The Druze at the Limits of Trauma and Collective Memory

Sami DAOUD
Introduction:
Genocide generates among its survivors an awareness of the necessity to reorganize themselves according to a radically different conception of identity. When the very cause of a group’s distinctiveness becomes the reason for its targeting, the violence it endures turns into a mechanism through which the group redefines itself and the way it is perceived in the eyes of its enemies. At that point, its relationship with the society it once imagined itself a part of—and by which it was annihilated—begins to fracture. The group then weaves for its identity its own connective fabric, envisioning itself as part of every individual who belongs to the targeted category, not because of internal homogeneity, but through a shared existential threat. Its relationship with the surrounding society gradually recedes into estrangement—not necessarily because that society is inherently hostile, but because it has transformed into a space where assumptions of safety and belonging have collapsed, and which, in the consciousness of the targeted group, becomes a parallel cultural world irreconcilable in the post-traumatic moment.

Within this framework, the cultural content of any group becomes the actual frontier of its existence, while geography shrinks to vast lines demarcating hostility. Along these reconstituted borders, dynamics of interaction and exclusion between groups take shape. This process does not presuppose a predetermined path or a single model for post-genocidal identity reconstruction, nor does it treat the targeted group as a closed, homogeneous unit. Rather, it seeks to understand the redrafting of cultural boundaries as a historical-cognitive process—one that emerges in response to violence aimed at total erasure, yet without erasing the group’s internal diversities or its conditional possibilities of engagement with the surrounding world.

Moreover, this reading does not carry any normative justification for the outcomes of reverting to a particularized identity; instead, it endeavors to deconstruct the conditions under which such reconstitution occurs—as a spontaneous response to an existential shock that reshapes the mutual gaze between victims and aggressors.

This article argues that the attempted genocide against the Druze of Syria in July 2025—and the accompanying systematic humiliation of their cultural symbols as an ethno-spiritual group, together with the destruction of the symbolic carriers of their identity—constituted a collective trauma that reorganized their self-awareness and perception of the Other. It compelled a redefinition of belonging within a social fabric that established a cognitive-cultural unity separating them from those who viewed them merely as potential subjects of extermination.

Accordingly, this study approaches the Sweida massacre through two interrelated conceptual frameworks: Frederick Barth’s notion of ethnic boundary maintenance, used here as a tool for analyzing post-violence mechanisms; and Omer Bartov’s conception of perception and genocide, serving as a framework for understanding the genocidal logic—the discourse that seeks to negate collective existence itself.

Policies of Humiliation

The internal violence in Syria, in one of its structural dimensions, rests on the political crime perpetrated by colonial powers following the First World War, when forced political borders were imposed on disparate native groups whose cultural and historical systems were dismantled—rendering the formation of a cohesive political nation an impossibility from its very inception. This legacy did not vanish; rather, it was later reproduced by new actors through policies that further shattered the social and cultural boundaries of indigenous groups, perpetuating political geography as a fragile arena of conflict rather than a field for intercultural dialogue and solidarity.

These structures interacted with the exclusionary policies structured by the Ba’ath Party within Syrian society—not merely as an authoritarian regime, but as an actor that reorganized the political community on artificial administrative bases, dividing society into ethnically and sectarianly opposed urban and local units. This dismantling deepened through tribal and sectarian carriers, mobilized to propagate a contradictory religious-political discourse aimed at entrenching the hegemony of a doctrinal faction over power, while excluding all who refused to submit to the loyalty system woven by the Ba’athist military elite, in integration with networks of merchants and notables from cities and countryside, particularly in Damascus and Aleppo. In this context, exclusion was not the product of cultural difference per se, but the result of refusing subservience to the faction that had seized power and rejecting the abandonment of cultural particularity in favor of forced integration into an authoritarian system that intertwined religious and political violence to create a “savage state,” in the words of Michel Seurat.

Within this trajectory, the Druze faced systematic political exclusion and social denigration, employing religious pretexts with deceptive character. Since the eleventh century, this group has followed a distinct religious path based on esoteric belief, where faith is understood as a rational interpretation of God’s oneness and the path to it, and as an ethical practice embodied in upholding covenants and human relations—not as mere declared doctrinal affiliation, for reason is “the central axis at the core of the doctrine of unity” (1). Hence, their spiritual path manifested in adherence to the spiritual idea without transforming into a proselytizing sect, rendering their cultural particularity susceptible to misunderstanding and hostile interpretation.
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