the editor-in-chef, restating that the SSNP is not a National Socialist party and that no stance should be taken vis-à-vis the Allies or the Axis. By that time, the SSNP had grown exponentially and had clashed on many occasions with its primary ideological rival, the Kataeb Party, a Spanish Fascist-Inspired party that had been founded by Pierre Gemayel, a pharmacist and athlete after his return from the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Being vehemently anti-communist in its early days, a position that would later change, it had also clashed with the Syrian-Lebanese Communist Party, the latter accusing the SSNP of Nazi sympathies. While the Kataeb was committed to the notion of Lebanon as a nation state defined as an entity presiding over the borders outlined first by the Sykes–Picot agreement in 1916, and afterwards by the French administrative division of its mandate into six states including the state of Greater Lebanon, and had espoused a strong bond between the nation and the church as well as outright social ultraconservatism, the SSNP rejected these national claim on the basis that the borders outlining the newly created states were fictitious, resulting from colonialism, and do not reflect any historical and social realities. The party claimed that Greater Syria as defined by Saadeh represents the national ideal encompassing the historical people of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, bound together by a clearly defined geography and a common historical, social and cultural development path away from all sectarianism. The Party took a radical stance against the traditional notable class in Syria and Lebanon, including the large landowners and feudal lords, and called for the emancipation of the working class and the peasantry away from religion and sectarianism, into a socialist-inspired production-based economy. The SSNP also called for the reclamation of Alexandretta which had been arbitrarily given to Turkey by France. With the start of the Arab–Israeli conflict in 1948, Saadeh radicalized the party's Anti-Zionist stance by declaring that "Our struggle with the enemy is not a struggle for borders but for existence", and called on Party members to fight in the Arab Liberation Army, although many regular Lebanese and Syrian army officers were already Party members. When the Lebanese Communist Party, which had fought against Saadeh's return in 1947 and which had been fighting for the title of head of the country's Anti-Zionist movement, declared its acceptance of the Partition Plan, infuriated and increasingly zealous SSNP