natural homeland. The notion of a Syrian people is the cornerstone of the SSNP, and is defined according to the Party as the people inhabiting the Fertile Crescent, whose culture and socio-economic conditions have been a direct consequence of its own interaction with the natural environment. The Syrian people, according to the Party's founder, is a cultural and socio-economic body of people hailing from a very heterogeneous background, but whose social mixing and assimilation over time within the Levantine basin has allowed for the emergence of a high settled civilization and for the extension of this people over the entirety of Natural Syria. In a clear departure from ethnic, racial and religious understandings of a nation, the Syrian people is a "mixture of races generated by migrations and intermarriages", its social life and cohesion having been shaped and determined by the environment and geography in which it developed. Hence the SSNP rejects racial notions of nationalism, Saadeh himself having ridiculed European racial doctrines in the opening chapters of the Genesis of Nations. Romantic nationalism The attitude of the party and its founder towards minority separatism and movements calling for ethnically-separate homelands was one of outright hostility. Saadeh was also hostile to all religiously-motivated political movements, or movements that did not call for the separation between Church (or Mosque) and State. Thus he called Wahhabism and Islamism a "return to the desert", a "dry ideology of Arabian tribes" that had no commonalities with the high civilization of the Fertile Crescent. The incoming Jewish migrants to Southern Syria (Palestine) and the Jewish communities were criticized for their "foreign and racial loyalties", their unwillingness to assimilate, and their active willingness to create an ethnically Jewish state in Palestine, with Saadeh deeming the Jews as the community unable and unwilling to assimilate, and having criticized the notion that Jewishness can be a cornerstone for a nation-state. For the SSNP, the Jews do not constitute a nation as they are a heterogeneous mixture of peoples in a similar sense that Muslims and Christians do not constitute a nation. Similarly, the Kurds were attacked for their communitarianism and their disposition to establish a Kurdish state in the north. In what relates to the Arab–Israeli conflict, the party has since its establishment adopted a hard-lined anti-Zionist stance, while retaining its belief that a secular and democratic state in Palestine is the only proper solution to the conflict.