On June 23, Druze residents attacked two injured Syrian rebels who were transferred by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ambulance from the border to an Israeli hospital. This lynching in the Druze Majdal Shams village in the Golan Heights is a warning bell not just for Israel, but for all the players in the region. The Druze problem has brought to the surface, at least implicitly, the network of inter-ethnic hostilities and tensions on Israel’s border. If the regime in Damascus collapses or abandons this border region to the goodwill of Sunni factions, we can safely assume that the relative stability and quiet there will end as well. The pent-up tension in the border region would explode.
What Israel should learn from these events is that it must strive for the survival and bolstering of the current regime at any price. Anyone who wonders why is invited to look at neighboring Iraq or distant Libya. What’s happening there is likely to happen in Syria after President Bashar al-Assad.
