“I want to thank my mother who taught me that freedom is mightier than our prisons.” - Ahmad Faraj Birqdar #PanArabism #Marxism #Zionism #SyrianNationalism #SSNP #Palestine1948 #Baathism #MuslimBrotherhood Syria has historically been the heart of the Arab nationalist struggle against Zionism, and all other forms of European subjugation of the Arab peoples. Modern Arab nationalism emerged in Syria in early 20th century. It was during the 1950’s that the Pan-Arab socialist Ba’ath Party began to win more and more seats in the Syrian parliament and it allied itself with the military in order to improve its political power. Both the Ba’ath Party in Syria and the Free Officers Movement in Egypt were based on rejecting anything Western and European. This was exacerbated by the Nakba in 1948; the ethnic cleansing of Palestine at the hands of Jewish European colonizers, the establishment of Israel, and the Arab armies’ humiliating defeat at the hands of the Jewish State. A tidal wave of anti-imperialist, anti-Israel, and pro-Pan-Arab socialist dogma overcame the entire region. Now the Syrians were threatened by an alliance between the Jewish state, Jordan, Turkey, and Britain. The Syrian nationalists wanted to keep their republic sovereign at first, but this changed in the 1930’s as the wave of Pan-Arabism hit the region and the Syrians sought Iraqi support against the French colonial authorities during this decade. Syrian nationalism, and a desire to unify with Iraq, was a reaction to French exploitation and brutality. When the Syrians shook off their pro-Iraqi sentiments they saw themselves as victims of Arab imperialism, a plot that had been spearheaded by the Fertile Crescent campaign devised by Iraqi leaders. This is the eternal struggle of Syrian Ba’athist thought; what is Arab solidarity and what is Arab imperialism? Michel Aflaq, a Syrian Christian from Damascus and the chief ideologue of Ba’athism, was a student in France during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Michel Aflaq and his close friend Salah al Bitar, a wealthy Sunni Muslim from Damascus and the future co-founder of the Ba’ath Party, were capitvated by Marxism. It was the French Communists whom both Aflaq and Bitar developed an interest in because they were outspoken advocates for the cause of Syrian independence. Aflaq expressed a staunch dislike for Nazism while working on the editorial committee of a Communist daily paper known as Al Talia. This paper published such editorials as “The Nazi Brutes Murder Their Adversaries” in 1935 and “Everyday Racism Under Hitler” in 1936. In 1941 he became a writer for Al Tariq, the daily paper that was published by the League to Combat Fascism and Nazism. Both Syrian and Lebanese Communists created this organization. It was through Aflaq’s writing for this particular Communist paper that two future Ba’athist politicians, Sami al Jundi and Jalal al Sayyid, came to know him. In 1941 Michel Aflaq published an essay that offered a warning about the “nationalism that comes to us from Europe.” His writing laid out the differences between Ba’athist socialism and Germany’s National Socialism. Aflaq rejected both Germany and Italy’s fascism on a theoretical level because they were “based on the ideal of racial supremacy and discrimination between nations.” The alleged right of one specific race of people to dominate the world went complete against his values. So did the concept of legalized discrimination between different individuals belonging to the same nation. Aflaq described European fascism as being “bent on expansionism and colonialism,” thus he rejected it on practical grounds as well. Article 11 of the 1947 Ba’ath Constitution states, “Anyone who advocates creating an anti-Arab racist bloc or joins one, as well as anyone who has immigrated to the Arab fatherland with colonialist aims, shall be expelled.” This was added to the constitution with Palestine in mind. The disastrous Partition Plan was to be manifested by the United Nations that same year. Zaki al Arsuzi, an Alawite from Lattakia, created his own Communist group separate from and independent of Aflaq’s organization; the Arab Ba’ath. It was Arsuzi, not Aflaq, who first used the term ba’ath and although he believed in a doctrine of racial superiority it was a complete opposite of what Nazism stood for. Arsuzi believed that the Semitic peoples, including non-Arab Jews, were biologically superior to the Germans. In an essay written in 1938, Arsuzi declared, “As for the Jews, my opinion is that Arabs and Jews should come to an understanding in this world and cooperate in order to re-establish the Arabs’ glory and realize the Semitic genius, which is the Judeo-Arab genius.”He took nationalistic, not antisemitic, inspiration from the doctrines of racial superiority within the Nazi movement. Sami al Jundi was not comfortable with this in the slightest and neither was Jalal al Sayyid who took a strong disliking to Arsuzi’s “categorizing people as slaves or masters.” Arsuzi was to be excluded from the beginnings of the Ba’ath Party in 1939. Jalal al Sayyid worked with Aflaq and Bitar to found the nucleus of what was to become the Ba’ath Party and by 1944 Arsuzi’s group had broken up. Most of his followers joined Aflaq and Bitar the following year. Sami al Jundi stuck with Arsuzi until 1946. He too succumbed to the call of the Ba’ath Party following Syria’s independence. Those who are looking for an Arab reincarnation of German Nazism need look no further than Antun Saadeh. A Lebanese Christian, he founded the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP) in 1932. He was an unabashed Germanophile and made no secret of his admiration for Hitler while teaching German at the American University of Beirut. The expansionist polices of Nazi Germany touched him the most. The “Syrian” in SSNP refers to the idea of a Greater Syria on steroids; it would encapsulate the lands of Palestine, the Sinai, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and the island of Cyprus along with modern-day Syria. Saadeh’s organization is a literal copy of the German NSAP, including doctrines of racist pseudo-science, a personality cult, and a Swastika-like flag. Saadeh’s ideology was made up of a very severe Christian sectarian fanaticism going so far off the rails as to separate Syrians from Arabs. It was Saadeh who came up with the racist notion that the Mediterranean Syrian civilization and culture was superior to not just African Arabs but to all Muslim Arabs. This far-right political party is what German government officials in Berlin circa 1935 proudly proclaimed to be the Syrische Volkspartei; the Syrian People’s Party. Being an ultra-nationalist Christian, Saadeh believed antisemitism to be an intractable aspect of Christian identity. Not only did he fully believe the myth that the Jews killed Jesus, but he also believed that Islam and Judaism were inferior to Christianity on an equal level. In the fall of 1935, three years after secretly founding the SSNP, he was arrested and sentenced to six years in jail. It would not be the first time his extremist, sectarian politics sent him behind prison walls. In 1943, while living in Argentina, the French colonial authorities sentenced him in absentia to two decades imprisonment. Simultaneously, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria paralleled the rise of Ba’athist thought and they both have had a place in Syria since the 1930’s. The ideas of Hassan al Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, made their way to Syria through the young Syrian graduates of Cairo University. Mustafa al Siba’i, the dean of the Faculty of Islamic Jurisprudence and the School of Law at the University of Damascus, became the leader of the Syrian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1945. In 1941 he established a religious paramilitary group based on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood; Shabab Mohammad. It was part of the National Bloc and worked to resist the French occupation. Women’s involvement in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood goes back to the 1950’s. A young activist named Amina Sheikha met Mustapha al Sibai and then organized a Syrian Sisterhood that worked to recruit women. The Syrian Sisters had a leading role in the organization the Muslim Brotherhood’s decision-making circles. It was the brutal state repression that would come later in the the 1970’s and early 1980’s that delayed their rise to power. The newly independent Syria, dominated by big, Sunni, land owning families and its successive governments were to be deposed through several military coups. As a result of the subsequent instability political life was dominated by Arab nationalism, the Syrian Communist Party, and Islamic fundamentalism. In the 1930’s the Palestinian struggle for liberation was radicalized alongside the Syrian campaign for independence. Sheikh Izz ul Din al Qassam, a Sunni Syrian Imam from Jableh village who had studied Islamic theology in Cairo, organized and lead an armed resistance in Palestine 1935. He had previously lead military exploits against both the French occupiers and their Alawite collaborators before being exiled to the Palestinian coastal city of Haifa in 1921. His militia carried out attacks on the European colonizers for several years before choosing death rather then surrender in the fall of 1935. Qassam and thirteen of his followers met their fate in a similar fashion to Yusuf al Azmah at Mayasalon in 1920. In 1936 a representative from the Jewish Agency for Palestine met with one of the leaders of the National Bloc in Syria; Fakhri al Barudi. The National Bloc had solidified itself as a liberal, Westernizing body working towards Syria’s independence while simultaneously stopping others from crossing the border and joining Qassam’s resistance. One year after Syria’s independence came the UN Partition Plan for Palestine and Syria was one of the members of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). Syria and the other Arab states proposed a resolution to the conflict in the fall of 1947 and the Arab states pointed out that almost 300,000 European Jewish immigrants had already been admitted to Palestine between 1933 and 1946 compared to only 65,000 to the United Kingdom and about 200,000 to the United States. Rather than legalize the theft of Palestinian land and turn someone else’s tiny country into one large Jewish refugee camp, the Arabs states made recommendations through UNSCOP and they were submitted to the General Assembly in November of 1947. Their recommendations were not adopted. UN General Assembly Resolution 181 allowed 52% of Palestine to be given to the Jewish non-Arab minority, and 45% of Palestine was given to the indigenous Arab Palestinian majority, even though there were 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs living in this country at the time. Both the Palestinian capital, Jerusalem, and the Palestinian city of Bethlehem were placed under international control. Before the Partition Plan of 1947 European Jewish settlers in Palestine owned only 6% of the land. This institutionalized racism on behalf of the colonialist British powers turned 50% of the indigenous Arab majority into a subjugated minority overnight. Menachem Begin led a terrorist group called the Irgun, and Yitzhak Shamir, the head of another Zionist terrorist organization known as the Stern Group, were wanted a little more. In March of 1948 Jewish Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion oversaw a plan to ethnically cleanse the Jewish half of Palestine with a campaign of terror that would drive out as many Palestinians as possible; Plan Dalet. Villages were incinerated, blown up, encircled and shot to pieces. Every Palestinian village that was reachable was to be either militarily occupied or burnt to the ground. The Palestinian civilians were to be either massacred or chased out. The Palestinians did not have any major weaponry or military personnel, but the European Jewish terrorist groups certainly did. According to multiple Haganah historians all Palestinian villages within the 1947 Partition line that that resisted Jewish demands were to to “be destroyed ... and their inhabitants expelled beyond the borders of the Jewish state,” and Palestinian residents of urban quarters which dominate access to or egress from the towns should be expelled beyond the borders of the Jewish state in the event of their resistance.” The Palestinian people literally had to create something out of nothing in terms of self-defense. The Arab Liberation Army was set up by the Arab League comprised of 6,000 Syrian volunteers and was led by Fawzi al Qawuqji. The Arab League Military Committee’s headquarters were in Damascus. Fawzi al Qawuqji was a Turkoman from a Syrian-Lebanese family residing in Tripoli and he became the leading military figure of Arab nationalism in the interwar period. He served in the Ottoman military during World War I, supported Sherif’s short-lived monarchy in Damascus in 1920, fought in and survived the suicidal Battle of Mayasulun, and then joined the Great Syrian Revolt in 1925. He lead the uprising in Hama against the French occupation forces and the heavy French aerial bombardment of Hama the day after Fawzi helped to liberated the city killed 344 Syrian people, 355 were arrested, 144 homes were destroyed, and Fawzi was sentenced to death in absentia by the French colonial authorities. Fawzi al Qawuqji evaded capture and made his way to Palestine where he helped to led militias against the Jewish European colonizers during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. Syria had 12,000 soldiers at the beginning of the 1948 war and the Syrian Air Force had fifty planes, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to the weaponry and scorched earth tactics unleashed by the Jewish Zionist militias. The colonizers wanted see their Jewish state be grounded in European, rather than Arab, culture. This is not a Zionism that says Jews belong to the Near East. Rather, it proclaims that the Near East belongs to the Jews. The Arab armies of the Middle East, including Syria, were worthless compared to the Jewish colonialist paramilitary organizations. 6,000 Jewish combatants and 15,000 Arab combatants died in the first Arab-Israeli War. No official Palestinian state was created on the 22% of the land that the Zionists had not gotten their hands on. By 1949 roughly 500 Palestinian villages and towns were ethnically cleansed and/or destroyed and roughly 750,000-800,000 Palestinian people were dispossessed of their homes. Immediately after the premeditated ethnic cleansing and the announcement of Israel’s statehood in 1948 the Palestinians who had fled in terror were labeled as “absentee landlords” by the Israeli government and their properties were confiscated. The end result was the birth of an ethnocentric Jewish nation-state in which the majority of the native people, who had populated this country for generations, were transformed overnight into stateless, defenseless, and traumatized refugees. Then began the military strategy for taking over the areas that the imperial British authorities had left behind. This included areas like Galilee, Jaffa, Acre, bits of Jerusalem, Lydda, Ramla, and Haifa. Not only did the Jewish colonizers move into the formerly British outposts, but they also placed Jewish refugees directly into the homes of the Arab people who had fled in terror. Hot coffee and food belonging to Palestinian families were still on the table when European Jewish refugees were placed into these homes. Holocaust survivors made up one-third of the Jews who fought in 1948 and took part in the ethnic cleansing. Al Nakba (the catastrophe) refers to both the terror campaign of ethnic cleansing and the refusal of the Jewish state to allow the Palestinian refugees to return home. They were expulsed from 78% of their country. The Syrian government’s policy in Palestine was disastrous. Arab leaders wished they could defeat the Zionists and preserve Palestine, but they did not believe it was possible. From 1946 onwards every Syrian newspaper warned that the country would have to go to war to protect the Palestinians and the Syrian people demanded that their government arm the country. Shukri al Quwwatli, the first president of an independent Syria, as early as 1946 felt that Syria could not save Palestine. Quwwatli’s main concern for his newly independent country was to keep the Hashemites at bay, especially his Jordanian rival for power King Abdullah I of Jordan. Abdullah and his forces moved to Jordan following the fall of Damascus and the defeat at Mayasalon in 1920. It was Winston Churchil who struck a deal with Abdullah, asking him for his continued support of British policy. Abdullah agreed and was rewarded handsomely; the British created a protectorate for him and this was to become the state of Jordan. In the spring of 1946 his powerful British friends made sure he was crowned King. Abdullah was of an imperialist mindset; he dreamed of ruling a Greater Syria that encompassed not only Syrian territory, but also Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine. The newly independent people of Syria and Lebanon weren’t too comfortable with this expansionist monarchy who was allied to the British and wanted to impose himself upon them. Quwwatli lived in constant anxiety that King Abdullah would invade Syria and kill Syrian independence just as soon as it had been born. Syrian lands had been divided by the European powers at the end of WWI and King Abdullah wanted them all back and all under his thumb. President Quwwatli’s biggest concern was to stop this expansionist Hashemite plan before even considering offering any major military support to Palestine. The war against Zionism was placed on the back burner. Shukri al Quwwatli’s own army was very small and certainly not capable of defending Palestine and warding off the British-backed Jordanian military at the same time. After the heartbreaking defeat in Palestine the Syrian press and Parliament immediately blamed the government and its failure to adequately prepare the Syrian military. The Syrian commanders of the Arab Liberation Army returned to their positions in the Syrian army in 1949 and they were all nourishing their resentment towards the corrupt political order that had sent them on a mission that was doomed from the start and had lost Palestine in the process. Constantin Zureiq, a prominent Damascene Syrian Christian academic and pioneer of Arab nationalist thought, was the first use the term Nakba, writing; “The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is no simple catastrophe nor an insignificant, fleeting evil, but a catastrophe in the full sense of the word, an ordeal more severe than any suffered by the Arabs in their long history of ordeals and tragedies.” He strongly felt that rationalist intellectualism is what could save the Arab people from their ongoing humiliation and defeat at the hands of European imperialsts. Constantin believed in the power of a secular democracy while simultaneously sanctifying the importance of the Prophet’s message to humanity. To him the connection was obvious; when Islam flourished and prospered so did Arab civilization. This was his “revolution of reason.” As for the inability of the Arab peoples to prevent the immense trauma that was the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, Constantin wrote the following; “Seven Arab states declare war on Zionism in Palestine, stop impotent before it, and turn on their heels. The representatives of the Arabs deliver fiery speeches in the highest international forums, warning what the Arab state and peoples will do if this or that decision be enacted. Declarations fall like bombs from the mouths of officials at the meetings of the Arab League, but when action becomes necessary, the fire is still and quiet and steel and iron are rusted and twisted, quick to bend and disintegrate.” The shame and despair brought on by the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and subsequent defeat in 1948 opened the door to future instability and trauma in Syrian life. All confidence in the very young parliamentary democracy had been shattered and the first in a long line of military coups took place in the spring of 1949. Husni al Zaim was a Kurdish-Syrian politician who had been an officer in the Ottoman army, he was made Chief of Staff following Syria’s independence in 1946, and he had led the Syrian army into Palestine in the hopes of saving it from the hands of the European colonizers. The military coup he lead in 1949 was bloodless and it was given the greenlight by the CIA. He was supported by the West not out of some deeper empathy towards Arab self-determination, but because the US wanted someone more friendly towards them in this newly independent country. Shukri al Quwatli was an ally to Egypt and Saudi Arabia while Zaim wanted to renew the idea of unification with a pro-Western Iraq. Quwwatli had been democratically elected, but his failure to save Palestine had caused the public to turn on him, and so the time was right for America to seek some influence. By 1949 he found himself exiled in Egypt following his brief imprisonment at the hands of Husni al Zaim. Zaim promised his American supporters that he would not only democratically reform the country, but that he would also recognise the new state of Israel. Colonel Adib Shishakli, one of the commanders of the Arab Liberation Army, was more than happy to assist in the overthrow of Quwwatli and engage in some vigilantism against the incompetent government who had sent him on a failed mission into Palestine. Like Za’im he was a Syrian of Kurdish ancestry, but he was also an early member of the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP); the previously mentioned Nazi Party clone nourished by German government officials in the name of Arab nationalism. Later that summer came the second military coup, this time at the hands of Colonel Sami al Hinnawi. This too was assisted by Shishakli and the SSNP. Both Za’im and and Prime Minister Muhsin al Barazi were brought to the Mezze Prison in Damascus and quickly executed. al Barazi came from a prominent Sunni land-owning family in Hama and he had worked alongside both Constantin Zureiq and Zaki al Arsuzi in politically challenging France’s occupation of Syria. Upon Za’im’s rise to power al Barazi was given the task of peace talks with Israel and he successfully extradited Antun Saadeh, the previously mentioned founder of the SSNP, to Lebanon where he was executed. In return for this the Lebanese government vocally supported Zaim. The extradition and execution of Antun Saadeh had helped to set the stage for Zaim’s downfall at the hands of the SSNP. Hashem al Atasi became the new Prime Minister and suddenly all talk of a unification with Iraq came to an end. The Hashemite monarchy in Iraq decided that, clearly, Syria was still too unstable, what with its constant military coups. Still, the pro-Hashemite sentiment was too much for Shishakli’s comfort level, and he too performed his own military coup in December of 1949. Everyone would suffer under Shishakli’s pro-SSNP military rule. Newspapers were banned and all political parties were dissolved, including the National Party of Damascus, the Peoples Party of Aleppo, the Communist Party, the Baath Party, and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. America had supported the more fascistic, secular, power-hungry elements within Syrian society and this was the end result; Shishakli’s Nazi-inspired tyranny. Adib al Shishakli, who sought support from the West, maintained the armistice agreements with Israel, and kept all Iraqi influence at bay. He was courted by Britain and took financial support from the US in exchange for settling Palestinian refugees in Syria and bestowing Syrian citizenship upon them, thus openly engaging in the Zionist plot to erase the Palestinian people from history all while being fully supported by his SSNP backers. In the 1952 the US and Syria spoke about possibly engaging in a $400,000,000 deal that involved settling 500,000 Palestinians in the Jazira plains tbetween the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. By 1953 there were no more Syrian minority representatives in the assembly and this was a result of political persecution by Shishakli. No one was safe from him in this environment and the secular fascists of the SSNP had been empowered and their goal was to Arabize public life the way they saw fit. During this decade is when Syrian minorities began to flood the Ba’ath Party and replace the traditional positions of the Sunni upper class. While the Sunni land-owners were passing on their political power through their family ties the Ba’ath Party specifically recruited the poor, the marginalized, and the Communist. The pre-1958 history of Syria saw an urban Sunni establishment subjugate the countryside and its minorities, especially Alawites. It was a continuation of decades of sectarian oppression. A Druze revolt against Shishakli’s tyranny was crushed by the Sunni-dominated government in 1954. A process of national integration was carried out by force as Shishakli campaigned for dominance and the destruction of the Druze’s semi-autonomy. He made no effort to conceal his plans for democide of the Druze leadership, often proclaiming, “My enemies are like a serpent: the head is the Jebel Druze, the stomach Homs, and the tail Aleppo. If I crush the head the serpent will die. A new school of revolutionary thought amongst the Druze community of Syria began to take shape as a direct result of Shishakli’s persecution and their marginalization at the hands of the Sunni merchant class. The smear campaign committed against the Druze was particularly vile. Shishakli launched a brutal campaign to defame the Druzes for their religion and politics. Shishakli and his SSNP affiliated supporters accused the entire community of treason; one day the Druze were agents of the British, one day they were agents of Israel, and so on and so on. The Syrian Druze had played an enormous role in the resistance against the French occupation, and now a pro-Western tyrant who collaborated with the Zionist project for money was demonizing them to within an inch of lives. This is the resentment that Druze military officers nourished as they planned the military revolt that wrote the last chapter in Shishakli’s dictatorship.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 22:42:47 +0000
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