Druzes provided much of the military force behind the Great Syrian Revolt against the French that raged from 1925 to 1927.

In 1945 Amir Hasan al-Atrash, the paramount political leader of the Jabal, led the Druze military units in a successful revolt against the French, making the Jabal Druze the first and only region in Syria to liberate itself without British assistance from French rule. Because of the Druze success in arresting all the French soldiers in the Jabal, months before other parts of Syria, it was able to establish an autonomous administration and self rule well before President Quwatli was able to proclaim Syrian independence in April 1946.

No Syrians played a more heroic role in the struggle against colonialism or shed more blood for independence than the Druzes. The Druzes, made confident by their successes, demanded to keep their autonomous administration and many political privileges accorded them by the French. They also sought generous economic assistance from the newly independent Syrian government.

Sultan al-Atrash and Hasan al-Atrash

Sultan Pasha al-Atrash

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In contrast to the Druzes, the Alawites of Syria's western mountains had little political clout during the early independence era. Although they constituted 12% of Syria's population and its largest compact minority, they did not form a cohesive society as did the Druzes, and their tribal leaders held no weight in nationalist circles.
Following the suppression of the 1946 Alawite Revolt and the hanging of Sulayman al-Murshid, local Alawite autonomy was dismantled and the Alawite community all but disappeared from the national stage until the 1960s, when Alawite military officers would organize within the military to take power from Syria's Sunni urban elites.

The Kurds, Syria's other important compact minority constituting close to 10% of the population in the 1950s, were even less influential than the Alawites.

The Director General of Syrian Tribal Affairs in 1948 explained why the Kurdish community situated on Syria's northeast boarder with Turkey was no threat to Syria.

Because the "Kurdish tribes were in reality akin to feudal institutions," he said, the tribal chieftains owned all the land and could control their "serfs." In turn the government had firm control over the tribal leaders, he explained.

"Practically without exception the principal Kurdish leaders are under death sentence in Turkey and were they to show signs of asserting too much independence of action or to disregard the wishes of the Syrian Government in any important matter they could be conveniently disposed of by arranging to have them fall into Turkish hands."

As is the case today, the Damascus government in 1946 was worried about Syria's three compact minorities: the Alawites, Kurds and Druze. Today, it is the Kurds who present the greatest challenge to Damascus. In 1946, the Druze presented the greatest challenge.

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What did the Druze want in 1946?

The Druzes were determined that they would not be humiliated and excluded from power like the Alawites and Kurds.

Ably led by the Atrash household and jealous of their reputation as Arab nationalists and proud warriors, the Druze leaders refused to be beaten into submission by Damascus or cowed by Quwatli's threats.

When a local paper in 1945 reported that President Quwatli (1943-1949) had called the Druzes a "dangerous minority," Sultan Pasha al-Atrash flew into a rage and demanded a public retraction.

If the retraction were not forthcoming, he announced, the Druzes would indeed become "dangerous," and a force of 4,000 Druze warriors would "occupy the city of Damascus."

In negotiations between the Syrian Minister of the Interior and Amir Hasan al-Atrash, Druze demands were two-fold: economic and political.

Amir Hasan insisted that Damascus pay for better schooling, roads, and a running water system in the Druze region.

Most importantly, the Atrashes did not want the government to destroy their authority in the Jabal or to marginalize the Druze in the name of Arab nationalism and the centralization of power. 

Amir Hasan al-Atrash in 1946 demanded that a quasi-independent Druze Ministry of Defense be established with a minister chosen from the Jabal Druze. This is not much different from the demands of both the Druze and Kurdish leaders today. 

During the four years of his presidency, Quwwatli remained locked in a destructive and inconclusive struggle with the Druze chieftains over control of the Jabal. He did not have the military means to destroy the Atrashes or conquer the Jabal.

At the outset of independence, the Jabal was, as one observer put it, "ruled absolutely by the Atrash family, whose members, or their nominees, fill all the important posts." Atrashes staffed the top twenty positions in the local administration, including the head of the 350 Druze gendarmes and the Druze police force; the qa'immaqams (county commissioners) and lessor district administrators were clan leaders appointed by Amir Hasan.

The 850 strong Groupement Druze stationed in the Jabal had been renamed the Druze Cavalry Battalion by the Amir, following its expulsion of the French in 1945. Major Hamid al-Atrash was its commander.

When Hasan al-Atrash was asked to abandon his feudal authority and the monopoly over office-holding in the Jabal enjoyed by his family, he flew into a rage. "The Atrash family by right of conquest and tradition are the natural and historical leaders" of the Druzes, he proclaimed.

He ridiculed the notion that anyone but an Atrash could rule the Jabal, and insisted that only the community's traditional rulers could safeguard the interests of the Druzes. The mistrust separating the two sides was profound and precluded either from negotiating seriously over power-sharing arrangements.

President Quwatli devoted all the government's money spent in the Jabal on activities designed to destroy the power of the Atrashes, rather than to develop the economy and raise the standard of living. 

When national elections held in July 1947 resulted in a stunning victory for the five Atrash candidates in the Jabal districts, the government announced that the voting process in the Jabal had been fraudulent, despite claims to the contrary by its own election supervisor in the region.

President Quwatli insisted that new elections would have to be held for the five Jabal seats. New elections were never held and the Druze seats in the Syrian Parliament remained vacant until the end of Quwatli's presidency in 1949, when he was overthrown by the head of the Syrian Army, Husni al-Zaim. 

Because President Quwatli could not defeat the Druze outright, he decided to provoked a civil war among the Druze clans. (The analog today is the fighting between the Bedouin and Druze in Suwayda, which the government has used as a pretext to invade the region and impose Damascus's control.)

Quwatli established a secret fund to finance his divide and conquer scheme. The government armed and funded a collection of secondary Druze clan leaders from the northern Jabal who called themselves the Jabha al-Sha`biyya (Peoples' Front) or more simply the Sha`biyyun, or Populars.

The Populars wanted to supplant the Atrash and catapult themselves into the first rank of Druze society and politics. They accused the Atrashes of being traitors who were conspiring with the Jordanians to invade Syria and establish a throne for King `Abdallah in Damascus.

Today, the Druze are being accused of being traitors by Syria's Sunni majority because Israel is backing them.

The conflict between the Populars and the Atrashes led to a number of full pitched battles during the Fall of 1947. In July a Popular militia overran the town of Salkhad, shooting 20 Atrash supporters and expelling all its Atrash administrators. In November, they killed an additional 20 in an attack on Qraya, Sultan Pasha's village.

But the Atrashes completely routed the Populars by the end of 1947, capturing their four principal leaders. The Atrashes shut the Jabal off from the rest of Syria by cutting the phone lines, roads, and railway connections to Damascus to prevent the Syrian army from intervening.

At the height of the fighting in the Jabal, the French Minister to Syria exclaimed: "We tried to split the Jabal for 25 years. Is the Syrian Government going to succeed in 18 months?" He need not have worried. The broader Druze community's faith in and support for its traditional leaders was not to be undermined so easily by the Syrian government.

(Israel's bombing around the Ministry of Defense in Damascus in 2025 is performative. Israel cannot "defend the Druze," as it said it would.)

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The Atrashes were able to beat back President Quwatli's and the Popular Front's challenge, but at the cost of becoming ever more isolated in the Jabal.

The British, historic allies of the Druzes, refused to aid the Atrashes, despite entreaties that they do so.

More damaging to the Druze, however, was King `Abdallah's refusal to come to their aid. The Jordanian monarch had promised repeatedly to send the Arab Legion into the Jabal and annex it to Jordan if the Druzes so requested.

Atrash defiance of the Syrian government depended on the credibility of `Abdallah's threat to move into the Jabal with his army much as today's Druze depend on Israel's promise to keep the forces of Syria's new strongmen from moving south of Damascus.

The Druzes discovered that they were alone in their battle with the Syrian government, much as the Druze today are learning the same. Israel cannot protect them, neither will the Americans or the international community. 

• • •

Trump’s base feels humiliated -- AlterNet OpEd by Lindsay Bayerstein

AlterNet OPINION | Trump’s base feels humiliated because they were played for suckers — and they know it  
Lindsay Beyerstein July 15, 2025 

The good news is that Democrats have found the wedge issue that can shatter the MAGA coalition.
The bad news is that it’s Jeffrey Epstein.

The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell focus-grouped 2024 Trump voters who are disillusioned with Trump over the notorious FBI/Department of Justice memo that effectively closed the Epstein case.

The memo made it clear that they will not be releasing any more documents or pursuing cases against Epstein’s friends. It declared that there was no client list, no jailhouse murder, and no international blackmail ring.

This is all true, but to the QAnon base, it’s akin to the Pope tweeting, “We’ve reviewed the files and Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. Thank you for your attention in this matter.”

There’s no coming back from that.

MAGA’s headed for schism.

Longwell asked the group whether they thought Trump cynically hyped the Epstein story or whether he was in on the conspiracy.

Overwhelmingly, they thought Trump was in on it.

This is a potentially explosive finding.

Normally, it’s impossible to get Trump supporters to believe that Trump has ever made the slightest misstep, but here we have former MAGA's declaring that The Donald’s in league with ultimate evil.

Longwell understands how central Epstein is to the MAGA worldview. The base expects the Epstein files to fulfill prophecies broadcast on rightwing radio in the 1990s and elaborated through Pizzagate and QAnon. It was foretold that Bill and Hillary Clinton and all the Satanic Democrats would one day be exposed for their crimes against God and man.

To reasonable people, the Epstein saga is an outrage, but not a world historical event. To us, he was a degenerate billionaire who raped girls with his rich friends, dodged taxes and loved eugenics. To MAGA, however, Epstein was a leader of the Jewish Cabal that runs the world.

For us, exposing Epstein’s confederates would undercut elite impunity and deliver justice to victims. For them, it would expose the Illuminati.

According to QAnon theology, Trump is on a divine mission to fight the cabal of the deep state. To many, Trump’s willingness to hunt down Epstein’s co-conspirators is a test. If he won’t do it, he’s not the Chosen One. As far as they’re concerned, Trump deserves to be our supreme leader because QAnon says so.

By implying that the globalist Epstein conspiracy isn’t real, Trump is undermining his own authority. Trump ran on exposing the Epstein files as part of his campaign against the deep state. Key members of his government like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino built their careers on it.

The Epstein case is a particularly effective wedge because Trump’s conspiracist base feels humiliated. They were played for suckers and they know it. As historian Richard Hofstadter observed in his famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” status anxiety is an accelerant for conspiratorial thinking. People gravitate towards conspiracy theories when they feel insecure. It’s a special affront, then, to be treated with contempt by the very people who were supposed to salve their egos.

Attorney General Pam Bondi humiliated some of MAGA’s favorite far-right influencers by meeting them at a much-hyped event at the White House and presenting them with binders full of what she implied would be blockbuster secrets. In fact, the binders contained information that had been public for years. Then she left them to explain to their angry fans why there were no secrets in those binders. Bondi stalled by claiming that the Epstein client list was on her desk.

Now even Daddy Trump is yelling at MAGA to stop talking about Epstein. Bongino and Patel allegedly co-wrote the infamous Nothing to See Here memo. It appears these career conspiracists were more than willing to brush the Epstein files under the rug until the backlash hit. The Epstein bait-and-switch is proof that not even the conspiracists’ most ardent and well-compensated champions in Washington care about them.

Some Democrats are hesitant to fan the flames of this scandal because they’re afraid of legitimizing conspiracy theories. That’s a valid concern. This saga has moved QAnon to the very center of our politics – even more than the antics of the QAnon Shaman at the J6 insurrection or Marjorie Taylor Greene’s career.

However, there are also reality-based reasons to be up-in-arms about the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein saga. There’s an opportunity for congressional Democrats to demand meaningful transparency on the Epstein case. The key is to stick to legitimate grievances, namely Trump’s broken promises, lies and conflicts of interest.

The DOJ-FBI memo claims that there are no more releasable documents. The FBI’s Epstein files are probably about 1 percent as interesting as people expect, but the government is lying about what they have. They say that there’s only child porn and material that would expose the identities of victims. However, we know from lawyers who worked on Epstein lawsuits for years that there’s plenty of material that could be safely redacted and released. There’s probably no client list per se, because Epstein wasn’t running a bordello and blackmail is the wrong model to understand what he was up to. The men who came to the island were friends, not customers. Epstein surely collected kompromat on them, but the FBI may not have gotten a hold of much of it. Epstein had years of advance warning that he might be charged and he had IT pros to help him hide it.

Initially, Bondi had agents working around the clock to gather materials from footlockers and hard drives in far-flung FBI field offices. This is material that presumably wasn’t available to the Biden-era DOJ. We were supposed to get huge revelations any day. Then suddenly they put out a memo saying there’s nothing to see. It’s fair to ask what changed.

There’s also a glaring conflict of interest. Depending on how you define the Epstein files, Trump is already all over them. Epstein’s black book, which has been public for years, contains 20 different ways to reach Trump and his household. He rode on Epstein’s plane. In fact, Trump and Epstein were best friends for over a decade. Their friendship was largely based on chasing girls.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told Landon Thomas, Jr. of New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

In the early 1990s, Trump flew in 28 models for a “beauty contest” where he and Epstein were the only guests. Trump appointed the US attorney who gave Epstein his notorious and illegal federal immunity deal to be his first-term secretary of labor. Epstein died on Trump’s watch. Let’s not forget that Trump is an adjudicated rapist in his own right. Elon Musk’s accusation that Trump is in the Epstein files may have finally given MAGA a permission structure to take this mountain of evidence seriously.

Astonishingly, Trump recently declared on Truth Social that the Epstein files were “written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration,” which is tantamount to admitting that there are Epstein files with derogatory information about him. Whereupon, the president was ratioed on his own platform for the first time in Truth Social history.

I wouldn’t count on Trump to have a good handle on what’s in the files. He’s lazy and senile, after all. But something seems to have spooked him. Perhaps it’s just that the inexplicable force field that shielded Trump from the consequences of his well-known ties to Epstein is starting to crack and he wants to change the subject before it shatters entirely. Whatever it is, Longwell’s focus-groupers can sense it.

Gaza Notes From Twenty Years Ago

Watching the genocide in Gaza from across the ocean I spend much of my time feeling both angry and helpless, surrounded by people who seem indifferent to that horror. I am horrified that Congress is so intimidated that in a recently constructed concentration camp the IDF is killing small groups of unarmed Palestinians daily.  As the Israel-Hamas war nears the end of the second year I recall some observations I noted about twenty years ago which I noted at the time. 

Israel's connections with Palestinians were quite different twenty years ago as this shows. The following is a transcription from my old blog.  The NPR link has survived at this writing but the contents have since vanished. The voices made the story unforgettable. Fortunately I copied this much at the time...  

Here is a great story that NPR ran four years ago that caught my attention at the time. It describes a curious symbiosis between Israel and Gaza reflected in how automobiles were tagged in Gaza City. This was prior to Sharon's removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza, making me wonder if some of them may have had a surreptitious part in the story.

An Odd Hierarchy of License Plates in Gaza

The local government in Gaza issues a unique kind of license plate: one for stolen cars. Driving school owner Raeed el-Sa'ati decodes the region's vehicle license plates.

SIEGEL: Last week, as we were riding through the streets of Gaza, our interpreter, Hosam Arhoun(ph), pointed out something that is, so far as we know, unique to that isolated strip of Mediterranean coast. It's a kind of license plate. I thought he was kidding. We would be behind a car, and he would say, `See that pair of Arabic letters on the tag? That indicates this is a stolen car. And that one,' he said, `that's an official stolen car.'

Well, we dropped in on Raeed el-Sa'ati, who owns the Ekhlas Driving School in Gaza, to get more details. And he explained that Gaza license plates can be red for official, green for taxis, and white for private vehicles. The lower the number on the red plates, the higher the position of the official. The number 30 designates a truck.

All this is pretty conventional stuff for license plates. But then...

Mr. RAEED EL-SA'ATI (Ekhlas Driving School): (Through Translator) And then the cars which, written in Arabic, the letters M and F, it is the stolen cars.

SIEGEL: The stolen cars?

Mr. EL-SA'ATI: (Through Translator) And then there is these plates which, M-H-F--it is stolen cars, but working at the authority, means, aha, it is a stolen governmental car. There's also another kind, but this is the same plates; the numbers are different. The numbers which started with 25, it is a stolen car, but it is allowed to work as taxis. This is a very modern law in the world.

SIEGEL: As you can hear, our man Hosam could hardly stop laughing as he translated this.

It turns out this system is a legacy of the most efficient but embarrassing example of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in the 1990s: auto theft. The Palestinian Authority took over Gaza, and the Israeli police were out, so Israeli car thieves fenced thousands of stolen cars into the Gaza Strip, about 15,000 of them, where they were then sold. Thousands are driven by Palestinian security and other officials. A lot of them are in that stolen taxicab category, vehicles that provide income while costing a lot less than a legal yellow minivan.

When their cars were stolen, the Israeli car owners would get reimbursed by their insurance, and they would go buy new cars. So in effect, Israeli insurance companies were paying for Gaza's used car trade. When the insurance companies sued, the Palestinian Authority settled, and the settlement cost was offset in part by much higher registration fees for cars that had been stolen. So to designate those cars, they were given special license plates. According to the Transportation Department in Gaza, the news is that the Authority has decided in principle to end stolen car plates. Everyone will pay the same registration fees. But since this may put a lot of self-employed taxi drivers out of work, no one is saying how long it will take to abolish the license plate that says, `This car was stolen.'

Programmable Digital Currency -- Today's afternoon fun

This afternoon was my first learning of programmable digital currency.  I had just listened to a lengthy conversation about the possible (perhaps deliberately planned) explosion of interest rates expected to result in the current tampering, both national and global, expected by many to result from the extreme fiscal and monetary shocks triggered by the famous Big Beautiful Bill expected to be signed by President Trump tomorrow morning. 
[Here is the link to Richard Wolff & Michael Hudson: Trump's "The Big, Beautiful And The Ugly". These are two of my favorite people and their appearances on Nima's place are always delightful and smart.]

No one in the conversation mentioned bitcoin. But as they described the historic monetary shocks of the past and how they affected the social disparities between wealthy and poor people often resulting from sudden fiscal and/or monetary disturbances I was reminded of digital currency. 

As my imagination wandered I remembered stories about fortunes made and lost in connection with bitcoin and a quick search just now spit out this interesting bit of AI wisdom:

What if you put $1000 in Bitcoin 5 years ago?

• 5 years ago: If you invested $1,000 in Bitcoin in 2020, your investment would be worth $11,748.

• 10 years ago: If you invested $1,000 in Bitcoin in 2015, your investment would be worth $408,108. 

• 15 years ago: If you invested $1,000 in Bitcoin in 2010, your investment would be worth about $1.07 billion.

 Leaving a comment in the discussion section following the video I mentioned my suspicion that there may be some connection between deliberate efforts to stir the global fiscal pot in a way that people with access to the right technology might well be planning sudden fortunes. (That would make tulip bulbs unimaginably quaint.)
That's when someone replied that programmable digital currency might well be the medium of exchange in the future. I never heard of this, so I did some homework and thus far this is what I have turned up.
[This copy and paste method works pretty good with AI. I suppose as long as I reveal what I'm dong I'm not doing anything illegal.]

Programmable currency refers to digital money with embedded rules and conditions that govern its usage, often implemented through smart contracts on a blockchain.

It allows for automated financial operations and the execution of transactions based on predefined logic. This concept enables various applications, including conditional payments, automated processes, and enhanced regulatory compliance within transactions. 

Programmable currency exists as digital or tokenized representations of value, rather than physical cash. 

Welp. That's as far as I have come this afternoon.

I have been planning to stop blogging because it's so old-fashioned, but this seems to be a good way to keep personal notes.

And since my blogs have always been public (and advertisement-free) somebody might want to check it out and leave a message. 

 

Pascal's Wager Explained

The philosopher whose "wager" is famously associated with the afterlife is Blaise Pascal.  

Pascal's Wager, as it's known, is a philosophical argument suggesting that when faced with the uncertainty of God's existence and the possibility of an afterlife, a rational person should wager on God's existence. 

Here's a breakdown of the core concept: 

~ The Options: Pascal presents two possibilities regarding God's existence and the afterlife:

• God exists.
• God does not exist.

~ The Wager: Because reason alone cannot determine which option is true, a choice or "wager" must be made through how one lives.

~ The Outcomes: The potential outcomes are analyzed based on whether one believes in God or not:

• Believing in God and God exists: One gains infinitely, such as eternal happiness in heaven.
• Not believing in God and God exists: One loses infinitely, such as eternal damnation in hell.
• Believing in God and God does not exist: One loses nothing or only a finite amount, such as the perceived restrictions or sacrifices associated with living a religious life.
• Not believing in God and God does not exist: One gains nothing or experiences a finite gain by living as one pleases.

Pascal's Conclusion: The rational choice is to wager on God's existence, as the potential infinite gain outweighs the possible finite loss. 

➤  Pascal's Wager suggests that betting on God is the most prudent strategy when considering the afterlife, as the potential reward is infinite and the potential loss is minimal compared to the alternative.