Between 13 and 20 July 2025, Suwayda experienced what can be considered a dark week in its recent history: a massacre attributed to armed militia elements drawn from tribes and the Popular Security forces, carried out against its Druze inhabitants. United Nations estimates put the death toll at roughly 1,400 people, while local sources place the number closer to 2,000. Thousands were displaced, dozens of villages were seized and destroyed, and scores of communal halls, Druze shrines, and churches were burned.
These “events” were not a military confrontation or the settling of a local dispute, as the Damascus authorities (formerly Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) framed them under the slogan “resolving the conflict between Druze and Bedouin.” Rather, they were an organized act of a genocidal character, preceded by long-standing religious and media incitement that labeled the Druze as “apostates” and “agents,” thereby justifying their transformation into a domestically legitimate “internal enemy” to be eliminated, except for those among them who sided with the authorities.
The incitement that preceded the attacks, beginning in spring 2025, created a social and political climate ripe for an outbreak of violence. Druze communities were blamed for the failures of transitional governance, for the monopoly of arms by state actors, for being subject to Israeli strikes, and even for the persistence of sanctions.
What happened in July resembles a pogrom: organized or tolerated mass violence directed at a religious or ethnic group that is presented as an existential threat. Pogrom violence typically includes killing, looting, property destruction, burning of houses of worship, and the rape of women. To understand this dynamic fully, one must return to the historical and intellectual origins of the term as it developed in Europe.
Language, Law, and the Contexts of Permitted Killing
Thinking of what occurred in Suwayda as a pogrom is necessary to move beyond the “white” concepts borrowed from Western legal frameworks, which struggle to locate such violence between genocide, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.
Revisiting these definitions and the question of whom to hold accountable, individual perpetrators versus the political structure of power that rarely faces accusations of such crimes, is meant to enable a sociopolitical analysis that places the event within a comparative historical framework.
Humiliation and the dehumanization of the victim—shaving of beards, torture, the abduction of women, the looting and burning of property, and systematic house-to-house killings—are not merely episodic outbursts of lawless violence against a “heretical,” “apostate,” or “collaborator” sect. They constitute a pogrom.
“Pogrom” is a Russian-derived word that literally means violent destruction or devastation. It denotes organized mass attacks targeting a specific religious or ethnic group and is most often associated with assaults on Jewish communities in the Russian Empire and Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Kristallnacht
One of the most notorious pogroms occurred on the night of 9–10 November 1938, when Nazi SA and SS units, along with ordinary German civilians, staged a pogrom against Jews in Germany and Austria (recently annexed into the Reich), while the police and state authorities looked on.
This pogrom became known as “Kristallnacht”—the Night of Broken Glass—because the streets were littered the next morning with shards of broken glass from the windows of destroyed Jewish shops, homes, and synagogues.
According to estimates cited by a historian in a recent Arte documentary, Kristallnacht resulted in the burning and destruction of more than 250 synagogues and about 7,000 shops, roughly 100 people killed, and the arrest of some 30,000 Jews who were sent to the first concentration camps. Kristallnacht marks the turning point when persecution of Jews in Germany moved from discriminatory practices to state-sponsored, organized violence, the precursor to the Holocaust carried out by the Nazi regime.
From historical and sociological studies we can identify several common elements that distinguish pogroms from other forms of collective violence. First is the existence of a despised religious or ethnic minority long demonized in public discourse—the Jews in imperial Russia before World War I and in Europe before World War II are the paradigmatic examples.
Second is the collusion or acquiescence of the authorities: the state may not necessarily carry out the attacks, but it often turns a blind eye or implicitly encourages them.
Third is an economic or political crisis, or a military defeat, which creates a need to channel collective anger toward an internal enemy. Rumor, media and religious incitement play mobilizing roles by framing killing and looting as legitimate acts of national or religious purification, while the absence of deterrence and punishment after the fact makes repetition likely. In short, a pogrom is directed, permitted mass violence against a marginalized group presented as a scapegoat for a broader social or political crisis.
Hannah Arendt and the Unraveling of Politics
Hannah Arendt did not treat the term “pogrom” or Kristallnacht explicitly in The Origins of Totalitarianism, but in the first part of that work she developed an analysis that can be applied to this type of mass violence.
Arendt explained how “anti-Semitism” was politicized in tsarist Russia and modern Europe, directing popular resentment against minorities and stripping them of legal protections. This analytical framework helps us understand pogroms as organized violence that the state tolerates and instrumentalizes to tighten its grip on society. Such violence later acquires a kind of legitimacy: those subject to it are described as “bare life” (to borrow Giorgio Agamben), people who “deserve to die, and whose killer has not committed a crime” because the act of killing takes place outside the state’s legal order.
In the chapter on anti-Semitism, Arendt argues that hatred of Jews in modern Europe ceased to be merely a religious animus (as it had been in the Middle Ages) and evolved into a socio-political phenomenon linked to the formation of the nation-state and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Within this context Jews were cast as a category blamed for economic and political crises, removed from meaningful participation in public life; political beings stripped of definable social attributes.
Thus, for Arendt, a pogrom is the moment when structural hatred becomes overt public violence: the state loses its monopoly on legitimate violence and allows the masses to act against minorities.
Arendt distinguishes between the “people” as a political community with institutions and the “masses” that emerge from the disintegration of traditional class structures and the erosion of social location and identity. When the masses vent their anxieties upon a weak or different “other,” violence becomes mass mobilization directed by power: what Arendt calls an alliance of “the mob and the elites.”
The elites manufacture the justifications and arguments, and the mob carries out the attacks. The elites create an internal enemy, strip it of political and human attributes, and thereby make violence against it appear legitimate.
Violence Without Order or Monopoly
Yet the scene in Suwayda differs from Arendt’s paradigm of fully formed totalitarian regimes. The system led by “the formerly Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” does not yet possess the instruments of a totalitarian state nor the bureaucratic organization of violence seen in the Nazi experience. Rather, it is a weak regime that seeks to compensate for its fragility by manufacturing a pliant public; in that sense it resembles late-stage tsarist Russia.
This public is fed a religious discourse that produces doctrinal certainty, strips minorities of their humanity, and legitimizes violence against them as a form of purifying action. Thus the violence against the Druze does not reflect the operation of a stable, all-powerful state, but a fragile authority that builds itself through normalization of violence and use of that violence as a mechanism for mobilization and identity formation—a process of constituting authority in the absence of a constitution. It is a primitive version of totalitarian logic in which the failure to build a state becomes a continual project of enemy-manufacture and legitimation of force through repeated mobilization of armed crowds.
For Arendt, the existence of an independent legal order means there is a political system capable of restraining and regulating violence within a legitimate framework so that force is used to protect the public sphere. Law is what separates legitimate power from arbitrary violence.
But when state institutions disintegrate or are turned into instruments of ideology, that distinction collapses: violence itself becomes the source of legitimacy and is presented as “direct justice” or “purification.” At that point, law no longer delineates permitted and forbidden acts; authority or the masses become the sole source of truth and moral standard.
In such conditions a pogrom becomes possible because violence is exercised in the name of the system-as-public, and law becomes a mere façade that legitimizes killing under the banner of public order. For Arendt the public sphere is the space where people meet as equal political actors, exchange opinions, and exercise free political action. When that space disappears, political action is rendered impossible: individuals become a mass directed by fear and creed; debate is replaced by violence, and citizenship by ideological or ethnic belonging. At that point violence becomes the only language of political existence because there is no law to protect difference and no public sphere to guarantee plurality.
Suwayda: A Laboratory for Manufacturing the Public
In the Suwayda events, we see the features of a pogrom repeat themselves: governmental and mass violence that rests on the collusion of authority and “society” against a politically disenfranchised group. What occurred was not a security breakdown or a local feud; it was the embodiment of the disintegration of politics itself, where the boundaries between law and violence melt and the masses are turned into instruments of power. In this sense, the “black week” in Suwayda represents a contemporary pogrom experiment, showing how an emergent sociopolitical structure can produce violence and deploy it to reshape society and engineer the political space on sectarian-exclusionary bases prior to the establishment of state institutions capable of monopolizing force and regulating arms according to local conditions and demands.
The black week against the Druze of Suwayda in July constituted a purgative formula: the Druze were racialized as a category burdened by a long history of demonizing discourse and framed in religious terms as “apostates” or, at best, “infidels.” Damascus’s authority implemented and sponsored the attacks via the Ministries of Defense and Interior and was aided voluntarily by tribal militias after months of incitement.
The economic and political crises in Syria, problems that the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham regime inherited from, and later exacerbated itself, cannot be solved by the limited tools of jihadi Salafism. Issues such as displacement, reconstruction, transitional justice, national unification, and the creation of a national identity lie outside the lexicon of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which speaks instead in terms of “kidnapping, securing towns, prisoner exchanges,” and similar terms.
Sectarian, systematic violence ensures the creation of a bloodthirsty audience eager to applaud the elimination of an imagined “internal enemy.” That audience helped commit atrocities and enforce financial blockades, carried out looting and pillage of Druze property under the guise of “faza‘at” (tribal mobilizations), calls to jihad, or the provisioning of fighters.
At Kristallnacht the public had already been conditioned by years of preparation: ordinary German citizens actively participated in looting Jewish property and burning it, humiliating detainees before their deportation to concentration camps.
In Suwayda’s black week, humans were looted too: Druze people, including children and women, were abducted while the “public” carried out a full desecration of places and people, energized by influencers in the online space who justified the violence and praised the slaughter.
The precise motive behind these pogroms—whether political revenge, religious animus, or sectarian intent—is secondary. Their primary aim is to unify the public by aligning elite rhetoric with the mob’s actions. The repeated use of pogroms is a selective process that manufactures a public to serve as a tool for combating internal enemies. In this sense a pogrom is the real laboratory for producing a public and encouraging it to cross the boundary between law and violence, beyond which there is no return.
