By Rima Najjar
Syria honors its indigenous majority; Israel manufactured one at gunpoint
The debate surrounding the possible removal of “Arab” from the official name of the Syrian state — Syrian Arab Republic — has reignited foundational questions about national identity, ethnic plurality, and historical justice.
While some actors in the Trump-era negotiations have expressed support for retaining the term, Israel’s involvement and commentary on this issue are rife with hypocrisy. For a state that engineered its own demographic transformation through violence and terror — benignly termed “settler colonialism” — and continues to deny national recognition to millions of Palestinians, Israeli pronouncements on Syria’s naming appear not only politically untenable but ethically incoherent.
Syria’s Arab-majority identity is a demographic and cultural reality, rooted in centuries of indigenous continuity. The inclusion of “Arab” in its national name reflects this foundation — not an imposed fiction.
While Ba’athist ideology may have elevated Arab nationalism in exclusionary ways, this should not be conflated with Syria’s legitimate identity as an Arab-majority nation. Minority communities such as Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, and Turkmen have contributed richly to Syria’s cultural mosaic, yet their presence does not dilute the centrality of its Arab character. The notion that Syria must alter its name to reflect a form of symbolic inclusion is both conceptually flawed and disproportionate to demographic truth.
Indeed, the call to drop “Arab” from Syria’s name collapses under comparative scrutiny. Should France abandon “French Republic” because of Algerian or Vietnamese minorities? Should Japan reconsider its national identity to account for Ainu and Korean residents? Would Turkey drop its name due to a substantial Kurdish population? In each of these cases, the answer is clearly no.
The nation-state reflects its majority identity while safeguarding minority rights through institutions — not through semantic erasure. Syria’s case is no different. Arabs constitute approximately 80–90% of the population, with Kurds around 10%, and other minorities each comprising far smaller proportions. To suggest that Syria’s name must be changed based on these demographics is an argument that fails both empirically and ethically.
“Syria will always remain the beating heart of Arabism and will never give up its national identity.”
— Bashar al-Assad
Though spoken by a leader whose regime distorted Arab nationalism into authoritarian control, the statement inadvertently affirms a deeper truth: Syria’s Arab identity is not a Ba’athist invention but a reflection of historical continuity rooted in its indigenous majority. The irony is that even the machinery of exclusion had to invoke the undeniable legitimacy of Arabism to justify its grip.
By contrast, it is Israel’s national identity that warrants scrutiny. Unlike Syria’s organic majority, Israel’s Jewish majority was manufactured through a settler colonial enterprise that reconfigured land and population, through a campaign of terror, to suit an exclusivist project.
The Zionist movement, backed by British imperial policy and galvanized through the Balfour Declaration, orchestrated immigration waves that displaced indigenous Palestinians and reshaped the region’s demographic fabric. The 1948 Nakba, the Absentee Property Law, and the Alia process institutionalized mechanisms of exclusion and erasure, transforming a historically Arab-majority land into a Jewish-majority state through violence and legal manipulation.
Even today, Israel demands recognition as a “Jewish state,” despite the fact that millions of Palestinians — whether citizens within its borders, subjects under occupation, or refugees exiled to neighboring countries — remain politically unacknowledged and excluded from the national framework. When the full geography of historic Palestine is considered — including Gaza, the West Bank, and the refugee communities in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria — Palestinian Arabs comprise a demographic majority. This enduring reality dismantles the myth of Jewish national dominance and exposes the artificiality of a state narrative built on displacement and denial.
This demographic reality exposes not only the ethical contradictions in Israel’s national claims, but the historical misrepresentation on which they rest. It stands in stark contrast to the foundational myth of Israel as a Jewish homeland, which was established when Jews were a small minority in the region. The persistence of this majority — despite decades of displacement, occupation, and demographic engineering — renders Israel’s claim to exclusive national identity not only untenable, but deeply at odds with the lived geography of the land.
Naming a nation isn’t cosmetic — it encodes sovereignty, legitimacy, and moral vision. Syria’s Arab designation reflects what is. Israel’s demands reflect what was forcibly made. One name stands with history. The other stands in its way.
Naming a nation is never merely symbolic — it carries the weight of history, sovereignty, and moral vision. Syria has held that line. It is Israel that must now confront the truth it has long refused to name.
Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.
12 July 2025
Source: countercurrents.org