Syrian Social Nationalist Party - Foundation and Early Years

Foundation and Early Years

The SSNP was founded by Antun Saadeh, a Lebanese Syrian nationalist philosopher from a Greek Orthodox family in the town of Dhour el Shweir. Saadeh had emigrated to South America in 1919 (via the USA where he stayed for about a year before continuing on to Brazil), at the age of fifteen, and in the years he lived there engaged in both Arabic-language journalism and Syrian nationalist political activity. On his return to Lebanon in 1930 he continued working as a journalist and also taught German in the American University of Beirut.

In November 1932 he secretly established the first nucleus of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, which operated underground for the first three years of its existence. In 1933 it started publishing a monthly journal called Al-Majalla which was distributed in the American University of Beirut. The articles written in that journal and the speeches given by Saadeh consolidated the ideological basis of the party, and contributed to its popularity.

Since its founding, the party endorsed an open hostility to colonialism and advocated national self-determination, which eventually led to its ban by French authorities and the incarceration of Saadeh in 1936. Saadeh was sent to trial in 1936 and spent six months in prison for creating a clandestine party. He was also accused in the trial of having been in contact with the fascist movements of Germany and Italy, but the charge was dropped as a letter was addressed from Germany denying any relationships. It is during his months in prison that Saadeh laid down the final ideological foundations of the party in The Genesis of Nations.

Saadeh emigrated again to Brazil in 1938 and afterwards to Argentina, only to return to Lebanon in 1947 following the country's independence from the French in 1943. By that time, the SSNP had grown exponentially and had clashed on many occasions with its primary ideological rival, the Kataeb Party.

While the latter was committed to the notion of Lebanon as a nation state defined as an entity presiding over the borders outlined first by the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, and afterwards by the French administrative division of its mandate into six states including the state of Greater Lebanon, the SSNP rejected this national claim on the basis that the borders outlining the newly-created states were fictitious, resulting from colonialism, and do not reflect any historical and social realities. The party claimed that Greater Syria as defined by Saadeh represents the national ideal encompassing the historical people of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, bound together by a clearly-defined geography and a common historical, social and cultural development path. Furthermore, and with the start of the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948, Saadeh radicalized the party's Anti-Zionist stance by declaring that "Our struggle with the enemy is not a struggle for borders but for existence".

On July 4, 1949, a year after the declaration of the establishment of the state of Israel and the Nakba, and a response to a series of aggressions perpetrated by the Kataeb-backed central government,the SSNP attempted its first revolution. Following a violent crackdown by government forces, Saadeh traveled to Damascus to meet with Husni al-Za'im in an attempt to obtain his support. Viewed as a radical agitator and threat to the newly-created Syrian state, Al-Za'im handed Saadeh over to Lebanese authorities, who had him executed on July 8, 1949. It was the shortest and most secretive trial given to a political offender.