Border Lines    

The last thing Israel needs is to get bogged down in the Syrian quagmire, but what happens when over a thousand Israeli citizens — many of them experienced IDF combat soldiers — breach the border to protect their relatives being slaughtered by the new Syrian regime? Will the intervention on behalf of Israel’s loyal non-Jewish minority torpedo the White House’s big plans for a new Middle East?

Just minutes before midnight, the home of Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, perched atop the Druze town of Julis in northern Israel, is bustling. In the spacious living room, middle-aged men pace with urgency, phones pressed to their ears, trading rapid updates.

It looks like a war room — because it is one.

Outside, two young men are exchanging and collecting names of the dead. The names keep coming in — from As-Suwayda, southern Syria. Nearly every family here has relatives there.

Just a week before my arrival, Bedouin militias — together with forces loyal to al-Julani’s so-called “Syrian Army” — stormed As-Suwayda, the capital of Syria’s Druze heartland. The result was swift and brutal: Hundreds were executed in the streets with unimaginable cruelty. Elderly men and sheikhs had their mustaches forcibly shaved in public as a form of humiliation. Homes were burned. What began as a local dispute —between a young Druze man and a group of Bedouin — rapidly escalated into a massacre that many residents say echoed the horrors of ISIS.