Ahmad Zuayyin

**Tariq Ahmad Zuayyin** (Arabic: طارق احمد زعيّن; b. 10 April 1919 in Jerusalem, d. 16 January 1989 in Ramallah) was a Palestinian politician and educator, who founded the Palestinian Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in 1949, serving as its first Regional Secretary.

## Biography

Zuayyin was born in 1919 in Jerusalem, around the same time as the formation of the British Mandate for Palestine. His father worked in the mandatory civil service from 1920 to 1927. He moved with his family to Paris in 1935 at age 16, after his father was assigned a diplomatic liaison role in France by the British. Zuayyin lived through the Nazi occupation during the Second World War, which claimed the life of both his parents and left him temporarily deaf after a bombing raid by the Royal Air Force in 1944. He graduated from the Sorbonne University in Paris in 1947, after which he returned to Palestine to begin a career as a French teacher, teaching in several secondary schools in the West Bank. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Zuayyin was made responsible for escorting women, children and the elderly to the local bomb shelter under his school in Ramallah, and after the war volunteered with local reconstruction alongside his job as a teacher. In 1949, he founded the Palestinian Regional Branch of the Ba'ath Party in Ramallah with 34 colleagues and 4 Syrian delegates from the National Command. Following the inauguration of Ragheb al-Nashashibi of the National Defence Party as first President of Palestine, Zuayyin commissioned an outlook for the long-term goal of Palestinian unity with other Arab republics, which upset Nashashibi's elitist-nationalist line, resulting in a state ban on Ba'athist participation in politics. Nevertheless, Zuayyin quit teaching full-time the following year as the party continued to rapidly grow in size, and Nashashibi's death shortly after all but buried the conservative government's memory of Zuayyin's party, as well as its popularity among the Palestinian officers' corps, which was almost completely working-class in origin.

After the Ba'athist takeover of Syria in 1963, the Palestinian Regional Branch received a great boost in funding and credibility, contesting legislative elections with the third- and later second-most seats. Zuayyin and his supporters in the officer corps of the Army of the Republic of Palestine backed the Palestine Arab Party civilian leadership during the 1964 coup, which ousted the Independence Party from power. Following Palestine Arab Party leader Ahmad Shukeiri's election as president the following year, the Palestine Arab Congress was taken over by a Ba'athist-Palestine Arab Party coalition, and Zuayyin was appointed Prime Minister of Palestine by Shukeiri, although this was mostly a symbolic role as the Ba'ath Party was almost immediately completely sidelined in the Revolutionary Command Council by Shukeiri and his contemporaries. Zuayyin sided with Syria following the Syrian-Iraqi schism in the Ba'ath Party in 1966, and the Palestinian Regional Branch's Regional Command officially became subordinate to the National Command in Damascus. Later that year, Zuayyin was invited to Damascus by Syrian Ba'athists to assist with theory, and the role of Regional Secretary of the Palestinian Regional Branch was taken up by General Rifaf Khan, one of the highest ranking Ba'athists in the armed forces.

Following the Arab defeat a year later in the Six-Day War and Palestine's subsequent decade of occupation by Israel, Zuayyin led the party spiritually from exile in Cairo alongside top Palestinian leadership. Beginning in 1970, his party became the spearhead of a unified resistance movement known as the Palestinian National Salvation Front; by the start of the Sinai War in 1976, Zuayyin had been sidelined by the leadership of the resistance, namely Khan, who chaired the Military Committee of the Palestinian Regional Branch and Yasser Arafat, commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the most powerful of the multiple militias in the partisan front. Following Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza and Sinai at the end of the war in 1979, Zuayyin returned to Palestine. He did not participate in the postwar Ba'athist government led by President Khan, but continued his role as spiritual leader of the party until his death in early 1989 at the age of 69.

## Personal life

Zuayyin was born into an Arab Christian family; his father was Greek Orthodox and his mother from a Cairene Coptic family, but his parents raised their children in a secular home. In a 1988 interview, he admitted to having become an atheist at the age of 22, as a result of the amazing destruction and hopelessness he witnessed during the height of the Second World War in France, where he lived with his family.

In 1951, at age 32, he married Maryam Suleif, with whom he would have one son and four daughters. Suleif died in 1977 while in exile with her husband and children in Cairo; Zuayyin never remarried. His younger sister, Nadia Zuayyin, married President Rifaf Khan in 1980; she died with her husband in a plane crash one year after her brother's death.