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Syrian nationalist political party

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) (Arabic: الحزب القومي السوري الإجتماعي) is a Syrian nationalist party operating in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. It advocates the establishment of a Greater Syrian nation state spanning the Fertile Crescent, including present day Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Cyprus, Sinai, Hatay Province, and Cilicia, based on geographical boundaries and the common history people within the boundaries share. It has also been active in the Syrian and Lebanese diaspora, for example in South America, and is the second largest political party in the pro Assad National Progressive Front – Syrian Ba'ath Party. Founded in Beirut in 1932 as an anticolonial political organization hostile to French colonial rule, the party played a significant role in Lebanese politics. It launched coups d'état attempts in 1949 and 1961, following which it was repressed in the country. SSNP was active in the fight against Israeli military during the 1982 Lebanon War and subsequent Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon until 2000, while simultaneously supporting the Syrian occupation of Lebanon due to its beliefs in Syrian irredentism. In Syria, SSNP operated as an ultranationalist movement until the 1950s; advocating armed uprising to establish a one party state. It participated in the 1949 Syrian coup d'etat, which overthrew the democratically elected government of Shukri al Quwatli. SSNP continued to engage in violent activities throughout the country; and was banned in 1955 after its assassination of a Syrian Ba'athist military officer Adnan al Malki. Despite its ban, the party remained organized, and by the late 1990s had allied itself with the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Lebanese Communist Party, despite the ideological differences between them. The SSNP was legalized in Syria in 2005, and joined the Syrian Ba'ath Party led National Progressive Front. From 2012 to 6 May 2014, the party was part of the Popular Front for Change and Liberation. The party would take the side of the Ba'athist government during the Syrian Civil War, where almost 12,000 fighters of its armed branch, the Eagles of the Whirlwind (dismantled in 2019), fought alongside the Syrian Armed Forces against the Syrian opposition and the Islamic State.

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. He belonged to the Nahda, thinkers influenced by the Arabic Literary Renaissance and the French Revolution 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 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. 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 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."

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. Most of the party's known activists remained in prison or exile until a general amnesty in 1969. 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. An SSNP member, Habib Shartouni, was arrested for the assassination and eventually convicted for it in 2017. 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.

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. 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.

Saadeh had intended SSNP to be an organization that created an Italian style Risorgimento which would bring about his project for "Greater Syria". The party promoted anti communist conspiratorial rhetoric and believed in the formation of an all encompassing, totalitarian state. Throughout the 1950s, the party acted as an ultranationalist entity which plotted violent insurrections and committed terrorist attacks, political assassinations, and other criminal acts. The Syrian Communist Party and Ba'ath Party were its principal rivals, both of which denounced SSNP as a Western backed Zionist project aimed at undermining Arab unity and aiding Western interests in the region. After the SSNP's assassination of a high ranking Syrian military officer and Arab nationalist, Adnan al Malki, in 1955, Syrian authorities banned the party and organized a witch hunt against its members under pressure from the Ba'ath and Communist parties. Throughout the 1950s, SSNP members were captured and put on trial, imprisoned, or killed, ending the party's status as a political force in the country. The SSNP remained an outlawed group in Syria for decades, with the party's image being tarnished by the Malki affair as well as its alignment with Western interests and anti Arab stances resented by the Syrian populace. The SSNP's stance during the Lebanese civil war and in Lebanese politics—where it has become a close ally of Hezbollah Its Syrian leader is Ali Haidar, who has been one of the two non Ba'ath party minister's in the Damascus government since 2012, as Minister of State for National Reconciliation Affairs.

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. Once the Syrian Civil War broke out, the government reciprocated, providing weaponry and training. 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". 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. 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. 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. In 2023, the SSNP announced their support for Hamas attack on Israel, congratulating Hamas for launching the offensive and asking for the Palestinian National Authority to join the fight. The SSNP further claimed that terrorism is a "tool for the Jewish people" rather than for Hamas.

In 1966 King Hussein had his security services sent into action to eradicate the SSNP from Jordan. The party had been active among the Palestinian population.

Scholars and analysts have debated how the SSNP's ideology should be described. For example, L'Orient Le Jour write that Saadeh's "national vision was based on belonging to one's geographical milieu, rather than one's race. His supporters insist that their leader chose the party's emblem long before he learned of Nazism." Saadeh was aware of accusations of fascism, and he responded to them during his speech of 1 June 1935:text=The system of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party is not a Hitlerite or a Fascist system, but that it is purely a Syrian system which does not stand on unprofitable imitation, but on basic originality which is one of the characteristics of our people.|author=Antun Saadeh|source=June 1935

Throughout the Second World War, Saadeh was rumoured to have close contacts with officials of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Some scholars have made comparisons of SSNP's ideological and organizational resemblances with European fascism, and of its external symbols to those of German Nazism, although these criticisms are not accepted by the party itself.

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. 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. 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. Similarly, the Kurds were criticized 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. 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. 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. 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".

The SSNP was organised with a hierarchical structure and a powerful leader. 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. a claim that the party vehemently denies. The party also accepted that due to "religious and political considerations", the separate existence of Lebanon was necessary for the time being. 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. 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." 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."