Articles, Radio Addresses, and Interviews Recorded at the Time in My Own Papers - Part 3: A 1951 Radio Talk on Nationalization and a 1950 Speech on Palestine's Partition

A Talk I Delivered on the Radio, February 1951

Dear citizens,

It is the affliction of this East of ours that its people say more than they do, and if the truth compels me to say so, they say and do not do at all... Had we done even a fraction of the great deal we have said in defense of Palestine, and in guarding its own being, this corner of our homeland would today stand far removed from the injustice now hanging over it, and its own people would be living in their houses, their farms, and their shops, rather than waiting on the hands of charity to fend off the ravages of heat and cold, sickness and hunger...

This week, which we here have taken to calling "Refugee Week," saw two events, neither one far removed from the cause of Palestine and its refugees, even if neither appeared so at first glance. The first was the grave and historic memorandum His Excellency Dr. Nazim al-Qudsi, the Syrian prime minister, submitted to the Political Committee of the Arab League. The second was the nationalization law passed by the Syrian People's Assembly.

Both events alike are aimed at preparing the Arabs to stand against the outside aggression now bearing down on our own wounded land.

As for the memorandum submitted by His Excellency al-Qudsi, it is a piercing cry from the heart of an Arab man who sees the Zionist danger crouched at his own innermost core, one who lays his finger squarely on the seat of the disease and points to the one true cure, casting aside every form of evasion, equivocation, and dodging. It is a resounding cry in the ear of whoever has ears yet fails to hear, a blazing lamp for whoever, half-blind, gropes his own way through the thickest darkness yet cannot find it, whether from true blindness or from willful refusal to see... Our own prime minister has placed the men responsible across the Arab countries squarely before their own responsibilities, and history alone will render its verdict in favor of a Syria that believed in Arabism, after first believing in God, and strove sincerely and honestly for the unity of the Arabs, for their liberation, and for the binding of their own wounds... We now await the response to this praiseworthy, formidable step Syria has taken, embodied in the person of its own prime minister.

As for the nationalization law, it is the practical answer to the cry rising from the people's own hoarse throat, and a noble application of Article 24 of the new constitution, which states that "the state may, by law, nationalize any institution or enterprise connected to the public interest, in exchange for fair compensation."

The idea of nationalization rests on stripping ownership away from private individuals and handing it over to collective groups or bodies. These groups may be the state itself, managing the enterprise the way it manages its own private property, a process known as internationalization, though this differs entirely from the internationalization of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, since the internationalization of Jerusalem aims at stripping it away from its own people and placing it under the supervision of the United Nations, to be governed in its own name, with every member state sharing equally in its oversight. The internationalization of institutions and enterprises within a single state, by contrast, means that this same state alone holds dominion over them. But this collective group might instead be the nation itself, understood as an existing political reality made up of a people, a government, and a land, in which case the process we are discussing here is properly called nationalization.

There exists, too, a middle ground between internationalization and nationalization, in which the state and various groups share ownership in differing proportions, enterprises known as mixed-economy companies, the Port of Latakia being one such example.

Nationalization is not a new social idea at all, though it has been known under other names, as in matters of state monopoly, which represent a kind of privilege the state reserves for itself alone, as with explosives and salt, or grants to certain individuals or groups, as with the tobacco monopoly and mineral extraction... But this idea did not take clear shape until the period between the two World Wars. The French government nationalized its arms and aviation factories as early as 1936, and expanded this nationalization drive further from 1944 onward, under General de Gaulle's own legislation.

The idea of nationalization rests, in theory, on three foundations, which we note briefly here:

1. A political foundation: this rests on the fact that large enterprises give their own owners immense wealth, and immense wealth grants its owners financial influence, which inevitably turns into political influence in turn. Since all political influence must be drawn directly from the nation itself, through whatever service a person renders it, rather than drawn from money, the presence of large enterprises in hands other than the nation's own sovereign hands becomes a real political danger, one that must be actively resisted. It goes without saying that this political influence becomes even more dangerous to the general political situation whenever the one holding the reins of the enterprise is a foreigner, or connected to a state with its own political designs on our own country.

Our own honored citizens will recall that the very shape of colonialism has changed in our own time. Where it once meant annihilating the native people and installing a new people in their place, as happened in Australia, America, and, more recently, Palestine, where new peoples arose upon the remains of the original ones, colonialism came instead to mean military occupation, as with France's occupation of the Arab Maghreb, and Europe's occupation of Africa and Asia more broadly. It then became clear that the colonized peoples were beginning to stir from their own deep slumber and work toward freeing themselves from the foreign occupier, and so the colonial powers hastened toward a new form of colonialism, one achieving the very same ends military occupation once secured, but without wounding the general dignity of the citizenry. This new form is economic colonialism, some of whose manifestations the Syrian state has fought back against in its own recent nationalization law.

2. A social foundation: this rests on a core idea, namely that the public services provided to the people as a whole must never become a field for generating private personal gain. And if such gain must exist at all, it ought to belong to the workers alone, since it would then help raise the general standard of the people, and remove the causes of resentment and discontent from the hearts of the needy.

There is no doubt that the existence of vast differences between the social classes of a single nation creates a great chasm between them, and this chasm becomes the greatest possible aid to conflict and mutual rejection, fertile ground for the spread of divergent, extremist ideas and philosophies, something that is not even in the interest of the monopolizing class itself, since it remains perpetually threatened, both at home and along its own borders. And when things grow truly dire, and the battle grows fierce, it finds no protector or defender left but the very arms of the poorer classes. Should it lose them, it loses everything else along with them, and loses, above all, the very meaning of its own existence and its own monopoly.

3. Nationalization presupposes a directed economy, one wholly different from the free economy built on speculation, competition, and free pricing, since a free-economy system aims at securing exorbitant profits, profits ultimately drawn, when all is reckoned, from the bread of the poor, from their health and their education. A directed economy, by contrast, presupposes the state's own oversight of economic activity and enterprise, directing it in a manner consistent with the public interest, rather than the interest of any single class of people, especially in young, developing countries whose economic condition rests on a policy of doing what is most urgent first.

Many Arab countries have already nationalized their own coal mines, electrical power, lighting gas, water, banks, social-insurance institutions, and certain major factories, such as the French Renault automobile factories, along with means of transport such as railways and airlines.

Nationalization presupposes the achievement of two distinct things:

The first: the expropriation of the institution to be nationalized, meaning the transfer of the institution's entire assets to the new body, carried out on the basis of either a general law or a specific one.

The second: the payment of compensation to the rightful owners, compensation that must be fair, in accordance with the provisions of the sixth paragraph of Article 21 of the Syrian constitution.

We note that France, when it nationalized the Renault factories, seized ownership of them without any compensation whatsoever, for political reasons.

The nationalized institution retains an industrial and commercial character, and possesses its own legal personality and financial independence on the one hand, and so retains the right to buy, sell, and lease property just as any ordinary individual would, its director-general is not a mere civil servant, and its workers benefit from the provisions of labor law. On the other hand, it remains subject to state oversight, and in this capacity must publish its own official accounts and submit to government financial inspection.

These are the fundamental ideas underlying the nationalization law enacted by the People's Assembly, and issued by His Excellency the President of the Republic two days ago, published in the official gazette, and thereby made one of the laws of the state. We have not gone into its own finer details here, since these have already been published for the people in the daily press.

And so the grave new principles our new constitution enshrines have now entered the stage of practical application, and have not remained mere ink on paper. We are not unaware that other principles exist, no less important than this one, but we are working to achieve them one by one, by God's own will and providence, despite the great difficulties standing in our own path.

This new era aims at building a state on sound foundations, and this building will be resisted by those who once held power in the eras that came before, those who built their own fortunes from this very people's own blood. We are not unaware that they will fight every reforming movement by every means available to them: money, the press, malicious rumor, and the spreading of panic...

But the pioneers of reform pay no mind to obstacles. Indeed, no true reform can ever be achieved without overcoming the harshest of obstacles, and I can already see the sun of socialism beginning to rise, one that those who wish to extinguish God's own light with their bare hands will never manage to put out, for God refuses anything less than the completion of His own light. Peace be upon you, dear citizens.

A Speech Delivered in the Great Hall of the Syrian University on 29 November 1950, on the Occasion of the Partition of Palestine

The ceremony was held by the Palestinian Women's Union

Ladies and gentlemen,

I was invited to speak on a subject I no longer find any inclination to speak on at all, and this is not out of any coldness on my own part, but rather because the law of speech has been suspended by the law of the sword, and the case for justice has been overwritten by the rules of the jungle.

On the twenty-ninth day of November, three years ago now, the colonial powers, who cannot bear to see the Arabs know a moment's peace or a single wound of theirs finally heal, wrote the black word "partition" into the register of our own great calamities, a calamity beside which the tragedy of Andalusia itself pales...

And so innocent blood flowed, gushing across the plains of Palestine, mingling with the blood of blessed forebears, now reduced to bones trodden today beneath the feet of the usurping Jews...

Women were scattered, children flung apart, and the displaced driven from their homes...

While the eyes of England and America, like the eyes of statues, looked on as atrocities were committed and sacred places desecrated, neither blinking nor turning aside...

And what business is it of mine, that the Jews should seek to build a state of their own...

Or indeed, what business is it of mine, what the two powers that conjured Israel out of nothing have done. They act purely on the dictates of self-interest, not out of humanity or compassion, mere commodities with no true market in the arena of colonial struggle...

But it is toward the Arabs themselves that I wish to direct my own accusation...

I do not wish to grieve for a Palestine already lost, but rather for what I see in a number of our own lords and grandees, men who call themselves one of us, though God knows they are not one of us at all, who feel nothing of what we feel, and suffer nothing of what we suffer, men who have sold themselves to the devil and become a whip of torment upon their own peoples, in exchange for a kingship that slavery itself would be preferable to, and for gains whose pettiness no bleary eye can any longer fail to see...

The hidden hand, working from behind the veil, willed that the Jews should have a throne and a scepter, and so the Jews came to have a throne and a scepter...

And it willed, too, that the very Arab sons who helped build the state of Israel should remain upon their own thrones and couches, and so they remained exactly where they were, managing the affairs of the Arab nation in whatever direction would strengthen this monstrosity, one that cannot stand on its own two feet anywhere but on this land, and among no people but this one...

And it wounds the soul of every free man that these Arab conspirators are never exposed to their own peoples... or that their own peoples have never worked to expose the truth about them!...

O God!... is the Arab nation sunk in so deep a slumber that the sheer horror of this terrible calamity was not enough to wake it?... Or is it a nation so advanced in age, having reached the very depths of senility, that it has turned its back on its own history, averted its face from its own present, and closed its eyes to its own future, until wrongdoing and virtue, treachery and patriotism, became one and the same to it, content with nothing more, from the whole spoil of life, than to walk toward its own death, escorted by the hooves of Jewish horses?...

Whoever casts even a passing glance at the acts of heroism unfolding across the world, in Greece, in Indonesia, in Indochina, in Korea, can only come to believe in one or the other of these two possibilities!...

And were it not for the Syrian people's own uprising, and its overthrow of those who took part in this towering catastrophe, despair over the future would have proven fatal, and every Arab would have had no choice but to wrap himself in his own shroud, even as his heart still beat with life...

My brothers, sons of the southern part of our homeland,

Do not think you alone are the victims of this catastrophe, for we and you alike stand together on the edge of a collapsing precipice, awaiting together a fate darker still, and blacker still, than what has already befallen you...

The Jewish invaders know full well what they once did to the Canaanites, and they are not ignorant of the true nature of their own adversaries!...

I remember that night, so near and yet so far... The session of the Syrian People's Assembly had stretched into the small hours of the night, nerves were taut, the air itself stifling, every heart held tightly in check so that no one might hear it pounding, when the strokes of midnight shattered the silence, and the Syrian prime minister rose to surprise us with news whose echo still rings in my own ears to this day:

"At this very historic minute, the armies of the Arabs have crossed the borders of Palestine to liberate it..."

And I bear witness that the tears that streamed from my own eyes were among the most illustrious tears ever to well up in any eye, and the sweetest sigh ever to rise from any heart...

For in my own imagination I traveled back centuries in time, and saw the armies of Khalid and Abu Ubaidah gliding like serpents across the plains of Palestine and Syria, and pictured Saladin and his own great hosts, tearing down fortresses and guiding the way to citadels, and driving from Islam and from Arabism a plague the likes of which had never been seen...

I imagined we were about to rouse history itself from its own slumber, and shake the very bones in their graves... but I never imagined that we were entering Palestine anew only to prop up the Jewish state and help secure its own foundations!...

Palestine had already been sold, the moment our own great men accepted that first truce. Had the Arab armies entered Tel Aviv that very day, not a single voice in the whole world, not even in England or America, would have risen to mourn Israel...

But our own great men understand the rules of international order, and hold the Security Council sacred, while the Jews have placed every international sanctity beneath their own feet, and mocked the resolutions of the United Nations exactly as Korea does today, and so we were abandoned, and they were granted their own safety...

Brothers,

You are not the only refugees. Every Arab in the whole world is himself a refugee, and a humbled man, for the arrow lodged in the very core of our hearts, and the loss of Palestine from all of us together, has made us, "the wandering Arabs," and made the Jews masters of the house.

It is no strange thing for a man whose own home lies far away to feel himself a stranger, but strange indeed is the man who feels himself a stranger in his own home. And the fire will yet blaze again at the very heart of our own home a second time, for this scrap of land the Jews have seized will never, ever solve their own national problem, and they will go searching for their own living space, and will not find it on Mars, nor in China, but will find it, in the end, along their own neighboring borders...

Nor will their own state ever be able to live forever on begging alone, and a day will come when they go searching for their own livelihood in our own markets, and in our own homes...

And if we fail to prepare ourselves for that day, and fail to reconsider our own domestic and foreign conditions, and fail to build Arab society upon national foundations of sound socialism, and fail to raise our own youth on new and lofty ideals, and fail to mobilize every material and spiritual resource we have, then we ourselves will become the fuel of a devastating war, one that will spare nothing and leave nothing behind.

And if today we still find a place to gather in, to voice our own grievance and rouse our own resolve, a day may yet come when we find ourselves scattered instead beneath every star in the sky...

Upon my life, I have woken whoever was asleep, and made heard whoever still had ears to hear.

An address by the honorable Deputy, Mr. AbdulWahab Homad