Two days ago, Maariv, the Israeli newspaper, mentioned that hundreds of Druze soldiers in the Israeli army have expressed their willingness to go to Syria and take part in the fighting there to “protect" their coreligionists, who are coming under attack from Al-Ansar Front (probably Al-Nusra Front), in the Druze village of Khadr. The Israeli paper quoted the spiritual leader of Israel's Druze community, Sheikh Mowafak Tarif, as saying, “We have received hundreds of phone calls from young men, who called and announced, ‘We will do anything to protect our brothers in Syria.'" This development should cause a deep jolt in our collective consciousness, rather than lead to mutual condemnations and insults, here and there. Furthermore, this takes place not far from calls by the Christians of Lebanon to pay attention to the conditions of their coreligionists in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, no matter what content is given to this attention. While the Arab uprisings in general have taken on a Sunni flavor that is now hard to conceal, a pan-Shiite political trend has emerged, from Lebanon to Iran, and in Syria, Iraq and Bahrain, imposing on its proponents homogenous attitudes. And though the Kurdish question has split into a number of sub-questions equal to the number of homelands where Kurds live, this does not negate the existence of an inter-Kurdish link that can turn into a rallying cry if Kurds were to suffer any crisis in one of those countries. True, the sectarian or ethnic flavor characterizing these broad cases does not reduce them to that mere character, or deprive them of their legitimate aspirations and demands. But it is also true that we are witnessing an unprecedented boom in transnational links among entities that see themselves as representing shadow homelands that can convert to alternative countries – and causes. It is not without significance that an Israeli newspaper ran that news story about the Druze on the same day that the Israeli Army Radio quoted security sources in Tel Aviv as saying that Israel faced no threat in the coming 20 years, because the partitioning of Syria into three states was now a reality. According to the same radio, Israeli intelligence believes that Kurdish, Druze, Alawi, and Sunni cantons are already being established in Syria, in light of the diminishing area controlled by the regime in the Sunni regions and other districts where minorities live in sizeable populations. Again, the intention is not to distribute accusations and insults, or underscore conspiracies being hatched against us in the dark. Rather, it is to draw attention to a major development making its way into our lives and under our very eyes, a development that we must understand. It is prudent for us to also familiarize ourselves with the sources of this development in the collapse of the nation-states structure we built, so that we may deal with it today and tomorrow. But knowing how to deal with such challenges requires, before anything else, relinquishing theoretical and ideological tools that we continue to use, and which are based on assumptions-postulates that are not valid: From the idea of unity, whether within the one country or on a pan-Arab, pan-Islamic scale, to the idea of one joint cause for the “Arabs." This is not to mention the tons of papers we inked writing about “modernity and heritage" and the like. Indeed, today, especially in the Levant and the rest of the Arab world, reality is undergoing a geological shift that is beleaguering people and doing away with familiar meanings. As for the instruments to understand it, they are entirely different and completely unhelpful.
