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

  In any event some Jews were equally hostile toward, equally contemptuous of, the Arabs. “Had we permitted21 the squalid, superstitious, ignorant fellahin … to live in close contact with the Jewish pioneers,” wrote one, “the slender chances of success … would have been impaired, since we had no power … to enforce progressive methods or even to ensure respect for private property.” This jarring tone was not uncommon. Palestinian farming, as practiced by the fellahin, suffered from “typical oriental lack of foresight,” sniffed Samuel Tolkowsky, a Zionist leader who advocated the application of scientific methods to agriculture. “Ignorant and stupid22 as the Fellahin are,” began one lecturer to the English Chovevi Zion Association, who then went on to damn with faint praise the fellah’s “rude virtues.” But again the disdain did not flow in one direction only: Some Arabs treated Jewish settlers as they treated the Christian tourists whom they hoped to fleece: their property and their money were fair game.

  On the land and in the towns Jews and Arabs often competed. In the countryside, where the Jews employed the latest farming techniques, they were likely to win. “In the Arab orange groves 350 boxes of oranges per acre is considered a very good average yield,” wrote a correspondent for the Zionist journal Palestine. “The Jewish planters obtain23 far higher returns and the writer himself had in 1912–13 an average crop of 638 boxes and in 1913–14 an average crop of 757 boxes per acre.” In the towns Arab artisans and merchants likewise feared Jewish competitors. In 1891 authorities24 in Jerusalem sent a telegram to the Ottoman grand vizier begging him to prohibit Russian Jews from immigrating to their country. The quarter century before25 1914 saw a stream of such communications and the formation of organizations designed to keep the Jews out, or at least to keep them from buying property, as well as anti-Zionist newspaper editorials and pamphlets. None of it had any effect—the Jews continued to arrive. In a typical piece a journalist in the Arab newspaper al-Asmai complained, “Their labor competes26 with the local population and creates their own means of sustenance. The local population cannot stand up to their competition.”

  Over time Arab protests grew more sophisticated and merged with a developing nationalist movement, of which anti-Zionism was merely a component. Suffice to say here that some politically conscious Arabs regarded Jews not merely as an economic threat to local merchants and farmers but rather as a geopolitical menace to a larger Arab cause. Five months before the outbreak of world war, one young Arab confided to his diary: “Palestine is the connecting link which binds the Arabian Peninsula with Egypt and Africa. If the Jews conquer [Palestine] they will prevent the linking of the Arab nation; indeed they will split it into two unconnected parts. This will weaken the cause of Arabism and will prevent its solidarity and unity as a nation.” In another entry he put his finger on the crux of the matter, in words that continue to vex us even today: “If this country is the cradle of the Jews’ spirituality and the birthplace of their history, then the Arabs have another undeniable right [to Palestine] which is that they propagated their language and culture in it. [The Jews’] right27 had died with the passage of time; our right is alive and unshakeable.”

  It may be correctly deduced that the Ottoman government held ambivalent feelings about Jews. On the one hand, it had no wish to see them established within the empire as an autonomous assembly cherishing national aspirations—the various ethnic groups already under its rule gave it enough to contend with. Both the sultan and the revolutionary Young Turks who deposed him were therefore resolutely anti-Zionist. On the other hand, the sultan and the Young Turks welcomed Jewish immigrants on an individual basis, deeming them potentially useful and industrious citizens. They tried to steer them into the Anatolian region of the empire, away from Palestine. But it was Palestine28 that beckoned to the Zionists, and they continued to find a way in, sometimes bribing Turkish officials who had been instructed by Constantinople to exclude them, sometimes simply relying on the inefficiency of imperial officials who could not be bothered to take action against them after they purchased land.

  Such ambivalence and inefficiency offended many Arabs. Under Abdul Hamid II they had little scope for opposition; under the Young Turks they had more (although not much); but whether on the eve of World War I the Ottoman regime was generally unpopular in Palestine is a matter that divides historians. That the Jews were unpopular seems undeniable, although how deep and widespread their unpopularity was and what the antagonism might have led to under other circumstances remains uncertain. Every significant historical development has roots that may be traced back indefinitely. The Balfour Declaration was not, in and of itself, the source of trouble in a land that previously had been more or less at peace, but nor was it a mere signpost on a road heading undivertibly toward a cliff. No one can say what the course of events in Palestine might have been without it. What did come was the product of forces and factors entirely unforeseen.

  CHAPTER 2

  Ottomanism, Arabism, and Sharif Hussein

  WHAT CAME WAS the most destructive and widespread war that humankind had yet experienced. One by one the great powers joined in. Few understood that Europe would be recast, the entire world irrevocably altered.

  For twenty years the great powers had been aligning themselves. When war began, the alignments crystallized, with Germany, Austria-Hungary, and (belatedly) the Ottomans on one side, and Russia, France, and Great Britain on the other. During the blood-drenched years that followed, smaller countries chose sides according to their interests and calculations: Italy, Romania, and Greece sided with Britain and her allies; Bulgaria with the Germans. The opposing forces were very nearly evenly matched, and only when another great power, the United States, entered the fray in April 1917 on the side of the Allies could the German-led coalition finally be defeated.

  The Turkish decision to side with Germany had been probable but not inevitable. Germany was the enemy of Turkey’s greatest enemy, Russia. Russia was Turkey’s enemy because she coveted free access to the Sea of Marmara and thence, through the Dardanelles, to the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas; Turkey controlled access to the Sea of Marmara and would not let the Russians through. Twice Russia tried to force the issue, and twice she had been thwarted. In 1856 Britain and France, who did not want the Russian navy in the Mediterranean, helped Turkey to defeat her in the Crimean War; in 1878 a concert of European powers, meeting at the Congress of Berlin, made her back off after she defeated the Ottomans in the Russo-Turkish War. (The Congress did permit weakening the Ottoman Empire in other ways, allowing Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro to declare independence and granting limited autonomy to Bulgaria.) In August 1914 Russia seemed ready to try again—and this time both Britain and France were her allies. Naturally Turkey turned to Germany for support.

  It has been argued that this need not have happened, that Allied diplomacy with regard to the Ottomans was inept. Some Britons thought their country’s alliance with Russia ill conceived, especially after the Young Turks and their Committee of Union and Progress led a successful revolution in 1908: better to ally with these advocates of modernization and representative government (however far they were from realizing those ideals), they felt, than with the tsar of Russia, the world’s most autocratic major head of state. Others pointed out that it ill behooved Britain, with nearly a hundred million Muslim subjects in South Asia, Egypt, Sudan, and elsewhere, to make an enemy of the world’s other great Muslim power, the Ottoman Empire, seat of the caliphate. When the war began, but before Turkey chose sides, some believed that Britain should make Russia declare she had no interest in taking Constantinople—that would have allayed Turkish fears. Others held that Winston Churchill, secretary of the British navy, was needlessly, if characteristically, provocative when, shortly after the German declaration of war but before the Ottomans chose sides, he commandeered two Turkish battleships (paid for by popular subscription in Turkey) that were under construction in British shipyards.

  In fact, the Ottoman government was divided over which all
iance to favor or whether simply to stay out of the conflict altogether. Enver Pasha, the minister of war and leader of the Young Turk movement, forced the issue. To make up for the two warships that the British had taken, Germany had given Turkey two more, the Goeben and the Breslau. Enver Pasha gave orders for Germans disguised as Turkish sailors aboard the two warships to bombard Russian ports on the other side of the Black Sea—without the knowledge of a majority in his cabinet. Some of its members never forgave him. Still, with Russia seemingly ready to advance, and with Britain and France both committed to Russia, it is hard to imagine Turkey doing anything significantly different. And with Turkey in the war and therefore in the crucible, so too were all her dominions, including Palestine.

  In November 1914 the armies of Russia, a reactionary empire, and the Ottoman, a decrepit one, lurched into gory battle near the Turkish fortress city of Erzurum. Long before then, however, the British had been considering how to weaken the Turkish foe and help their Russian ally. They recalled certain prewar talks with dissident Arabs. They recalled reports from their Middle Eastern agents and diplomats on the aspirations and activities of these people. Perhaps, mused the British, Arab discontent with Turkish rule could be turned to advantage.

  In 1914 the Arab nationalist movement was not a major factor inside the Ottoman Empire; nor was it a negligible one. Its immediate progenitors were an assortment of mid- to late-nineteenth-century clerics and intellectuals from Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Virtually all of them longed for the empire to modernize and regain its former status as a great world power, able to protect the East, including Arabs, from the West. How this recovery would be accomplished remained a matter of contention. Some Arabs emphasized that Islam would confront the European threat; they became pan-Islamists. Others stressed that Arabs within pan-Islamism would not merely participate in the Ottoman revival but repossess the caliphate from Turkey. A few preached the unity of all Arabs within the empire regardless of religion. Historians group this bundle of approaches under a single term, Ottomanism, because they all envisioned revival of the Ottoman Empire.

  Pan-Islamism and Ottomanism predate a third Middle Eastern ideology, Arabism, which emerged as a significant factor only during the six years before the outbreak of World War I. Advocates of Arabism looked forward to the revival of the empire and held views on religious and political questions as disparate as those of the champions of Ottomanism. But they went further than the Ottomanists in that they also wanted autonomy (home rule, as the British called it) for the various Arab groups inside the empire. They did not advocate complete separation and independence; full-fledged Arab nationalism1 envisioning separate sovereign Arab states did not appear as a noteworthy force until after 1914.

  Sultan Abdul Hamid II probably helped delay the emergence of Arabism. A despot who reigned from 1876 to 1909, he was convinced of his divine right to rule but fearful of his people. At the outset he promised them liberal reforms and accepted a liberal constitution, but it was a pose designed to attract Western support. When the Western powers meddled and interfered with his modernizing projects instead of facilitating them, the sultan dropped it. He disavowed the constitution, imprisoned its author (a former grand vizier, or prime minister), and instituted personal rule that he never willingly relinquished. Paranoid, he employed ten thousand spies or more. They came to constitute a powerful and dangerous oligarchy within his realm, crisscrossing the empire and seeking out—or intentionally fabricating—accounts of disaffected subjects whose only defense against such charges was bribery. The spies’ reports poured into the offices in Constantinople, stoking the sultan’s fears. He had a harem of nine hundred women; one would check under his bed every night before he went to sleep. His tasters tried every morsel of food before he would touch it. His vigilant censors attempted to allay his terrors by cutting paragraphs, or entire stories, out of newspapers and journals and books, or by shutting down the presses altogether; but judges invariably confirmed his apprehensions with guilty verdicts in his corrupted courts. The sultan was subject to melancholia and fainting spells as well as murderous fits of rage: He ordered that his brother-in-law be strangled; also the grand vizier who had written the constitution and been imprisoned for his pains; also a slave girl who flirted with one of his sons.

  But the sultan understood the necessity of maintaining good relations with Arab notables. During his reign they received scholarships to his military academies, commissions in the army, sinecures at the court, imperial postings, and relatively generous treatment. Whether by policy or merely by chance, the sultan surrounded himself with Arab advisers; the point is that he did not discriminate against them. He also understood the importance of religion to his Arab subjects. In order to facilitate the hajj, the annual pilgrimage of the devout to Mecca, he ordered that a railway be constructed to connect Damascus with that city. By 1908 it reached as far as Medina. Nothing could disguise2 the brutality of his rule, but then the brutality helped postpone the emergence of Arabism; moreover his generosity with the Arab notables, coupled with his religious policies, tempered criticism from that quarter.

  Policies aimed at soothing Arabs did not necessarily appeal to Turks, however. The Turkish elite, army officers especially, increasingly despaired for their country and its empire, for the sultan was not merely cruel and brutal to his own people but ineffective in dealing with strangers. Where once Turkey had been a great power, now it was “the sick man of Europe.” Ravenous wolves—which is to say the powers that were not sick, and those that were less sick (Austria-Hungary), and the smaller, newer nations that felt themselves in the springtime of youth (Serbia and Romania)—gathered around the sickbed and licked their chops or considered snatching a morsel then and there. Two years into Abdul Hamid’s reign Russian soldiers marched to within ten miles of Constantinople; he gave in, but the Congress of Berlin saved him from the worst consequences of defeat, stripping him of much territory but not allowing the Russians access to the Mediterranean. In 1881, however, Abdul Hamid had to accept Greek occupation of Thessaly and, much worse, foreign control over the Ottoman national debt. In 1882 he had to accept British occupation and financial control of Egypt. In 1903 he had to accept the German plan to construct a railway through his territories from Berlin to Baghdad. He was unable to pacify his increasingly restive subjects in those Balkan territories that remained to him; Bulgaria finally achieved independence in 1908. He pacified his subjects in Armenia, or rather terrorized those who survived the twentieth century’s first attempt at something approaching ethnic cleansing. (The entire world was outraged, or claimed to be.)

  Organized resistance, when it came, originated in the army, which was warrened through and through by dissident Young Turk officers, members of secret societies, the most important of which was the Committee of Union and Progress. On July 3, 1908,3 a CUP major in the Third Army Corps stationed in Resna, Macedonia, raised the standard of revolt. His soldiers enthusiastically supported him. Troops sent to suppress the rebellion went over to the rebels. The uprising continued—indeed, it spread like wildfire. Within weeks the sultan surrendered. He restored the constitution of 1876 and reconvened the very parliament he had dissolved thirty-two years before. It decreed new elections, from which the CUP emerged victorious. The CUP proclaimed the equality of all Ottoman citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion. It pledged to uphold the reinstated constitution and parliamentary institutions. It promised to intensify Abdul Hamid II’s modernizing efforts. Enthusiasm reigned among most Turks and non-Turks alike throughout the Ottoman Empire.

  None of this pleased the sultan or his conservative supporters. Within months they were dabbling in counterrevolution, launching an attempt in April 1909. The army suppressed it; the CUP retained power. This meant the end for Abdul Hamid II and almost for the sultanate itself. The CUP deposed him4 and placed upon the throne an unappealing but relatively tractable figure, his younger brother. This gentleman served as a CUP puppet until his death in 1918, whereupon a third memb
er of the family, Turkey’s last sultan, took his place and served until 1923.

  The empire’s position among the great and smaller European powers continued to be perilous; the grasp on her remaining European possessions grew ever more tenuous. During the hectic six-year period before 1914 she lost nearly all of them: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania—in fact, everything except a slice of eastern Thrace. Meanwhile Italy had seized Libya and Rhodes in 1912 and Greece had annexed Crete. A hurricane raged outside the new regime’s main gates.

  Inside too the CUP was sorely tried. A Liberal Union Party, envisioning an empire composed of federated districts, won some key by-elections. More important, some CUP members were incompetent, unable to stem the loss of Balkan and other territory. In January 1913 army officers burst into a cabinet meeting. One of them shot5 and killed the minister of war then and there. The army officers authorized a new CUP government and outlawed the Liberals, but that hardly calmed things down. On June 11, 1913, the new grand vizier was murdered too.

  For readers familiar with European history, the CUP may be usefully compared to the Jacobin Society led by Robespierre during the French Revolutionary era. It tamed a monarchy, as the Jacobins had done (or thought they had done). Like the Jacobin, the CUP held militantly secular views that sparked a conservative reaction. When the CUP replaced Islamic law with civil courts, when it opened schools for girls as well as boys, it offended devout Muslims. Like the Jacobins, the CUP was professedly democratic but, again like the Jacobins, it turned away from democratic practices in order to deal effectively with a national emergency. Finally, as the Jacobins had centralized power in eighteenth-century France, so did the CUP a little more than a hundred years later centralize the Ottoman Empire. This last policy caused the gravest difficulties of all.