Syrian Social Nationalist Party

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP; Arabic: الحزب السوري القومي الاجتماعي, romanized: al-Ḥizb al-Sūrī al-Qawmī al-ijtimāʻī) 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, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Palestine region (includes Israel and its occupied territories), Cyprus, Sinai of Egypt, Hatay and Cilicia of Turkey, 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. Until the fall of the Assad regime it was an ally of the ruling Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, being the second-ranking party in the National Progressive Front.

Founded in Beirut in 1932 by the Lebanese intellectual Antoun Saadeh 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 the 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'état, 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 took 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, fought alongside the Syrian Arab Armed Forces against the Syrian opposition and the Islamic State. Following the fall of the Assad regime, it was banned by the Syrian transitional government, though it still operates openly in other countries as well as clandestinely in Syria.^{[better source needed]}

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."

The SSNP was founded by Antun Saadeh, a Lebanese journalist and lecturer from a Greek Orthodox family who had lived in South America from 1919 to 1930 who secretly established the first nucleus of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in November 1932, which operated underground for the first three years of its existence; in 1933, he started publishing the monthly journal Al-Majalla, which was distributed in the American University of Beirut and developed the party's ideology. In 1936, the party's open hostility to colonialism led to the French authorities banning the party and the imprisoning Saadeh for six months for creating a clandestine party, although an accusation of having been in contact with the German and Italian fascist movements was dropped after the Germans denied any relationship. During his time in prison Saadeh wrote The Genesis of Nations to lay out the SSNP's ideology. At that time, the Party joined ranks with other nationalist and patriotic forces including the National Bloc, whereas it began militating, in secret, for the overthrow of the Mandate. Nonetheless, the alliance between the SSNP and the National Bloc did not last long: The National Bloc refrained from engaging in actual militant activities against the French, deciding instead to cooperate with the High Commissioner. Many SSNP members also felt that the NB refused to cooperate with them because their founder was Christian.