Syrian Social Nationalist Party

Referring to Syria, Butrus al-Bustani adopted "Love of the Homeland is an article of Faith" as a slogan when he founded the periodical Al-Jinan in 1870

In the mid-nineteenth century Butrus al-Bustani was one of the first to assert the existence of a natural Syrian nation that should be accommodated in a reformed Ottoman Empire.[24] He belonged to the Nahda, thinkers influenced by the Arabic Literary Renaissance and the French Revolution[25] and who wished to shape the Tanzimat reforms, which were an attempt to introduce a constitutional monarchy with religious freedom to reverse the Ottoman state's creeping economic marginalisation[26] and which would lead to the Young Turks and the Second Constitutional Era.

An influential follower of al-Bustani was the Belgian Jesuit historian, Henri Lammens, ordained as a priest in Beirut in 1893, who claimed that Greater Syria had since ancient times encompassed all the land between the Arab peninsula, Egypt, the Levantine corridor and the Taurus Mountains, including all the peoples within the Fertile Crescent.[27]

"Syria is the Tunic of Christ" – Henri Lammens.

This was also accompanied with the rise of a profoundly idealistic patriotism, largely resembling European romantic nationalism, idealizing the coming of a National Revival to the Levant, that would shake off the Ottoman past and propel back what many started to see again as the cradle of civilization into the modern world's front stage. In that aspect, the works of Kahlil Gibran (the English name of Jubran Khalil Jubran) who began expressing his belief in Syrian nationalism and patriotism are central. As Gibran said,

"I believe in you, and I believe in your destiny. I believe that you are contributors to this new civilization. ... I believe that it is in you to be good citizens. And what is it to be a good citizen? ... It is to stand before the towers of New York and Washington, Chicago and San Francisco saying in your hearts, "I am the descendent of a people the built Damascus and Byblos, and Tyre and Sidon and Antioch, and I am here to build with you, and with a will."[28]

After Saadeh was executed and its high-ranking leaders were arrested, the party remained underground until 1958 when it sided with the pro-Western president Camille Chamoun against the Arab nationalist rebels.[36] This occurred right after the Party was accused of having plotted the assassination of Adnan al-Malki, a left-leaning Baath Party army officer in Syria, and after Party members had fled to Beirut. The Party at that time still viewed the Soviet Union with contempt, and opposed the Arab Nationalist current of Nasser, while retaining its commitment to Syrian Nationalism. Indeed, the idea of having Greater Syria subsumed under the creed of Arab Nationalism founded on the Arabic language, Arab and Islamic culture was abhorred by the SSNP, which retained its profound belief in Syrian social and anthropological historicism, namely the process of national and social association that characterizes the Fertile Crescent and that differentiates it from the Arabian Peninsula or North Africa.

On the last day of 1961, two SSNP members, company commanders in the Lebanese army, led an unsuccessful attempted lightning coup against Fouad Chehab, supported by some 200 civilian SSNP members.[37][33] In the scholarly literature, the coup has been explained as stemming from the party's ideological preference for violence ("bullets over ballots"), its frustration at exclusion from the Lebanese state, and both political and military criticism of the rule of Fouad Chehab.[33]

Advisors of Chehab who allegedly witnessed armed SSNP partisans gathering around the central areas of Beirut rushed to the presidential palace to inform Chehab of the insurrection. This resulted in a renewed proscription and the imprisonment and/or execution of many SSNP leaders.[38] Most of the party's known activists remained in prison or exile until a general amnesty in 1969.[37] In 1969, the party re-aligned towards Arab nationalism.[36]

Syrian Social Nationalist Party
Leaders	Inaam Raad, Abdallah Saadeh, Isaam Al Mahayri
Dates of operation	present
Group(s)	Lebanese National Movement (LNM), Lebanese National Resistance Front (LNRF), Front of Patriotic and National Parties (FPNP)
Headquarters	Hamra Street (Beirut), Amioun, (North Lebanon) Dhour El Choueir (Mount Lebanon)
Size	10,000 fighters
Allies	Lebanese National Resistance Front PLO Lebanese Communist Party Communist Action Organization in Lebanon Lebanese National Movement PFLP Progressive Socialist Party Syrian Army Hezbollah Amal Movement Al-Mourabitoun
Opponents	Lebanese Forces Tigers Militia Kataeb Party Guardians of the Cedars Israel Defense Forces South Lebanon Army Islamic Unification Movement Future Movement
Battles and wars	Lebanese civil war (1975–1990)

With the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, the SSNP formed a military squad that allied with the Lebanese National Movement (LNM), against the Phalangists and their allies of the Lebanese Front. The SSNP saw the Lebanese Civil War as the inevitable result of the divisions of the Syrian nation into small states and away from a liberation war against Israel. In the mid-1970s, there were tensions within the party between "a reformist branch close to the Palestinian factions and another more inclined toward Damascus"; it reunified in 1978.[36]

After the defeat of anti-Israeli forces in the 1982 Lebanon War, the SSNP joined a number of the organizations who regrouped to resist the Israeli occupation, including the killing of two Israeli soldiers in a Wimpy Cafe in west Beirut by party member Khalid Alwan. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation blames the SSNP for the assassination, in 1982, of Bachir Gemayel, Lebanon's newly elected president supported by the Israelis besieging Beirut.[39] An SSNP member, Habib Shartouni, was arrested for the assassination and eventually convicted for it in 2017.[40]

In 1983 the party joined the Lebanese National Salvation Front. In 1985, a member of the party, Sana'a Mehaidli, detonated a car bomb next to an Israeli military convoy at Jezzin, South Lebanon. She killed two Israeli soldiers and become one of the first known female suicide bombers.[41]

The SSNP in Lebanon was broadly supportive of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and was allied to pro-Syrian parties (including the March 8 Alliance) in the aftermath of the occupation.

The SSNP participated in a number of general elections in Lebanon, winning six seats in 1992, although seeing a decline in subsequent elections winning two seats in both 2005 and 2009. The SSNP were involved in the 2008 conflict in Lebanon, with gunmen attacking an SSNP office.[42][43][44][45][46]

Assaad Hardan was party leader for two terms. Hardan was succeeded by Rabih Banat in 2020, but with a growing split in the party between Hardan's followers, who are closer to the Syrian government and the March 8 Alliance, and Banat's followers, who are closer to the administration of Saad Hariri.[36] As of the 2022 Lebanese elections, the party did not win any seat and currently has no representation in the Lebanese Parliament.

L'orient Today reported in 2021 that the Syrian uprising/civil war "was an opportunity for the SSNP to take on a new dimension". According to Syrian analyst Samir Akil, SSNP cadres mostly came from the Christian, Alawite, and Shi'ite communities, posing a direct threat to the Assad regime, which was seeking to monopolise control over minorities by the Arab Socialist Ba'ath party.[36] During the Syrian revolution protests, the SSNP participated in counter-demonstrations in support of the government.[51] Once the Syrian Civil War broke out, the government reciprocated, providing weaponry and training.[23] In the meantime, SSNP officials had become a target for rebel militants and were kidnapped and assassinated.[51] Bashar al-Yazigi, head of the political SSNP bureau in Syria, stated that the "opposition is seeking to create sharp sectarian rifts and fragment Syrian society",[51] with the party regarding both the ongoing Syrian Civil War and the Iraq War as attempts to partition those countries—and, eventually, Lebanon—along ethno-sectarian lines.[23]

In 2016, estimates of the number of SSNP fighters in Syria ranged from 6,000 to 8,000.[23] Lebanese fighters were included in their ranks, even though the party claims that "their proportion within the group's total fighting force has decreased steadily, as more Syrians sign up".[23]

By February 2014, SSNP fighters were primarily deployed in the governorates of Homs and Damascus and were said to be the most formidable military force other than the Syrian army in Suwayda.[51] SSNP fighters have participated in the battles of Sadad, of Ma'loula, and of al-Qaryatayn, among others.[51][52] In 2016, party officials claimed that its membership had increased "by the thousands" since the start of the war as a result of its alleged "reputation as an effective fighting force in Syria".[23]

The party was allowed a larger role in the Syrian People's Assembly: it fielded thirty candidates for the 2016 parliamentary election, winning seven seats.[23]

However, starting from 2018, these gains began to be reversed, as Bashar al-Assad initiated an intense Ba'athification programme in regime-held territories, which sought the stronger amalgamation of the Ba'athist-state nexus and the tightening of the grip of the state. As part of its attempts to strengthen the one-party state, the Ba'ath party has also cemented its monopoly over military forces, student activism, trade unions, youth organizations, and other social associations.[53] The new campaign also purged those Ba'ath cadres deemed insufficiently loyal from all levels of party organizations and promoted the re-structuring of Syrian society along the lines of Ba'athist ideology, characterized by absolute loyalty to the Assad dynasty, which is portrayed as the founding fathers of the Syrian state.[54][55]

The SSNP was one of the biggest losers in the 2020 Syrian parliamentary elections, with its allotted seats being reduced from seven to three. The elections showcased the absolute dominance of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath party in the political system by increasing the Ba'athist share to two-thirds of the total, or 167 seats. This was also part of the Assad regime's wider clampdown on SSNP activities to curb its influence in Syria that was gained during the civil war. The Ba'athist government also dissolved the Eagles of the Whirlwind, the SSNP's paramilitary wing in the country.[56]

The anti-SSNP clampdown was also part of Bashar al-Assad's feud with his cousin Rami Makhlouf, who headed the SSNP (Amana) faction and was widely reviled as a symbol of corruption in the regime. Bashar al-Assad had banned the SSNP (Amana) faction on 10 October 2019 and ordered the confiscation of his cousin's business assets. Makhlouf's private militias, which fought alongside the Syrian military, were also disbanded by the government. SSNP leaders criticized their sidelining in the 2020 parliamentary elections as a betrayal, with many party cadres viewing the authoritarian measures of the government with dismay.[57][58][59]

In 2023, the SSNP announced their support for Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, congratulating Hamas for launching the offensive and asking for the Palestinian National Authority to join the fight.[60] The SSNP further claimed that terrorism is a "tool for the Jewish people" rather than for Hamas.[61]

While in jail from early February to early May 1936, Saadeh completed The Genesis of Nations which he had started writing three months before the French authorities in Lebanon discovered the secret organization and arrested its leader and his assistants. In his book, Saadeh formulated his belief in the existence of a Syrian nation in a homeland defined as embracing all historic Syria extended to the Suez Canal in the south, and that includes modern Syria, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait. The boundaries of the historic environment in which the Syrian nation evolved went much beyond the scope usually ascribed to Syria, extending from the Taurus range in the north-east and the Zagros mountains in the north-west to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the south and includes the Sinai peninsula and the Gulf of Aqaba, and from the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including the island of Cyprus, to the arch of the Arabian desert and the Persian Gulf in the east.[31] According to Saadeh, this region is also called the Syrian Fertile Crescent, the island Cyprus being its star.[71]

Greater Syria corresponds to the Mesopotamian basin of Bilad al-Sham before it was arbitrarily dissected by the colonial powers. According to Saadeh, geographical factors play an important role in setting the parameters for the process of association and thus for the establishment of a nation. He held that the process of human evolution from hunter-gatherer to settled agriculture was among the most important factors that led to the creation of private property and the class system. Saadeh highlighted the role that the class system played in the flourishing of trade and commerce and the creation of wealth, ascribing it to be a characteristic of the Semitic peoples, namely the coastal Phoenicians. He also stressed the link between the economic modes of production and the establishment of cultural norms and values, a view he shared with Karl Marx.

However, Saadeh believed that while the economic modes of production can create culture, culture acquires a life of its own with time and eventually becomes embedded and perpetuated in its people, who come to recognize themselves as a living organism. Hence comes the importance of the state in serving the interest of the nation, and of national democracy as the legitimate source of political legislation. The party espouses the idea that the fundamental basis of nation is the territory or geographical region, not the ethnical bond. The natural environment and geographical specifications of a certain land is what eventually allows, or disallows, its transition from a socio-economic phase to another.

SSNP members at Saadeh's return from exile in 1947

These natural geographical factors hence create the societal framework in which man establishes his existence, beliefs, habits, and value systems. Saadeh's critique of ethnic nationalisms led him to hence develop a framework of geographical nationalism, the idea of the "natural homeland". When he applied this model to the case of the Fertile Crescent, the conclusion he reached was straightforward: the natural geographical factors of the basin lying east of the Mediterranean is what has allowed it to become the cradle of civilizations, what has driven throughout the course of human history movements seeking to unify it, what has allowed it to establish, through ethnic, religious and cultural assimilation and mixing, a high culture and civilization, and what has made it the prize coveted by all imperialist powers. Saadeh advocated for all ethnoreligious groups to consider themselves as descendants of the pre-Christian era empires of Babylon and Assyria, of the Hittites and the kings of Aram, then of the Islamic empires, all the way up until the present.[37] The SSNP claimed that the Greater Syria is the natural home of the Syrian people with clearly defined geographic boundaries, yet that its people are suffering from what Saadeh described as a "woe" (al-wail) owing to an identity crisis due to Ottoman occupation, colonialism, and sectarianism. Saadeh claimed that the renaissance of the Syrian nation is inevitably linked to the purge of these "decadent" forces through the reinforcing of national solidarity, resistance against colonialism, and adoption of secularism.

In Saadeh's vision of "harmony" among the country's ethnic and religious communities through a return to a so-called Syrian "racial unity" which was itself in fact a mixture of races, neither Islam nor pan-Arabism was important, and therefore religion wasn't either.[37] Saadeh's concept of the nation was shaped mainly by historical concrete interactions amongst people over the centuries in a given geography, rather than being based on ethnic origins, race, language or religion. This led him also to conclude that the Arabs could not form one nation, but many nations could be called Arab.[19]

Unlike other militant nationalist parties in the Arab World, Syrian Social Nationalist Party was unique in its espousal of an exclusive form of nationalism modelled after European fascist trends, which glorified the pre-Christian era of Pheonicians. While SSNP advocated the union of all Syrian peoples under a "Greater Syria", it also espoused racist doctrines which excluded Jews from the Syrian nation. Although the party admitted Arab Muslims into its ranks, it denied Jews any membership in its organizations, even if they were opposed to Zionism.[66]

The attitude of the party and its founder towards minority separatism and movements calling for ethnically-separate homelands was one of outright hostility. Saadeh was also hostile to all religiously-motivated political movements, or movements that did not call for the separation between Church (or Mosque) and State. The incoming Jewish migrants to Southern Syria (Palestine) and the Jewish communities were criticized for their "foreign and racial loyalties", their unwillingness to assimilate, and their active willingness to create an ethnically Jewish state in Palestine, with Saadeh deeming the Jews as the community unable and unwilling to assimilate, and having criticized the notion that Jewishness can be a cornerstone for a nation-state. For the SSNP, the Jews do not constitute a nation as they are a heterogeneous mixture of peoples in a similar sense that Muslims and Christians do not constitute a nation.[72] Similarly, the Kurds were attacked for their communitarianism and their disposition to establish a Kurdish state in the north.

While the Renaissance is underlined as a romanticized notion of spiritual, intellectual, and patriotic elevation, the SSNP elaborated a simple yet straightforward doctrine pertaining to how the Syrian People ought to organize itself once the Renaissance has begun, albeit the fact that Saadeh had not developed the idea completely. The social-nationalist model elaborated by Saadeh is reflected in the "Communiqué of the First Social Nationalist Revolution of 1949".

The first of these principles is the abolition of feudalism and of the rule of the traditional notables and landowners, which the Party deems responsible for the "desolate state of things to which the country had gotten to", including maintaining educational levels at an all-time low and being instrumental in the loss of Palestine. The second principle is "opposing capitalist tyranny". Despite its belief in the necessity of private property, the SSNP declared defending workers' rights and establishing a framework that guarantees these rights as an inalienable right. This is coupled with the need to establish mandatory education, universal healthcare, the nationalization of vital areas of the economy such as the production of raw materials, and a strong centralized state that is able to give economic directions. The third principle stated is combating communism.

Perhaps one of the most striking features of the Party throughout its history is the zealous and the almost mystical devotion of its members to the notion of liberation war. Most Party members have historically conducted military, guerrilla, and assassination operations. Saadeh himself had a very revolutionary view of life and death, whereas the Renaissance and the "New Generation" would not see the light of day without sacrifice: "we love life because we love freedom, and we love death when death is a path to life" is among the few quotes of Saadeh which the SSNP reveres.

Since its foundation in 1932, the SSNP adopted direct action and violence against those it deemed as the enemies of the Syrian People, to which it referred to as the "forces of darkness", while the founder referred to the Party as the "Sons of Life" (Abna` al-Hayat): Colonialism and particularly French colonialism in Syria and Lebanon, the feudal landowning and notable class, politicians it deemed to be traitors or corrupt, Zionist settlement of Palestine, Christian separatism in Lebanon, Islamic fundamentalism in Syria, a list to which could be added the communists, although this last addition would change in the course of the years as both would join ranks in the LNRF.

The flag of the Lebanese National Resistance Front, a coalition of armed groups that assembled to fight off the Israeli invasion of Lebanon

In 1949, it declared the "First Renaissance Revolution" against the Lebanese government, an armed confrontation with the Lebanese and Syrian security forces that ended in a disaster and the execution of Antun Saadeh by the Lebanese authorities on 8 July. Not too long later, party members assassinated the Lebanese Prime Minister Riad al-Solh who was instrumental in Saadeh's death penalty. To avoid being caught, the assailants committed suicide. When one of the assailants survived and woke up in the hospital, he completed his suicide attempt by tearing up his wounds and falling from the bed. The assassination of the general prosecutor who judged Saadeh was also conducted by a Party cell, and Party members are believed to have been involved in the assassination of Husni al-Zaim, the Syrian dictator who captured Saadeh and handed him over to the Lebanese authorities.[73]

In 1982, party member Habib al-Shartouni assassinated the Lebanese President Bachir Gemayel, seen as betraying the country in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.[36] The party also undertook many operations against Israeli presence in Lebanon, including a military operation in broad daylight against Israeli officers stationed in Beirut, which triggered the beginning of the generalized armed struggle for Lebanese liberation. Party member Sana'a Mehaidli, known as the first female suicide bomber, detonated herself in her car along with an Israeli convoy in south Lebanon.[74] The party joined arms with the Communists, the PLO, the Arab nationalists, and other groups to fight against the Israeli invasion – see Lebanese National Movement/Lebanese National Resistance Front.

Today, the party's military wing fights alongside the Syrian Arab Army against the Free Syrian Army and ISIS in the Syrian Civil War. Journalist Terry Glavin write in 2015 that it "lavishly indulges a habit of suicide-bombing and assassination" and runs "death squads on behalf of its patron ... Bashar Al-Assad, mostly in the vicinity of Homs and the suburbs of Damascus".[50]

The SSNP's ideology was an entirely secular form of nationalism; indeed, it posited the complete separation of religion and politics as one of the two fundamental conditions for real national unity, alongside economic and social reform.[75]

The SSNP was organised with a hierarchical structure and a powerful leader.[75]

The party's emblem is the whirlwind (in Arabic Zawba'a, زوبعة). It was designed by the SSNP students at the American University of Beirut while the party was still clandestine and before the French authorities had uncovered it in 1936. Saadeh stated the whirlwind was found engraved on ancient Syrian artifacts, and it is known from for example Sumerian art. The SSNP emblem has been said to be a combination of the Islamic crescent and the Christian cross.[76][77] The party flag features a red hurricane, called the Zawba'a, within a white disc on a black background. Each arm symbolizes one of the four virtues of the party's mission: freedom, duty, discipline and power.[2]^: 45 According to SSNP lore, the black color symbolizes the Dark Ages of Ottoman rule, colonialism, sectarian division, national division, and backwardness. The Zawba'a allegedly represents the blood of the SSNP martyrs bound together as Muslims and Christians through freedom, duty, discipline and power as a hurricane to purge the Dark Ages and spark their nation's rejuvenation and renaissance. Critics and many scholars claim that the symbol was modeled after the Nazi swastika[67][68][69][78][79][80] a claim that the party denies.[23]

Arab nationalist thinker Sati' al-Husri considered that Saadeh "misrepresented" Arab nationalism, incorrectly associating it with a Bedouin image of the Arab and with Muslim sectarianism. Palestinian historian Maher Charif sees Saadeh's theory as a response to the religious diversity of Syria, and points to his later extension of his vision of the Syrian nation to include Iraq, a country also noted for its religious diversity, as further evidence for this.[81] The party also accepted that due to "religious and political considerations", the separate existence of Lebanon was necessary for the time being.[75] From 1945 onward, the party adopted a more nuanced stance regarding Arab nationalism, seeing Syrian unity as a potential first step towards an Arab union led by Syria.[75]

Anglo-American journalist Christopher Hitchens and his team were assaulted in February 2009 by SSNP paramilitaries in the streets of Beirut before being rescued by a crowd. The attack left Hitchens with body injuries and a limp in his leg.[82] Reporting to Vanity Fair in May 2009, Hitchens described SSNP as a "suicide-bomber front" that carries out terrorist operations in Lebanon on behalf of Ba'athist Syria. He asserted that SSNP was a violent fascist movement; noting its irredentist ambitions of creating "Greater Syria", a project that sought the annexation or partial conquest of numerous nation-states in the region.[83] Recounting the events of the assault, Hitchens stated:

"What shook me is how nearly it could have got fantastically nasty. We could have been hurt or taken away. These militias have their own private dungeons. I wouldn't fancy spending time in one of those."[82]

Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi gives a somewhat contrasting interpretation, pointing to the position of the Greek Orthodox community as a large minority in both Syria and Lebanon for whom "the concept of pan-Syrianism was more meaningful than the concept of Arabism" while at the same time they resented Maronite dominance in Lebanon. According to Salibi,

Saadeh found a ready following among his co-religionists. His idea of secular pan-Syrianism also proved attractive to many Druzes and Shiites; to Christians other than the Greek Orthodox, including some Maronites who were disaffected by both Lebanism and Arabism; and also to many Sunnite Muslims who set a high value on secularism, and who felt that they had far more in common with their fellow Syrians of whatever religion or denomination than with fellow Sunnite or Muslim Arabs elsewhere. Here again, an idea of nationalism had emerged which had sufficient credit to make it valid. In the Lebanese context, however, it became ready cover for something more archaic, which was essentially Greek Orthodox particularism.[84]

Prof. Salibi remarks on the beginnings of Saadeh's party in the 1930s: "[A]mong its first members were students and young graduates of the American University of Beirut." This early party was "mainly Greek Orthodox and Protestants with some Shi'ites and Druzes ... ." In Lebanon as a whole the party was not popular. "Christians were generally opposed to their Syrian unionism, while Moslems were suspicious of their reservations with regard to pan-Arabism. The Lebanese authorities were able to suppress them without difficulty."[85]

Sidney Glazer attributed the failure of Saadeh's ideological project to its abnormality, which clashed with the culture and psychology of the people in the region. According to Glazer:

"Sa'adih's doctrines were explicitly anti-Islamic, if not antireligious, anti-Arab, and antidemocratic—in an area with a predominantly Muslim population strongly in favor of Arab unity and traditionally inclined to individual freedom! It is easy to see why the totalitarian Syrian Social Nationalist party, despite powerful internal organization and militancy, would fail."[49]