istering Syria. The disenfranchised middle class
and educated professionals were blocked from
advancing their own interests. Increasingly, those
who were not the beneficiaries of French political
and economic patronage turned to new political
movements with radical anticolonialist ideologies.
These two political forces would wrestle for control
of Syria’s governmental apparatus for the first 30
years of Syria’s existence as an independent state
after World War II. The dominant ideology of the
patriotic Syrian bourgeoisie was Arab nationalism
that espoused a reversal of the colonial partition
of Arab lands by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Arab
political sovereignty over its own territory, and the
adoption of Arab cultural policies that recognized
the significance of Islam as the majority religious
tradition in the region. Every anticolonialist pop-
ular movement that emerged in Syria in the 20th
century clung to some variant of Arab national-
ism as a basic political principle. The Communist
Party of Lebanon and Syria, founded in 1928, was
one of the new uncompromising anticolonialist
political movements. By the 1950s, it became one
of the largest and best organized communist par-
ties in the Arab world.
Another of the radical Arab nationalist par-
ties that emerged during the period of the French
mandate was the baath party, founded in 1939
by two schoolteachers, one Greek Orthodox and
the other Sunni Muslim. In addition to adhering
to a basic policy of Arabism, unity, and political
independence, the party also advocated a vague
notion of socialism that would evolve in time
to include land reform, state ownership of key
economic institutions such as banks, and state
regulation of the private sector. The Baath finally
came to power in 1966. From the 1950s through
1970s, the leadership of the Syrian Baath Party
was almost exclusively composed of members of
professions: professors, schoolteachers, doctors,
lawyers, and military officers—the very people
who had been thwarted from achieving political
power and economic advancement by the old rul-
ing classes of landowners, merchants, and urban
notables. In a military coup in 1970, one Alawi
air force officer, Hafiz al-Asad, prevailed over
all other factions in the Baath Party and became
president of Syria until his death in 2000. He was
succeeded by his son Bashar al-Asad who remains
the Syrian president in 2008.
Syria became a key player in Arab regional
politics. It is a frontline state in the arab-israeli
conFlicts. Syrian volunteers fought in the 1948
war in Palestine and, at its conclusion, Syria served
as one of the countries of refuge for Palestinian
refugees. israel occupied the Syrian Golan Heights
in 1967 and expelled most of the population. More
of the Golan was occupied in 1973. Today there are
only about 20,000 Syrians, mostly Druze, left in
the Israeli occupied part of the Golan Heights. The
occupied territory has also been populated by about
20,000 Israeli settlers. Israel declared the unilateral
annexation of the Golan Heights in 1981.
Syria was a key Middle East regional ally of
the Soviet Union during the years of the cold war.
The USSR supplied the country with MIG fighter
jets and missile systems in order to defend itself,
but Syria was never allowed to achieve military
parity with Israel. When Israel mounted a full-
scale invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and the
Syrian air force challenged Israeli jets bombing
its antiaircraft missile defense systems along its
border with Lebanon, a third of the entire Syrian
air force was destroyed in only a few hours. Since
1982 Syria has supported Palestinian factions who
have rejected peace proposals that fall short of
full Palestinian national sovereignty in the West
Bank and Gaza. Syria has opposed regional peace
initiatives that are bilateral in nature and ignore
the issue of Syrian sovereignty over the Golan
Heights. At the same time, Syria has conducted
secret negotiations with Israel through third-party
intermediaries and has shown flexibility over pro-
posals for limiting Syria’s return to full sovereign
control of the Golan by having any future peace
agreement monitored by international peacekeep-
ing forces, including those of the United States,
and installing electronic early warning systems.
Syria has played a pragmatic role in Arab
regional politics. It has been cautious in nurtur-
ing its relations with saUdi arabia and the gUlF
states. Over the years Saudi Arabia has suppliedSyria 649 J