Syrian Baath Party and Arab Unity

The Baath Party was born in Syria with a great pledge and hope. For its founders, there was no real reason for the separation of the Arab peoples except for the artificial borders drawn by foreigners, and the party was the united organ of the entire Arab nation that would achieve unity in the Arab lands. The party would also fight for the liberty of Palestine. As a matter of fact, the Baathists made several attempts to realize their goal and they did achieve it once when they managed to unite Syria with Egypt in 1958. However, it was to prove a short-lived unity that availed the Palestinians nothing. As a result, the extent of the disappointment was as big as the hope itself. In fact, the Baathists were trying to unite all of the Arabs, but they were indeed not united in themselves. The aim of this book is to first analyse the Baath Party in Syria and its role in the spread of the Arab unity idea. What will also be discussed in the book is the interaction between the internal and external dynamics that affected the changes in the party policies regarding the idea of Arab unity and the Palestine issue from the establishment of Israel in 1948 to the Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

Ramazan Özdemir is an instructor at Fatih University and a PhD student in the department of Political Science and International Relations at Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul.