Greater Syria Antidote

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) an American forester and environmentalist whose writings laid the foundation for modern ecological ethics and conservation philosophy, articulated the concept of a land ethic, advocating for ecological stewardship, biodiversity preservation, and sustainable land management. Leopold admired the land management practices of Native American communities, which fostered reciprocity and respect for the earth. He lamented their displacement, recognizing that their ecological knowledge and sustainable practices were lost through colonization and capitalist expansion.

On the other side of the globe, Antoun Saadeh (1904–1949), founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) regarded the colonialist implantation of the Zionist project in Palestine as an imminent threat to the historically and geographically coherent entity of the Levant, organically rooted in both the natural and cultural constituency of a Greater Syria. He opposed the imperialist plot to divide the Arab world and prevent its emergence as a sovereign state.

Whether through the dismemberment of the Syrian homeland by imperial powers or the commodification and destruction of forests in the United States, both thinkers rejected the colonial and imperialist exploitation of land, articulating a radical resistance to its violent fragmentation and alienation from its people. In advocating for an ethical and reciprocal relationship between human communities and the earth, Aldo Leopold echoes Saadeh’s apprehension of the land as the bearer of a collective memory that shapes the ethos and destiny of its people. Land and its people are indivisible and separating them is an act of the utmost existential violence. Saadeh states: “Land is not a commodity to be divided by foreign hands—it is the womb of our people, bearing the memory of generations.” While Leopold reckons: “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

The steady march of colonialism and imperialism, through the imposition of arbitrary borders, have systematically disrupted the unity and integrity of indigenous populations, splintering their social, cultural, and political fabric. Geophysical characteristics and physical boundaries that once shaped the habitability and cohesion of regions have been superseded by the imposition of arbitrary borders over physical geography to serve the dictates of empire. Boundaries drawn with little regard for existing ethnic, linguistic, and ecological realities have forced diverse communities into zombie states or, conversely, scattered cohesive groups across multiple territories. This manufactured disunity has led once-interconnected populations to turn against themselves. The Somali people united by shared culture and language, were split into five different territories by colonial borders. The Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo in Nigeria—once distinct and self-governing societies—were forcibly incorporated into a single colonial entity under British rule, leading to sectarian violence and civil war after independence. In West Asia, the Sykes-Picot Agreement arbitrarily divided the Ottoman Empire’s territories, creating borders that disregarded the multi-ethnic fabric of the region and its own relationship to the land. The Levant has since been dismembered to facilitate the encroachment of the Zionist settler colonial project that has perpetrated relentless crimes against the Palestinian population

A century later, it is sadly evident that the noble and vigorous aspirations of Aldo Leopold and Antoun Saadeh have been thoroughly inverted and the world is legislated by almost opposite principles. Syria is being eviscerated with the same callous indifference that American Indian indigeneity has been deracinated by the proliferation of private property. An over-confident empire is at the helm of an enterprise that seeks to commodify the entire globe. In the current paradigm, land is reduced to a mere economic asset and its inhabitants to disposable variables in the machinery of capital and imperial power. The land that Leopold considered as a living, biotic community and Saadeh as a cradle of belonging is stripped of its intrinsic value and reduced to mere real estate or resource stock. Forests, rivers, and deserts—once cradles of biodiversity—are leveled for monoculture plantations, fracked for gas, or drained for industrial agriculture, destroying the very fabric of biotic communities. While the Zionist settler-colonial project has long embodied this commodification, reducing Palestinian land, rich with generational memory and indigenous presence, to plots for settlement expansion, Syria, the heartland of Saadeh’s vision, is reduced to a geopolitical chessboard, with U.S. bases, Zionist airstrikes, and Turkish incursions, stripping the region of its sovereignty. Indeed, the dis-order of the modern empire stands at the diametric antipode of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and Antoun Saadeh’s idea of homeland sovereignty. Where Leopold understood the land as a living community, the empire sees it as a resource deposit. Where Saadeh deemed Greater Syria a cultural unity, the empire reduces it to partitioned provinces under foreign control.

More than ever, the notion of Greater Syria emerges as an antidote to a world disfigured by imperial fragmentation, resource plunder, and the alienation of both people and land. It is a reclamation of wholeness from the fracturing forces of colonialism and global capitalism, a rekindling of a shared cultural identity that can stand up to the imperial logic of division, extraction and deterritorialization. To dissolve the arbitrary borders imposed on Greater Syria’s continuity not only defies US imperialism and the Zionist settler-colonial project but effectively erodes sectarianism and resists the balkanization that transformed the levant into client states weakened by foreign interference and proxy wars. Greater Syria, long considered a trade route and colony by imperialists, would once again unfold as the living tissue of its people, whose rivers, mountains, and soil carry the memory of centuries. The Palestinian struggle for land—and the broader Syrian resistance to occupation—would no longer be isolated causes but part of a unified national struggle against dispossession. In tandem with Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, a Greater Syria would promote stewardship over exploitation and offer the reassertion of an indivisible indigenous sovereignty simultaneously cultural and ecological.