The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Read online

  But still the grand sharif remained silent.

  Feisal returned to Mecca on June 20, 1915, and delivered the Damascus Protocol to his father. The family gathered in council yet again. This time it deliberated for an entire week, “one of the most difficult16 weeks of my life,” Feisal would later tell the Anglo-Arab historian George Antonius. Grand Sharif Hussein balanced on a knife’s edge: Depending on which way he jumped, the British would help or harm him, but so would the Turks, and it was not clear whose forces could help or harm him more. Even though Great Britain governed the mightiest empire in the world, Turkish forces were so far more than holding their own against it. Britain hardly seemed invincible. Nevertheless Feisal urged his father to jump in its direction and away from the Turks. The British Empire had great resources; it could sustain terrible losses and still win at the end; and the Syrian conspirators were well organized and powerful. Hussein should accept leadership of their movement and present the Damascus Protocol to the British. Abdullah agreed with his younger brother; even before the war began, he had been urging action against the Ottomans with British aid. But Hussein knew, perhaps better than his sons, how merciless would be the Young Turk response, especially during wartime. He hesitated.

  In the end his religious beliefs proved decisive, or that is how he presented it afterward, in a typically convoluted justification: “God selected us17 to arouse our nation to restrain the unjust and to banish the insolent ones, the heretics, from the land and from among the true worshipers, requesting for them what we request for ourselves, namely to make us desire to follow what He [Muhammad] brought [Sharia, religious law as set forth in the Quran] and to drive the evil from our tribes and our Arab communities to whose race, language, customs, comforts and pleasures these heedless ones showed enmity.” Although he denied it, personal ambition cannot have been absent from his calculations. The British promised to guarantee his independence from foreign interference; their own role in the future Arabian state remained ambiguous, but surely that was better than the continual Ottoman scheming and plotting against him. Moreover the British seemed to be waving the caliphate before him as a further inducement to action. Whether Hussein truly hoped to become caliph at this stage, however, no one has established. Most historians think not.

  Sometime in mid-July Hussein took the plunge, dispatching a trusted messenger18 to Cairo carrying two letters. The first was a brief note from Abdullah to Storrs, dated July 14, 1915, requesting that the British allow Egypt to send to Mecca stores of grain for the annual hajj; they had been held back for the past two years; their resumption “would be an important19 factor in laying the foundations of our mutual advantage. This should suffice for a person of your grasp.” The second letter, undated and unsigned but undoubtedly composed by Hussein since it dealt with the crux of the matter, was longer and uncharacteristically clear. Essentially it repeated the Damascus Protocol and asked quite simply whether the British approved it and warned that if they did not, “we will consider ourselves20 free in word and deed from the bonds of our previous declaration which we made through Ali Effendi [X].” Thus recommenced the fatal McMahon-Hussein correspondence, whose conflicting interpretations have divided Jews, Arabs, and Britons for nearly a hundred years.

  Even before the sharif’s letter arrived, the British knew of its existence and something of its contents from Wingate, who had established his own line of communication with Mecca. “I think,” Wingate crowed to Clayton, “you will find21 that he will be strongly in favour of obtaining our assistance.” True enough. And when the messenger appeared in Cairo on or about August 22, he supplemented the written documents with an oral statement: “On handing [me] the letter22 at Taif, which was in the presence of his four sons, Ali, Abdullah, Faisal and Zeid, the Sherif told me to tell Mr. Storrs—‘We are now ready and well prepared.’ His son Abdullah then said: ‘Tell Mr. Storrs that our word is a word of honour and we will carry it out even at the cost of our lives; we are not now under the orders of the Turks but the Turks are under our orders.’”

  Cairo was delighted—until it read the proposed borders of the new Arab state. Hussein had copied them word for word from the Damascus Protocol, but they were too expansive from the British point of view. “The Sharif had opened23 his mouth … a good deal too wide,” Storrs would write afterward. McMahon cabled London: “His pretensions24 are in every way exaggerated, no doubt considerably beyond his hope of acceptance, but it seems very difficult to treat with them in detail without seriously discouraging him.” Eventually, after much consultation with London, he tried to square the circle. “We confirm to you25 the terms of Lord Kitchener’s message … in which was stated clearly our desire for the independence of Arabia and its inhabitants, together with our approval of the Arab Caliphate when it should be proclaimed,” he wrote to Hussein on August 29. But “with regard to the questions of limits, frontiers and boundaries, it would appear to be premature to consume our time in discussing such details in the heat of war.” This was the message carried back to Mecca.

  Hussein received it coolly and responded quickly (on September 9), angrily, and at length. Now he spoke as leader of an organized revolutionary movement, he emphasized, not merely for himself; the borders he had indicated were essential to the well-being of any future Arab state. George Antonius, who first translated and published the McMahon-Hussein correspondence in his classic account of the Arab Revolt and who knew and admired the grand sharif, described his writing style: “a tight network of parentheses,26 incidentals, allusions, saws and apophthegms, woven together by a process of literary orchestration into a sonorous rigmarole.” Which is why we quote very selectively here. “The coldness and hesitation which you have displayed in the question of the limits and boundaries … might be taken to infer an estrangement,” Hussein charged. And a little beneath: “It is not I personally who am demanding of these limits which include only our race, but that they are all proposals of the people who, in short, believe that they are necessary for economic life.” And finally, driving home the main point: “I cannot admit that you,27 as a man of sound opinion will deny to be necessary for our existence [the borders suggested in the Damascus Protocol]; nay, they are the essential essence of our life, material and moral.”

  The two parties had arrived at a seeming impasse. The matter might have rested there, for if the British declined to accept the borders Hussein wanted, then he might decline to launch the rebellion they favored. Perhaps Hussein could have continued to prevaricate, waiting out the war, albeit on the edge of the knife, without committing to either side. He had waited most of his life for the sharifate, after all. But as is so often the case in wartime, new and unexpected developments altered everything.

  “I am a descendant of Omar28 Ibn El Khattab, the second Khalifa of El Islam who had the title of El Farug, which means separator. He was so called for having separated the right from the wrong. The descendants of Omar El Farug were all living in Damascus, but some centuries ago a part of them emigrated to El Mosul. At present there are thirty families of them living in El Mosul and twenty families in Damascus. I was born in El Mosul in 1891 …”

  So begins the statement of Sharif Muhammad al-Faruki, an Arab lieutenant in the Turkish army who deserted to the British at Gallipoli in August, to tell them of the Arab plot and to enlist their support. By October the British had brought him to Egypt to be debriefed by their chief intelligence officer in the Middle East, Gilbert Clayton. Faruki told him: “I entered as Member in a secret Society started by the Arab officers in the Turkish Army … I have done several services and carried out several missions for the Society in Aleppo and environs.” But the reach of the secret society extended beyond Aleppo, Faruki assured the Englishman. It stretched to “Damascus and Beirut provinces … a branch being started in every important town or station.”

  “We know well the real military situation of the two contending forces,” Faruki continued, “and we know that our siding with the Allies will diminish greatly the two f
orces of their enemies and will cause them immense trouble.” But he knew much more than that. “Moreover the English have declared publicly that they will help the Arabs against the Turks.” In addition: “We also found out that the Sherif of Mecca was in communication with the High Commissioner in Egypt, and the English are willing to give the Sherif the necessary arms and ammunition for the attainment of his object. That the English have given their consent to the Sherif establishing an Arab Empire but the limits of his Empire were not defined.” Faruki added that the secret societies had renounced allegiance to the sultan of Turkey and sworn instead to support Hussein. The grand sharif would lead their rebellion.

  Faruki knew the terms outlined in the Damascus Protocol and, it would seem, even McMahon’s response to it. He had deserted in part in order to argue for the boundaries advocated in the protocol, and although he was not authorized to speak for the secret societies, he acted as though he were, and the British came to treat him as though he were. “A guarantee of the independence of the Arabian Peninsula would not satisfy,” Clayton reported glumly after talking with him, “but this together with the institution of an increasing measure of autonomous Government … in Palestine and Mesopotamia would probably secure their [secret societies’] friendship. Syria is of course included in their programme.” Faruki conceded that France possessed legitimate interests in Syria, but he insisted that French influence there be strictly limited. If it was not, then his societies would resist by force of arms. “Our scheme embraces all the Arab countries including Syria and Mesopotamia, but if we cannot have all [then] we want as much as we can get,” he declared imprecisely. More specifically, he said, the plotters insisted on keeping “in Arabia purely Arab districts of Aleppo, Damascus, Hama and Homs.” Here is the first mention of a geographical caveat that would prove a stumbling block to all future understanding and goodwill. The formulation appears29 for the first time in a cable reporting on discussions with Faruki that McMahon sent to London on October 19, 1915.

  As for the nature of the Arab state to be established, Faruki explained: “The Arab countries [are] to be governed by the principles of decentralization; each country to have the sort of Government which best suits it, but to be ruled by the Central government, i.e. the seat of the Khalifate. Sherif Hussein of Mecca to be the Khalifa and Sultan of the new empire.” Christians, Druze, and Neiria would have the same rights as Muslims in the new state, he promised, “but the Jews will be governed by a special law.” This did not augur well, but apparently the British saw no reason to query it.

  Essentially Faruki was reiterating the sharif’s program as set forth in his most recent letter to Cairo. He added flesh to the bare bones of British knowledge about the secret societies, exaggerating their strength, the extent of their organization, and their influence; also his own importance. Nevertheless the British believed him. They believed too a further embroidery, one of breathtaking audacity—a threat, or rather a bluff, or to put it baldly, a falsehood. Clayton reported that Faruki had “stated that Turkey and Germany are fully alive to the situation and have already approached the leaders of the Young Arab Committee, and indeed have gone so far as to promise them the granting of their demands in full … The Committee, however, are strongly inclined towards England.”

  Historians find no archival evidence that the Turks and Germans were prepared to grant the Arab demands. But really they have no need to search for such documents. Events soon would put the lie to Faruki’s assertion. By now, far from wanting to woo Arab nationalists, the Turks wanted only to destroy them, as a series of brutal trials, imprisonments, and hangings in Damascus would disclose within a matter of months.

  In October 1915, however, Clayton believed that the Arab plotters were powerful and that Germany and Turkey were near to winning them over. He warned London: “To reject the Arab proposals entirely or even to seek to evade the issues [emphasis added] will be to throw the Young Arab party definitely into the arms of the enemy. Their machinery will at once be employed against us throughout the Arab countries … the religious element will come into play and the Jihad, so far a failure, may become a very grim reality the effects of which would certainly be far-reaching and at the present crisis might well be disastrous.” Note the italicized words: They must refer to McMahon’s attempt, in the letter of August 29, to postpone discussion of future boundaries. Now Clayton was repudiating McMahon’s strategy. He was pushing for defining the boundaries immediately and in a way that would satisfy Arab aspirations. He thought it was necessary if Britain hoped to outbid the Germans.

  Why was Clayton so willing to accept Faruki’s embellishments? The young deserter’s arrival in Cairo was but one element of a remarkable and, for the British, not particularly happy conjuncture. He appeared before Clayton almost simultaneously with Hussein’s chilly letter of September 9. Faruki confirmed the sharif’s claims: He was speaking not merely for himself but for a larger movement; his ambitions were not merely personal; it really was the larger movement that had established the boundaries of the future Arabian federation adumbrated in his last letter. This confirmation was worrying enough, but, perhaps more important, Faruki’s arrival coincided with a torrent of bad news about the war: Bulgaria had entered it on the side of the Central Powers, affording them not only an increment of strength but a direct overland route from Germany to Constantinople. At Gallipoli, British losses mounted daily; morale there had plummeted; the British beachhead remained insecure, so that withdrawal seemed increasingly likely; but withdrawal was another word for retreat, and retreat was another word for defeat. Meanwhile in Mesopotamia, British forces were overextended, and soon would arrive devastating reports of disasters at Ctesiphon and Kut.

  For all these reasons the Cairo contingent was disposed not merely to believe Faruki but to act upon the belief. Britain must enlist the sharif and his movement, or else Germany would. In memos and cables they stressed Britain’s dire predicament in the Middle East and the grim consequences of inaction. So did Wingate from Khartoum and Sykes at the War Committee meeting. McMahon prepared to write the most important letter of his career, one that would induce Hussein finally to throw down the gauntlet to Turkey. But if he thought he was resolving a difficult situation, he was profoundly mistaken. “Aleppo, Damascus, Hama and Homs”: These place-names signified enormous complexities and ramifications; they would haunt his future, and everyone else’s.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence

  THIS BRINGS US to the crux of the matter, the rock on which British-Arab relations subsequently foundered, the misunderstanding, or perhaps the duplicity, that eventually colored everything else.

  The most important letter in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence was McMahon’s reply to the grand sharif, written while Faruki’s farrago of truths, half-truths, exaggerations, and downright lies were fresh and unquestioned in British minds, and while the alarming reports about Bulgaria and Gallipoli and Mesopotamia were likewise fresh. McMahon dated the message October 24, 1915, and immediately took up the question of the boundaries of the future Arab state:

  The districts of Mersina1 and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab and should be excluded from the proposed limits and boundaries. With the above modification, and without prejudice to our existing treaties with Arab chiefs, we accept those limits and boundaries and, in regard to those portions of the territories therein in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interests of her Ally, France, I am empowered in the name of the Government of Great Britain to give the following assurances and make the following reply to your letter.

  Subject to the modifications referred to above, McMahon wrote, Britain would recognize and support the independence of the proposed Arab federation with borders previously defined by Sharif Hussein—that is to say, with the borders first traced in the Damascus Protocol. She would guarantee the Muslim holy places against exte
rnal aggression. She would advise and assist the Arabs in establishing suitable forms of government in the various states that would comprise the federation. In return, the Arabs must agree to look only to Britain for advice and support and must accept that Britain could assert special measures of administrative control in the vilayets of Baghdad and Basra.

  McMahon wrote in English—he could neither speak nor write in Arabic—so his letter to Hussein had to be translated. Storrs wrote of the translation process in his memoirs: “Our Arabic correspondence2 with Mecca was prepared by Ruhi, a fair though not a profound Arabist (and a better agent than scholar); and checked often under high pressure by myself. I had no Deputy, Staff or office, so that during my absence on mission the work was carried on (better perhaps) by others, but the continuity was lost.” What Storrs did not record3 was that his own knowledge of written Arabic likewise was limited. Conceivably the imbroglio that resulted from this most infamous letter can be traced to nothing more than an imprecise rendering of English into Arabic caused perhaps by ignorance or even by haste.

  At any rate, once it had been translated, McMahon gave the missive to Hussein’s “trusted and excellent messenger, Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Arif Arayfan,” who set out once again upon the long and difficult journey from Cairo to Mecca. Hussein would have received and read it with some satisfaction. But in certain respects he would have found it vague and perhaps even troubling.

  Parts of the crucial paragraph require explanation, but regardless of the language in which they are read, they are not ambiguous. McMahon’s first qualification to Hussein’s suggested boundaries was the districts of Mersina and Alexandretta: These he wished to exclude from the proposed Arab kingdom because he suspected that France would claim them after the war, or even possibly because Britain might wish to claim Alexandretta before the French did. As for the second qualification regarding “our existing treaties with Arab chiefs,” this referred primarily to the line of principalities along the east coast of Arabia on the Indian Ocean with which the British government in India had established relations. With regard to the “portions of territories … in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interests of her Ally, France,” McMahon simply was recognizing that Britain’s most important partner in the war might make additional territorial claims in Syria that Britain would likely be obliged to support, although she did not know precisely what the claims might be and actually rather begrudged them. And finally, as for Baghdad and Basra, McMahon mentioned them to satisfy the territorial ambitions of the British government in India, which still wanted to annex portions of Mesopotamia.