The Man Who Made Zionism Into Settler Colonialism

How did Zionism come to be understood as the paradigmatic case of settler colonialism—indeed, as racism itself? Before we seek an answer from postcolonial theory, perhaps it’s important to unearth a forgotten genealogy linking contemporary academic discourse to explicitly interwar Nazi-inspired Arab fascism. This essay traces that genealogy through two pivotal figures: Antoun Sa’adeh (1904-1949), the Syrian ideologue who established the first cohesive fascist movement in the Arab world by consciously imitating German National Socialism, and his protégé Fayez Sayegh (1922-1980), who ultimately created the scholarly framework of “settler colonialism” that would capture the post-1968 New Left and became the principal author of 1975 UN Resolution 3379 which declared that “Zionism is racism.” What today passes as liberationist theory in elite universities began, in earnest, as propaganda for a party that called its leader Syria’s “Führer,” modeled its flag on the swastika, and defined Jews as the absolute evil to be eradicated. Understanding this intellectual lineage is essential for grasping how ideas originating in the most sinister currents of twentieth-century totalitarianism became academic orthodoxy, how the Left became the unwitting heir of much of Nazism’s legacy, and why the question of whether it is too late for the American university grows more urgent each day.

In Levant politics, the Syrian ideologue Antoun Sa’adeh (1904-1949) holds the mystical status of a political martyr rivaled only by a few in modern Arab history. His movement remains significant among supporters in Lebanon and Syria, and his party is an ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad, who has recently begun quoting Sa’adeh in his speeches.

Born in 1904 to a wealthy Greek Orthodox family in Beirut, Antoun Khalil Sa’adeh spent his early years between Egypt and South America. A literary polyglot fluent in German and Russian among other languages, he was drawn to literature and politics under the influence of his father, an active contributor to Syrian intellectual life. Upon returning to Lebanon in 1929, Sa’adeh pursued modest literary experiments before developing an ideological commitment to nationalism and socialism that culminated in his establishment of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) in 1932. The party promoted Sa’adeh’s vision of Greater Syria—a primordialist nationalism positing an organic nation with mystical essence extending from Kuwait to the Mediterranean and from Jordan to Anatolia. This theory combined French missionary conceptions of Syria with German philosophies of history and nationalism. Sa’adeh believed that only a nation grounded in German philosophy and social sciences could transform Syria’s fragmented traditional societies into a progressive, unified whole.

Sa’adeh thus established the first political model of secular socialist nationalism in the Middle East, consciously imitating German National Socialism—itself an inversion of Leninism. He adopted the title al-Za’eem (the Arabic equivalent of Führer), designed the SSNP flag as an imitation of the Nazi swastika, and named the party’s official publication al-Zawba’a (“The Whirlwind,” the Arabic term for the swastika). The party’s armed militia, the Eagles of the Whirlwind, who later fought alongside Assad forces during the Syrian Civil War, carry insignia imitating those of Nazi troops.

Arrested in 1935 for destabilizing activities, Sa’adeh spent his imprisonment writing his magnum opus, The Rise of Nations—a synthesis of German philosophy and social sciences elaborating an abstract theory of “Nationalist Being” as the work of the Absolute Idea in History, superior to all other human phenomena. He applied this framework to posit a triumphant, racially superior Syrian nation. The work provided a Hegelian overview of history, fusing evolutionary themes with idealist motifs in a progressive development from primitivity to national consciousness as the most refined form of the Absolute Mind. Sa’adeh envisioned a “new religion” that would subsume Christianity and Islam—explicitly excluding Judaism—and herald a new epoch after humanity purged itself of individualism’s disease. In his doctrinal guide, Principles of SSNP, Sa’adeh traced the Syrian race to historical groups including the Phoenicians, Canaanites, Arabs, and Crusaders, while explicitly excluding Jews: “Jews are various tribes who attacked southern Syria and occupied some of it after long wars with the Canaanites. However, due to their isolation, Jews remained external to the social interactions from which the Syrian nation unfolded, which is their situation everywhere they lived. The Syrians defeated them and banished them, and thus they are not one of the origins of the Syrian nation.”

The Rise of Nations was the first cohesive theoretical work produced in Arab politics, providing ideological content for an established political movement. By the mid-1930s, neither Arab Communists, Arab Nationalists, nor the Muslim Brotherhood had succeeded in assembling the complete elements of modern revolutionary politics—the Leninist vanguard model requiring theoretical content, charismatic intellectual leadership, and popular organization. Sa’adeh pioneered this synthesis, making him the first serious ideological threat to the emerging Arab Nationalism.

After his release in 1937, Sa’adeh was exiled and departed for South America, never to return before the war’s end. From exile, he continued writing to inspire his growing following. On January 9, 1940, he declared in The Whirlwind from Buenos Aires that those who opposed the SSNP were “sworn enemies with a Jewish psyche fighting against the nationalist renaissance and crucifying the cause of the Syrian people.” This “Jewish psyche” formulation targeted his main ideological competitors: Arab nationalists and communists.

Arab Nationalism, also conceived in the Levant from German philosophy, existed as an aspiration and an ambiguous principle. Despite official support from European and regional powers, it lacked the intellectual vitality and theoretical cohesion that could attract young intellectuals interested in ideas and popular organization—both elements the SSNP possessed. Communists faced even greater obstacles. The non-industrial nature of Arab societies and communism’s failure to address nationalism confined it to well-educated intellectuals from wealthy families. The SSNP thus became the target of constant ideological polemics from both Arab nationalists and communists, and Sa’adeh directed most of his own polemics back at them. In September 1942, he published in The Whirlwind an anti-Arab nationalist piece titled “A Secret Zionist Report,” which, following the tradition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purported to reveal David Ben-Gurion stating that “the call for Arab unification or ‘Arab unity’ is a Jewish aim to facilitate the division of Syria and establishing a Jewish state which can conquer it piece by piece through Zionist organization and Jewish capital… Arab unity was a weapon used by Jews.”

Sa’adeh’s instrumentalization of antisemitic conspiracy theories reflected the intensifying ideological ferment among Arab intellectuals, fueled by wartime excitement and rising expectations about a new historical epoch. Contemporary Arab historians noted that during the war, “Arabs were swimming in nationalist aspirations.” This period saw Arab nationalism gain new intellectual vitality and produce its first major works, including the first serious intellectual challenge to Sa’adeh. In 1939, Constantin Zureiq (1909-2000)—who would later popularize the term “Nakba”—published The Nationalist Consciousness, establishing himself as a seminal figure of Arab Nationalism. The chapter devoted to Sa’adeh focused on refuting his competing vision of Syrian identity rather than his philosophical premises. The following year, former communist Michel Aflaq (1910-1989), impressed by Sa’adeh and the SSNP, founded the Arab nationalist Ihya Movement, which became the foundation for the Ba’ath Party that would rule Syria and Iraq for generations under Saddam Hussein and the Assad regime.

Sa’adeh’s significance extends beyond his continuing cult following in Lebanon and Syria or his party’s role in regional upheavals. He was the first genuinely indigenous Leninist figure—a philosopher-king with philosophical doctrine and intellectual credentials leading a vanguard toward revolutionary transformation. He might be understood as a significantly more educated and sophisticated Levantine counterpart to Hassan al-Banna. In autobiographies of Levantine figures, the SSNP replaced the Muslim Brotherhood as the formative political home for young revolutionaries. Veteran Lebanese Communist George al-Batal lamented that “the boundaries of the SSNP and the Communist Party were not clear,” reflecting the SSNP’s crucial role in shaping intellectuals like Fayez Sayegh, who would become one of the most effective Arab voices in the international campaign against Israel, and the prominent scholar Hisham Sharabi.

Sa’adeh synthesized fascism with Marxist-Hegelian undertones, Nazi inspiration, Ibn Khaldun’s theories, and his own idiosyncrasies, all expressed through local idiom and symbols. This intellectual formation occurred within a specific context: constant political instability in Syria made nationalism a central topic of public debate during Sa’adeh’s formative years. Arab Christians stood at the forefront of the cultural modernization of Arabic language and literature, developing a literary sensibility that fostered a rudimentary Arab nationalism distinct from the more developed Arab nationalism of the 1940s.

Levant Christian intellectuals’ prolific writings were instrumental in creating modern literary Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic), which they envisioned as the language of a new secular Arab culture inclusive of Arab Christians. The Arabic Bible translation, first printed in Lebanon in 1881 by the Jesuit order and edited by prominent Arab Christian philologist Ibrahim al-Yaziji, employed Islamic idiom—likely reflecting an optimistic vision of Muslims and Christians united through linguistic belonging. Several factors made Levant Christian intellectuals particularly receptive to European ideas. Many viewed nationalism favorably as an alternative to the Ottoman Empire’s confessional organization. As the first Arab secularists, they likely coined the Arabic word for secularism, ‘almaniya, from Arab Christian roots meaning worldly or non-ecclesiastical. Nationalism and secularism were inseparable in their writings, presumably due to French influence; in much Christian Arab writing of the era, nationalism effectively signified secularism. This nationalism initially defined an Arab nation against the Turks—a formulation that became ideologically obsolete after World War I ended Ottoman rule.

Syria’s wartime instability, marked by poor economic and security conditions, made it a significant source of migration. Lebanese communities had already established themselves in Africa and Latin America since the late nineteenth century. Following his mother’s death, Sa’adeh relocated with his family to Brazil in 1919, where he wrote for local Syrian community publications. He opposed emerging Lebanese nationalism and advocated for a counter-movement against Zionism. After unsuccessful attempts to establish Syrian nationalist revolutionary groups like the Syrian Youth Guerrilla, he returned to Syria in 1929 to found what became the SSNP. Despite his execution by the Lebanese government on July 8, 1949—which generated mythology among followers claiming miraculous signs before his death—the SSNP continued its ascent in Levantine politics. It pioneered various forms of violence, including female suicide bombings, deployed against both Israelis and rival Arab factions. The SSNP’s popularity became so significant that Arab nationalist ideologues felt compelled to address Sa’adeh reverently while gently refuting his Syrian nationalism.

Sa’adeh’s ideology approximated Nazism more closely than any other Arab ideology in its incoherence, racial doctrine, völkisch myths and rituals, mystical content, and overt paganism. In The Rise of Nations, Sa’adeh theorized a superior Syrian race and valorized violence, soil, and blood—likely the first instance of such political mysticism in Arab culture. His treatment of Islam, later adopted by the Ba’ath Party, recast it as a metaphysical concept signifying authenticity with two elements: Christian and Muhammadan. This idealist mysticism allowed Sa’adeh to position Syrian Christians under the banner of an Islamic essence without requiring Muslim conversion. Yet these concepts bore no resemblance to traditional or religious understandings—they were thoroughly idealist. Like later Arab Nationalists, Sa’adeh sought to preserve Islam’s vitality as a unifying symbol while evacuating it of all moral or religious content.

Such an ideology could only be constructed from German philosophy of history. For Sa’adeh, the Syrian nation was a timeless metaphysical essence—“the unity of the Syrian people generated from a History starting even before the manifest history”—and History constituted the supreme science. His book’s introduction speaks exclusively in terms of epochs and ages, invoking Ibn Khaldun for authority. The governing principle of this History is progress, which Sa’adeh identifies, like other progressive totalitarian ideologies, as a concrete form of dialectical struggle. In “The Right to Struggle is the Right to Progress,” he argued that intellectuals must help the masses develop ever-greater national consciousness, heightening social tensions until the decisive struggle that moves History’s wheel forward. Oppressed nations must master the methods of struggle. To realize one’s vitality requires readiness to pour endless streams of blood—the SSNP’s fountain of eternal life. Only struggle can serve as History’s test, revealing the Truth of national essence. No individuals exist in his thought save himself, the eternal leader. Other humans are national personalities—earthly projections of transcendental essence—and the State is that personality’s ultimate form. He praised German Aryanism, employed German philosophical terminology, and included extensive bibliographies of German political, philosophical, and sociological literature in his fluent command of the language.

Sa’adeh made his party a final destination: members could freely join, receiving baptism in blood and fire, but could not leave without incurring severe punishment. The party featured rituals, ceremonies, and symbols articulated in the Prussian idiom of “Freedom, Duty, Discipline, and Might” within a Hobbesian world of perpetual struggle unto death. Only violence could be redemptive and regenerative. His antisemitic writings were venomous—unsurprising given his intellectual sources—positing Judaism as the essence of all evil, found in Torah and Talmud, to be eradicated. He coined the term “house Jews” for Syrian opponents he accused of treason. In one characteristic speech, he attacked “the ruling classes that do not feel the nation’s pain, squandering the resources of the people while standing impotent... these classes are our house Jews and the dangers of the house Jews are greater than those of the foreign ones. The [national] revival has no choice but to enter a struggle to the death with such classes.”

Sa’adeh’s opposition to Zionism was initially twofold: a logical extension of his Pan-Syrian ideology and a manifestation of the antisemitism integral to the German thought-structure he had adopted wholesale. By 1948, however, his anti-Zionism acquired a new function central to his revolutionary strategy. The Arab defeat became, in his speeches and letters, empirical verification of the urgent need for SSNP-led revolutionary transformation of the Levant. He became convinced that salvation from Zionism required the SSNP to seize power in Syria, Lebanon, or Jordan to establish the Pan-Syrian state: “we cannot protect the interests of the nations or deal with the external conflict [with Jews] before we end the domestic war. It is a ruthless war between the [universal] singular will of the national versus the particular wills.” This formulation—presenting the struggle against Zionism as an internal struggle of historical self-realization—had emerged in Arab nationalist writings in 1948, and Sa’adeh was among the first to deploy it for actual revolutionary planning. His speeches increasingly revolved around the claim that “the Zionists did not defeat the Syrian nation but its house Jews” and that “only the national pan-Syrian state will be able to liberate Palestine.” Two weeks before his failed coup and execution, on June 23, 1949, he wrote: “The war in Palestine was not a war with the Jews. Syrian, Arab, and Egyptian armies did not march to Palestine to fight Jews but to fight the people of Palestine in Palestine... the war was a dispute between statelets for what was left of Palestine and not for what the Jews already took.”

Sa’adeh was arrested and executed on July 8, 1949, in one of the most dramatic episodes of Levantine political intrigue, with Lebanese and Syrian governments colluding to kill him and crush his movement. The SSNP, though it survived, never realized its founder’s vision or acquired power in any Levantine state. Yet its influence on the region’s political and intellectual development remains undeniable. Like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the SSNP served as ideological first love and formative political experience for many Levantine intellectuals. Akram al-Hourani, co-founder of the Ba’ath Party—the vanguard of Arab Nationalism—began his career in the SSNP, Arab Nationalism’s supposed archenemy. Sa’adeh’s SSNP provided the first cohesive indigenous Middle Eastern ideology modeled on German radical thought: a philosophical system, charismatic leadership, and radical program for total social transformation claiming grounding in social science while drawing primary inspiration from Nazi Germany.

The life of Palestinian intellectual Hisham Sharabi (1927-2005) exemplifies Sa’adeh’s enduring influence. Born in Jaffa to a middle-class Muslim family amid rising ideological ferment and Jewish-Arab tensions, Sharabi studied at the American University of Beirut and joined the SSNP in 1946. He became a close associate of Fayez Sayegh, the SSNP’s propaganda minister and Sa’adeh’s favorite pupil, before their relationship ruptured when Sharabi sided with Sa’adeh in Sayegh’s excommunication. In his two-volume memoir written during his tenure as philosophy professor at Georgetown University, where Sa’adeh remains the central figure, Sharabi explained: “My attachment to the fatherland is primarily an outcome of my attachment to Antoun Sa’adeh and [his] party. The SSNP fundamentally transformed the meaning of the word ‘party’ in the Arab east, from the traditional idea of a party to the concept of a total social, national movement. From an old system resting on traditional paternalism to a modern notion resting on reason and purposeful commitment. Joining the party was a matter of fate. My only alternative was the Communist Party. However, at that time, I did not know of Karl Marx or communism but hearsay.” He attributed his urge to join to “seeking a doctrine around which I could wrap my life, a being that transcends the individual ‘I,’ and a social identity that gives my life a real existence. I found it in the doctrine of the SSNP.”

Sharabi attempted to explain Sa’adeh’s magnetic appeal to young intellectuals:

Sa’adeh’s modernity was different than the Levantine modernity of our professors at AUB, especially of [influential professor] Charles Malik, that we revered and which Sa’adeh called for fighting and replacing with an independent national modernity. For him, modernity wasn’t what we import from the West but that which comes from the inside of society and its living heritage... In Sa’adeh’s culture and upbringing, he was the child of the 19th century and the Enlightenment, heavily influenced by German philosophy and especially German historicism... Today [1993], when I reread his Rise of Nations... which he dedicated unprecedentedly to men and women, I find it to be unprecedented in the Arabic language... in it manifested the spirit of modernity and Enlightenment in his thought, especially in his secularism, faith in reason, modern science, and the inevitability of progress.

The day after Sa’adeh’s execution, Sharabi departed for the United States, vowing never to return. He carried with him Sa’adeh’s words: “All that we have is from the nation and for the nation. The blood in our veins is not ours. It is the nation’s trust to be returned upon demand... Be heroic and do not fear war but failure... we will change the face of history... life is nothing but a stand of might.” Sharabi devoted his Washington career to anti-Zionist activism promoting Palestinian and Arab causes.

During Sa’adeh’s South American exile, the SSNP faced a leadership vacuum. Among its junior ranks emerged Fayez Sayegh (1922-1980), a brilliant young member possessing sharp intellect, compelling rhetorical style, academic skills, and philosophical depth. More than any other figure, Sayegh’s life embodies the development of Arab Third Worldist intellectual culture in the twentieth century. The son of a Presbyterian pastor, Sayegh joined the SSNP in 1938. Within a year, party leaders appointed him to oversee party culture, making him the organization’s rising star. Sayegh wrote and edited party publications and delivered speeches rivaling Sa’adeh in force and appeal. His rapid ascent earned him dual appointments as Dean of Culture and Dean of Broadcast—effectively, propaganda minister for the Syrian Führer’s party. His primary duties were producing propaganda and enforcing ideological orthodoxy. On Judaism, Sayegh maintained Sa’adeh’s position. In a memo titled “The Dangers of Zionism to Civilization and to Spirit,” he wrote: “The Jewish people believe they are the chosen people... so it self-segregated... to live in superiority and believe they are the essence of all progress and that other nations are only a mean to be used to their prosperity... this is the Jewish psyche: a sense of destiny, a sense of superiority... and enslaving the world for the goals of Jews. This psyche creates a certain Jewish bond, a mix of violent racial and religious bond... such a dark and complex psyche...”

Toward the war’s end, Sayegh’s writings showed growing interest in existentialism, which was beginning its conquest of European intellectual life. The development alarmed party members who recognized that existentialism’s individualistic orientation undermined loyalty, nationalism, and collective power. Many complained to Sa’adeh. Upon returning from exile, Sa’adeh studied Sayegh’s writings and concluded that he had “emphasized individualistic humanism despite previous warnings not to do so,” “gave priority to existential ideas instead of concepts approved by the party,” and “abandoned party teachings for the sake of those of Kierkegaard and Berdyaev.” Sa’adeh, apparently also alarmed by Sayegh’s popularity during his absence, excommunicated him. Following this rupture, Sayegh departed for the United States and completed his Ph.D. at Georgetown in 1949. During the 1950s, he became a left-wing supporter of Arab Nationalism embodied in Nasserism. In the 1960s, he devoted himself entirely to the emerging left-wing Palestinian cause, becoming one of North America’s most prominent anti-Zionists. Working for the UN, he was the principal author of the 1975 UN Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism is racism in language remarkably similar to his SSNP writings despite superficial differences.

Sayegh’s most enduring legacy, however, was his 1965 monograph Settler Colonialism in Palestine. That same year, he established the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Research Center and joined its Executive Committee. His editorial leadership during the 1960s proved pivotal in shaping the Palestinian national movement’s revolutionary-era intellectual discourse. As a key figure in the movement’s diplomatic corps, he served as Chargé d’Affaires at the Arab States Delegations’ Office at the United Nations.

Zionist Colonialism in Palestine stands as the first intellectual articulation of Zionism as a settler colonial enterprise, arguing that the analytical frameworks applied to Vietnam and Algeria apply equally to Palestine. The treatise situates Zionism within European colonialism while presenting it as uniquely pernicious in its quest for racial exclusivity, refusal to assimilate or coexist, and relentless territorial expansion, all underpinned by intrinsic reliance on structural and overt violence. Sayegh portrays Zionism as the most sinister form of settler colonialism, emphasizing these characteristics as inherent, permanent features manifest in Israeli state policies toward Palestinians and the broader Arab world.

This book initiated Palestine’s annexation to the constellation of international Left causes, paving the way for its canonization as the cause célèbre of the post-1968 New Left. When Sayegh published his work, the French Left—then the vanguard of the non-Soviet international Left under Sartre’s influence—remained supportive of Israel, incorporating the Holocaust and antisemitism as central to its anti-capitalist analysis. It viewed the Arab-Israeli conflict as between two Western victims and two equally legitimate liberation movements. Sayegh’s framework was therefore adopted only by the post-Sartrean generation. Maxime Rodinson advanced this analysis in his 1973 Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, initiating its universalization within the New Left.

What Sayegh began in a modest 1965 monograph has proliferated dramatically. For many in Western universities, the proposition that Zionism constitutes the worst form of European settler colonialism has become axiomatic. Copious literature expounding this theme appears weekly, produced by scholars who have often never encountered Sayegh or Sa’adeh. Israel and its defenders ignore serious intellectual genealogy in favor of social media soundbites at their peril. Whether it is already too late for the American university remains an open question.

Published originally on November 9, 2025.