by Avi Shlaim
In the spring of 1916 Hussein proclaimed what is often called the Great Arab Revolt, which holds pride of place in the chronicles of the Arab nationalist movement. It is seen as the dawn of a new age, as the first serious Arab bid for independence and unity. Some scholars, however, have questioned the link between the revolt and Arab nationalism. They point out that the original terms on which the revolt was launched had little to do with Arab nationalism.3 Islam, according to this view, featured much more prominently than nationalism in its original aims. All nationalist movements dwell on the past, and in the case of the Arabs the past was necessarily Islamic. William Cleveland has categorically asserted that the revolt ‘was proclaimed in the name of preserving Islam, not in the name of Arabism or the Arab nation’.4
In diplomatic terms, however, as its origins make clear beyond doubt, the Arab Revolt was in essence an Anglo–Hashemite plot. Britain financed the revolt as well as supplying arms, provisions, direct artillery support and experts in desert warfare, among whom was T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence did more than any other man to glorify the revolt and to advertise its military successes. He also surrounded it with a romantic aura by portraying it as the product of a natural affinity between the British and the Arabs, or at least the ‘real’ Arabs, the nomads of the Arabian Desert.5 The French, on the other hand, took a cynical view of the Arab Revolt from start to finish, dismissing it as British imperialism in Arab headgear.
The Hashemites promised much more than they were able to deliver. After Hussein’s proclamation, only a disappointingly small number of Syrian and Iraqi nationalists flocked to the sharifian banner. Many Syrian notables dissociated themselves from what they saw as treason. The Iraqis had their own leaders; and the Iraqi Shia were particularly apprehensive about the prospect of a Sunni sharif and an outsider taking over their country. (The Sunnis are the leading sect within Islam and strict followers of the teaching of the prophet Muhammad. They differ from the minority Shia sect in doctrine, ritual, law, theology and religious organization.) The Lebanese Christians saw no advantage in exchanging the old Islamic Empire based in Istanbul for a new Islamic Empire, or caliphate, based in the Hijaz. The Egyptians were more hostile than all the others to the idea of separation from the Ottoman Empire and to being ruled from the backward Hijaz. Even in Arabia itself, popular support for the rebellion was nowhere near as enthusiastic or widespread as the British had been led to expect. The Arabian Bedouin and tribesmen who made up the rank and file of the sharifian army were more attracted to British gold than they were to nationalist ideology.
The usual grand narrative of the Arab Revolt, based on T. E. Lawrence’s classic accounts, greatly exaggerates not only its spontaneity, size and scope but also its military value. The first phase was confined to the Hijaz, where Mecca, Taif and Jedda fell in rapid succession to the rebel forces consisting of Hijazi Bedouins commanded by the sharif’s four sons, Ali, Abdullah, Faisal and Zaid. Three of these groups laid siege to Medina and were tied down there until the end of the war, contributing to the war effort largely by sabotaging the Hijaz Railway, the main Turkish supply route to Hijaz, Asir and Yemen. Only Faisal’s unit assisted the British offensive in Palestine and Syria, and, on 1 October 1918, entered Damascus first and hoisted the Arab flag.
The entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers hastened its final dissolution, and by the time the war ended it had lost its Arab provinces. After the end of the war, the Hashemite princes who headed ‘the revolt in the desert’ became the leading spokesmen for the Arab national cause at the 1919 Versailles peace conference and in the settlement following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. For their contribution to the Allied war effort against the Turks, Britain had promised, or half promised, to support Arab independence. But the territorial limits governing this promise had been left so ineptly and obscurely defined in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence that a long and bitter wrangle ensued between the two sides – especially over the disposition of Palestine.
Another major uncertainty surrounded the regime and institutions to be installed in the Arab areas that were indisputably marked for independence. Should this independence take the form of a united kingdom, a federation or an alliance between independent states? Was Britain committed only to the recognition of Arab independence or also to Hashemite rule over these areas? One searches in vain for answers or even clues to these questions in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence. Sharif Hussein himself regarded Arab unity as synonymous with his own kingship and as an empty phrase unless so regarded; it meant little to him except as a means to personal aggrandizement. He aspired to head a united Arab kingdom consisting of the Arabian peninsula, Greater Syria and Iraq, with his sons acting as viceroys, and such was his impatience that within four months of the outbreak of the revolt he proclaimed himself ‘King of the Arab Countries’. At first the British refused to recognize him, and, when they eventually did so, it was only as king of the Hijaz.
The task of fashioning a new political order in the Middle East following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was further complicated by other commitments undertaken by the British government after the initiation of its clandestine exchanges with the sharif of Mecca. The first was an agreement signed in secret by Britain and France in May 1916 and named after its chief negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes and Charles François George Picot. Under the terms of the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the whole Fertile Crescent, comprising modern Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine, was divided into British and French spheres of influence. Syria and Lebanon were in the French sphere of influence, while Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine fell into the British sphere. Each sphere was in turn divided into two zones, one to be placed under direct British or French rule and the other turned into semi-independent Arab states or a confederation of states. France and Britain were to supply advisers and enjoy economic privileges in the Arab states that would emerge within their respective spheres. In short, this was an agreement, in the event of an Allied victory, to divide the spoils of war without any reference to the wishes of the local inhabitants.
Were Britain’s promises to the sharif of Mecca compatible with those they made to the French? Elie Kedourie has argued that the Sykes–Picot Agreement did not violate the commitments contained in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence because the latter were so vague and qualified.6 T. E. Lawrence, who was involved at the sharp end in Britain’s wartime diplomacy, was much less charitable. According to him, ‘Sir Henry [McMahon] was England’s right-hand man in the Middle East till the Arab Revolt was an established event. Sir Mark Sykes was the left hand: and if the Foreign Office had kept itself and its hands mutually informed our reputation for honesty would not have suffered as it did.’7
Another promise made by the British government during the war was to support the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. Unlike the promise to Hussein and the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration was not a secret but a public pledge. On 2 November 1917 Arthur Balfour, Britain’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, issued the following statement:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
Was Britain’s promise to the Zionists compatible with its earlier promise to the sharif of Mecca? Again, there is a vast scholarly literature on the subject. One Israeli historian has denied that Palestine was a twice-promised land and concluded that the charges of fraudulence and deception levelled against the British after the war are largely groundless.8 Groundless or not, these charges acquired the status of dogma not only in the eyes of Arab nationalists but, much more surprisingly, in the eyes of most British officials as well
.9 My own view is that the Balfour Declaration was one of the worst mistakes in British foreign policy in the first half of the twentieth century. It involved a monumental injustice to the Palestine Arabs and sowed the seeds of a never-ending conflict in the Middle East.
In the case of Hussein bin Ali, who was proclaimed and recognized in October 1916 as king of the Hijaz, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between the initial response to the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent attitude. When news of the declaration reached Hussein, he was greatly disturbed by it and asked Britain to clarify its meaning. Whitehall met this request by the dispatch of Commander D. G. Hogarth, one of the heads of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, who arrived in Jedda in the first week of January 1918 for a series of interviews with King Hussein. ‘Hogarth’s Message’, as it came to be known, reaffirmed the Allies’ determination that ‘the Arab race shall be given full opportunity of once again forming a nation in the world.’ So far as Palestine was concerned, Britain was ‘determined that no people shall be subject to another’. Britain noted and supported the aspiration of the Jews to return to Palestine but only in so far as this was compatible with ‘the freedom of the existing population, both economic and political’.10
Hogarth’s Message is crucial for understanding King Hussein’s attitude to the Balfour Declaration. Following the meetings in Jedda, Hussein thought that he had Britain’s assurance that the settlement of the Jews in Palestine would not conflict with Arab independence in that country. This explains his initial silence in public and his private efforts to allay the anxieties of his sons. Hussein had great respect for the Jews, seeing them, in keeping with the Koran, as ‘the People of the Book’, as monotheists with a prophetic scripture. He was not opposed to the settlement of Jews in Palestine and even welcomed it on religious and on humanitarian grounds. He was, however, emphatically opposed to a Zionist takeover of the area. Hogarth gave him a solemn pledge that Britain would respect not only the economic but also the political freedom of the Arab population. When Britain subsequently refused to recognize Arab independence in Palestine, Hussein felt betrayed and accused Britain of breach of faith.11
If the disenchantment of Hussein and his sons with Britain was gradual, the hostility of the Arab nationalists towards Britain on account of the Balfour Declaration was immediate and unremitting.12 The Sykes–Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration became the two basic points of reference in all the Arab nationalist discourse that followed – enduring symbols of the cynicism and selfishness of the Western powers, of their disregard for Arab rights, of their sinister design to keep the Arabs divided and weak, and, worst of all, of their support for the Zionist intruders into Palestine. Zionism itself came to be considered not as the national liberation movement of the Jews but as an outpost of European imperialism in the Middle East.
The Versailles peace conference liberated the Arabs from Turkish control but ensnared them in a more complex diplomatic web spun by rivalries of the Great Powers and the baffling array of pledges that those powers had made in their eagerness to inherit the Ottoman Empire. Faisal, who had formed a temporary administration in Syria, attended the peace conference in Paris as the envoy of the king of the Hijaz. By temperament inclined to moderation and compromise, Faisal was enjoined by his authoritarian and now crotchety old father to insist on nothing less than complete independence.13
Faisal possessed more than a touch of the romantic aura, gentle melancholy, physical grace and perfect manners that many upper-class Englishmen found irresistibly attractive. But he was out of his depth in the world of Great Power diplomacy, and he left the conference empty-handed to face a rapidly deteriorating situation in Syria. Faisal tried to pursue a middle-of-the-road policy regarding the French, the troubles in Iraq and the Palestinian Arabs’ complaints against the Jews. But a clash with the French was made inevitable by the inflexibility of his Syrian nationalist supporters and by their insistence on a completely independent kingdom of Greater Syria, embracing Transjordan and Lebanon. A fervently nationalistic Arab-Syrian Congress, meeting in Damascus in March 1920, crowned Faisal as king of Syria. Faisal hesitantly accepted the crown, thereby simultaneously embarrassing the British and antagonizing the French, who refused to recognize him.
Brushing aside Arab nationalist claims, in April 1920 the Supreme Council of the Peace Conference proceeded to the Italian Riviera resort of San Remo to make the final decisions regarding the Ottoman Empire. They agreed to detach the Arabic-speaking parts of the empire and to divide them between Britain and France. Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine were placed under the ‘mandatory authority’ of Britain; Lebanon and Syria under the ‘mandatory authority’ of France. These mandates were to be administered on behalf of the League of Nations, the Palestine mandate in accordance with the Balfour Declaration. Under the terms of the mandates, these territories were all destined for eventual independence. But, as shortly became clear, the promise was little more than window-dressing, a cloak for European colonialism. In all but name, this was a victors’ peace.
The French demanded complete control over Syria, and Faisal was willing to come to terms with them, but his Syrian followers deflected him from the course of compromise. In July 1920 French troops marched from Beirut to Damascus, banished Faisal and took over the government of the country. The French prime minister declared that Syria henceforth would be held by France: ‘The whole of it, and forever.’14 The ease with which regime change in Damascus was accomplished seemed to support the French suspicion that Arab nationalism was a British invention designed to cheat France out of its claim to Syria.15 Thus was created the modern state of Syria, under French rule, and on the ruins of the dream of a united Arab kingdom led by the Hashemites. Many later developments in Middle East politics have their origins in the events that unravelled in Damascus between 1918 and 1920, including the abiding mistrust of the French towards British intentions and policies in this part of the world, and the grudge nursed by Syrian nationalists against the Western Powers for broken promises, bad faith and betrayal. The Hashemites constantly harked back to their short-lived kingdom in Damascus and based on it their various expansionist plans for Greater Syria; the fact that they allied themselves with Britain in order to further their dynastic ambitions accounts for the estrangement and mutual suspicion between themselves and the more radical Arab nationalists.
When the Syrian Congress elected Faisal to the throne of Syria in March 1920, it also nominated Abdullah to the throne of Iraq. But he received no encouragement from the British to seek that particular throne. Casting about for a principality to make his own, Abdullah turned his attention to the mountainous country lying east of the Jordan that nominally formed part of the British mandate for Palestine but in practice had been left to its own devices and had degenerated into brigandage and lawlessness. No troops had been left to hold this barren territory, only a handful of British political advisers who were instructed to set up ad hoc administrative centres.
It was to this territory that Abdullah set off from Medina, with his father’s blessing, at the head of a small force of nearly 2,000 men. In November 1920 he arrived in Ma’an and proclaimed his intention to march on Damascus and to drive out the French aggressors. The British representative in Ma’an, Captain Alec Kirkbride, having received no instructions on how to deal with this unlikely contingency, decided to welcome the Arabian prince in the name of something he called the National Government of Moab. Abdullah expressed the hope that the young Englishman would stay and give him his support and advice in the difficult days that lay ahead. ‘By the way,’ he added with a twinkle in his eye, ‘has the National Government of Moab ever been recognized internationally?’ Kirkbride replied graciously, ‘I am not quite sure of its international status. I feel, however, that the question is largely of an academic nature now that Your Highness is here.’16
In March 1921 Abdullah arrived in Amman and set up his headquarters, still with the declared intention of raising a larger force to mount an invasion of Syri
a from the south. Abdullah’s arrival in Transjordan threw into disarray a conference being held in Cairo by Winston Churchill, the British colonial secretary, to discuss Middle Eastern affairs. Churchill had already promised the throne of Iraq to Faisal as a consolation prize for the loss of Syria. This offer was part of his favoured ‘sharifian policy’ of forming a number of small states in Arabia and the Fertile Crescent, all headed by members of the sharif’s family and of course under British influence and guidance. Abdullah’s bold march into Transjordan, and his well-advertised plan of fighting to regain Damascus threatened this policy. Although such a move would have been doomed to failure, it could embroil the British in further difficulties with their suspicious French allies – and besides, Transjordan was needed by them as a link between Palestine and Iraq.
The initial impulse of the eminent experts assembled in Cairo was to eject the upstart out of Transjordan, by force if necessary, and to administer the area directly. But on further reflection it was decided to accept the fait accompli and let Abdullah stay in Transjordan as the representative of the British government. Sir Herbert Samuel, the Jewish high commissioner for Palestine, doubted Abdullah’s ability to check anti-French and anti-Zionist activities in the area, but Churchill stressed the importance of securing the goodwill of the king of the Hijaz and his sons. T. E. Lawrence, Churchill’s adviser on Arab affairs, claimed that Abdullah was better qualified for the task than the other candidates by reason of his position, lineage and very considerable power, for better or for worse, over the tribesmen. Lawrence was convinced that anti-Zionist sentiment would wane, and that Transjordan could be turned into a safety valve by appointing a ruler on whom Britain could bring pressure to bear to check anti-Zionist agitation. The ideal, said Lawrence, would be ‘a person who was not too powerful, and who was not an inhabitant of Transjordan, but who relied on His Majesty’s Government for the retention of his office’.17 In other words, the British were looking for a pliant client who could be entrusted to govern the vacant lot east of the Jordan River on their behalf.
