Antoun Sa’adeh embodied the tragedy of his nation, which had
lived under the yoke of occupation since the beginning of the sixteenth
century. Hardly would it rid itself of one enslaver before another colonizer
would invade it — seizing its spirit, its civilization, its natural resources,
and its production. The occupiers looked at geographic Syria with disdain,
humiliating it, tearing it to pieces, while the inhabitants submitted without
notable resistance, obsessed as they were with their internal divisions. They
had not yet reached the stage of forming a national state through which they
might feel themselves to be one body with a single destiny. Thus, some remained
submissive to the Ottomans because of their religious affinity with that
empire, while others welcomed Western foreigners, also in the name of religious
affiliation. Neither party thought of uniting with their compatriots who had
shared life with them on the same land for thousands of years. Antoun Sa’adeh
stood alone at the Brummana School, still a child, refusing to raise the
Turkish/Ottoman flag on the pole erected in the school courtyard.
Later on, at the end of the First World War, he defied the
elders of his community as they argued over who was best suited to rule them:
the French, the British, or the Ottomans. He asked them
innocently:
“Wouldn’t it be better if we govern ourselves and earn our
own independence?"
