Walid Joumblatt (Druze leader; Progressive Socialist Party) — The National interview, 3 Apr 2025: urging reconciliation with the new Syria — "Give Ahmad Al Shara a chance… you are giving a chance to the Syrian people" (despite Syria's assassination of his father) — while firmly anti-normalization yet anti-war on Israel: "I'm not favouring and will never favour peace between us and Israel."

Give them a chance. Give Ahmad Al Shara a chance. Because when you give Ahmad Al Shara a chance, you are giving a chance to the Syrian people. I think he's an intelligent person, and he's clever. I'm just saying give Ahmad Al Shara a chance.

I'm not favouring and will never favour peace between us and Israel.

[Source is English (The National interview, 3 April 2025; Walid Joumblatt is fluent in English and gave the interview in English); tier-2, confirmed verbatim against the fetched page (apostrophe glyphs normalized). DATA NOTE: the dataset appears to contain a DUPLICATE person entry — "Walid Joumblatt" (this canonical seed record, ...000375) and a separate "Walid Jumblatt" record (random UUID) that already holds a document; they are the same person and should be merged.] Declared positions of Walid Joumblatt — the veteran leader of Lebanon's Druze community and the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), long famed as the great pragmatist ("weathervane") of Lebanese politics. After the fall of Bashar al-Assad (Dec 2024), Joumblatt — whose own father Kamal Jumblatt was assassinated by the Assad-era Syrian regime in 1977 — strikingly urged giving Syria's new Islamist-rooted leader Ahmad al-Sharaa a chance ("Give Ahmad Al Shara a chance… you are giving a chance to the Syrian people"), and argued that "Syria should stay united." On Israel he is firmly ANTI-NORMALIZATION — "I'm not favouring and will never favour peace between us and Israel" — yet pragmatically NON-BELLIGERENT, arguing Lebanon "cannot go back to the old situation whereby firing rockets could alter Israeli policy" and should keep "the state of armistice" (a pointed break with Hezbollah's rocket-resistance doctrine), while warning that Israel seeks to "dislocate the whole of the Arab world" and exploit the Druze to "fragment the region." This is the DRUZE PRAGMATIST / REALIST-CENTRIST pole — communal protection, Lebanese and Syrian sovereignty and unity, reconciliation with former enemies, anti-normalization-but-anti-war realism, and resistance to sectarian fragmentation — distinct from both Hezbollah's resistance axis (Mohammad Raad) and the Maronite sovereigntists (al-Rahi). [Axes: Israel-stance (anti-normalization but pro-armistice / non-belligerent; against rocket-war), foreign-alignment / Syria (reconciliation with the new Syria; Syrian unity), sovereignty / sectarianism (communal protection; anti-fragmentation; coexistence), regime-stance (pragmatic accommodation).]