Category World News

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent a video message to the Druze minority in his country on Wednesday afternoon. He urged them to avoid entering Suwayda to fight local Bedouin and government forces, and to avoid entering the southwest of Syria.

Yet as Netanyahu made the statement, his own forces were bombing Damascus, hitting the country’s Ministry of Defense, and injuring at least three people.

Netanyahu asserted that he had used Israel’s military might to defend the Druze.

The principal architect of the 2018 nation-state law, which has been widely criticized for marginalizing the Druze and other minorities, said, “My brothers, the Druze citizens of Israel, the situation in Suweyda in southwestern Syria is very serious.” He assured them, referring to the Syrian government, that “we are acting to save our Druze brothers and to put an end to the gangs of the regime.”

Druze in Israel

In Suweyda, there have long-standing sectarian tensions between the Druze and the local Bedouins. Meanwhile, Israel’s repeated threats against the presence of the Syrian military close to its border have stymied attempts by the newly formed Syrian government, which came into power in December after the fall of long-standing dictator Bashar al-Assad.

In Syria, there are roughly 700,000 Druze. Another 150, 000 Druze reside in Israel, where many, at least prior to the law enacted in 2018, believed they were bound by a “blood covenant” with their Jewish neighbors since 1948 and the founding of Israel, at the expense of the Nakba’s ethnic cleansing population. The majority of people still support the Israeli state, where they are enlisted in the military, despite the fact that some people now perceive themselves as “second-class” citizens.

Rami Zeedan, an associate professor at the University of Kansas and the author of Druze Studies Journal, said, “The Israeli Druze view themselves as Druze, as Israelis, and as Arabs.”

The perception that both Jews and Druze are persecuted minorities contributes, he said. The Israeli Druze believe they still stand to gain a lot more from Israel than any other imaginable future. The Druze community’s protection serves as the foundation of this alliance.

He continued, “The Israeli Druze are now trying to use that to pressure the Israeli government to defend fellow Druze in Syria,” and he also cited the justification for Israel’s attacks on Syria, where the Druze community has historically been hostile, even as some leaders become more close to Israel.

Pure opportunism

Israel has historically attacked Syria, even prior to the most recent Druze-related violence to occur in Suwayda.

Israel has invaded and occupied Syria since 1967’s 14-year conflict, excluding the western Golan Heights, which it has occupied since 1967, and has fought with it hundreds of times.

Leading Israeli analysts speculate that the Israeli government’s and its troubled prime minister’s personal and political goals may have been the cause of these recent attacks rather than their concern for the welfare of the Druze.

Former Israeli ambassador and consular general in New York Alon Pinkas told Al Jazeera, “It’s pure opportunism.” In a statement made in reference to another regional ethnic group, he said, “Once again, it’s nice to pretend we’re helping our friends the Druze in the same way we never did our other friends, the Kurds.”

Pinkas identified a number of reasons Israel’s recent strikes on Syria have helped to boost Netanyahu’s newfound self-confidence as a leader of the war, to resuscitate his corruption trial, and to strengthen the “delusion” that Israel has somehow managed to reshape the Middle East through military force alone.

He also said, “He doesn’t want a strong central government led by al-Sharaa,” adding that a unified Syria is possible. He wants a weak central government that deals with the Druze and Bedouin in southern and northern regions that are ruled by the Kurds.

In essence, Israel can pursue its interests in Syria’s southern region if Syria is left unaltered, he continued.

Netanyahu has repeatedly argued that Israel will support only a demilitarized Syria that includes Suwayda and is not associated with Damascus. In effect, this gives Israel a buffer zone, which strengthens the military justification for its actions in Syria.

hollowed out by war

The attacks on Syria also have the additional benefit of sustaining the crisis that has plagued Israeli society and sustained its government through numerous scandals since the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent conflict in Gaza.

Since then, Israel has attacked Syria, Iran, Yemen, and Lebanon.

People don’t seem to care about war anymore; instead, it seems like they do. Israeli political analyst Ori Goldberg described the public’s response to the most recent attacks as “ennui”.

“War is fleeting, but it gives people energy and meaning.” He claimed that the 12-day conflict in June, which sparked global concerns about regional escalation, had been forgotten about by people as well as the Iranian conflict.

According to Goldberg, all the cautions and caveats that would ordinarily come before military action had been replaced by ever-evolving dangers that necessitated new escalations.

He claimed that it was “dangerous.” The Druze are irrelevant to Israelis. There is this worn-out, “OK, dude,” attitude from the beginning; it’s just a new threat, a new front. Let’s do it]attitude] ‘”.

The United States Department of Justice has requested that a former police officer involved in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor be given a prison term of a single day, plus three years of supervised release.

That reduced sentencing recommendation marks a stark reversal for the prosecution, which began under former President Joe Biden and continued under current President Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump appointee serving as assistant attorney general for civil rights, submitted a court memorandum reflecting the government’s new stance.

She argued that former police officer Brett Hankison should not be confined to prison for his actions in the early morning hours of March 13, 2020, when Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was shot to death in her apartment.

Dhillon noted that Hankison had no criminal history before November 2024, when a federal jury found him guilty of using excessive force in violation of Taylor’s civil rights.

These facts, Dhillon wrote, “demonstrate that there is no need for a prison sentence to protect the public from the defendant”.

“For the reasons explained in this memorandum, the government requests a downward variance and a sentence of time served (one day’s imprisonment), followed by three years of supervised release.”

But critics blasted the recommendation as disregard for the will of the jury — not to mention for Taylor’s life.

“The fact that Donald Trump’s DOJ thinks Breonna Taylor’s life is worth just a one-day jail sentence is morally reprehensible and deeply insulting,” wrote US Representative Morgan McGarvey, a Democrat whose district includes Louisville, Kentucky, where Taylor was shot to death.

“This is a dark day for our entire city.”

A national outrage

Taylor’s killing at the hands of police officers in Louisville was a galvanising moment in the US, sparking debate over the use of police force in Black communities.

It came just weeks before another unarmed Black person, George Floyd of Minnesota, was murdered by a police officer who knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.

Video of that incident — along with the news of Taylor’s killing and other deaths — provoked nationwide uproar, leading to one of the largest protest movements in US history.

Taylor had been at home just after midnight local time, when a group of plain-clothed police officers arrived at the apartment where she was staying with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker.

The officers executed a so-called no-knock warrant, attempting to storm Taylor’s apartment unannounced, based on faulty evidence that her apartment was involved in a drug operation.

Upon hearing the commotion, Walker said he believed he and Taylor were the targets of a home invasion, and he shot at the suspected intruders in self-defence.

A pair of police officers returned fire in the doorway. Approximately 22 bullets were fired into the apartment, several of which hit Taylor, killing her.

According to Justice Department prosecutors, Hankison then fired 10 more shots into the apartment through a window and sliding glass door, both of which were covered by curtains and blinds. They note that he could not see inside as he fired.

None of Hankison’s bullets struck Taylor, a fact Dhillon noted in this week’s court memo. Hankison has testified that he believed his police colleagues were engaged in a gun fight with a semiautomatic rifle, and he fired through the side of the apartment to help in their defence.

A shift in policy

Given the outcry surrounding deaths like Taylor’s, the administration of former President Biden had opened aggressive investigations and led prosecutions to hold police accountable for instances of excessive violence.

In December 2024, for instance, the Department of Justice announced it had reached a court-enforceable agreement with the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) to reform the force’s practices.

That agreement stemmed from a March 2023 report that found a pattern of federal civil rights violations under the LMPD, including the use of excessive force and unlawful search warrants.

“An LMPD leader told the department, quote, Breonna Taylor was a symptom of the problems that we had for years,” then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a prepared video statement in 2024.

“The findings of our investigation, which I came to Louisville to announce last year, made that clear.”

But since taking office in January, the Trump administration has rolled back the federal government’s agreements with police departments found to have committed patterns of civil rights violations.

One of the cancelled deals pertained to Louisville. Dhillon, at the time, called those reform agreements an example of “federal micromanagement”.

In this week’s court filing, Dhillon wrote that she did not dispute that Hankison fired blindly into Taylor’s apartment on the night of her killing.

She also said that the government “respects the jury’s guilty verdict” in Hankison’s case.

But she nevertheless pointed out that Hankison had been acquitted of state-level charges, and his first federal trial ended in a mistrial in November 2023. Federal prosecutors retried the case the following year.

Dhillon underscored that Hankison did not fire the fatal bullet.

“Counsel is unaware of another prosecution in which a police officer has been charged with depriving the rights of another person under the Fourth Amendment for returning fire and not injuring anyone,” she wrote.

Outrage over recommendation

But the recommendation that Hankison’s sentencing be dropped to a single day has reignited the outrage around Taylor’s killing — and the mourning for a young life cut short.

In a statement on Thursday, the civil rights lawyers who represented Taylor’s family, including Ben Crump, issued a joint statement denouncing Dhillon’s sentencing recommendations as farcical.

“This recommendation is an insult to the life of Breonna Taylor and a blatant betrayal of the jury’s decision. Every American who believes in equal justice under the law should be outraged,” they wrote.

“This sets a dangerous precedent. When a police officer is found guilty of violating someone’s constitutional rights, there must be real accountability and justice. Recommending just one day in prison sends the unmistakable message that white officers can violate the civil rights of Black Americans with near-total impunity.”