A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  Both Wilson and Lloyd George promised the peoples of the Ottoman Empire a better life, but where Wilson held out the hope of self-government, Lloyd George, while employing the rhetoric of national liberation, proposed to give the Middle East better government than it could give itself. In this the Prime Minister’s goals coincided with those of Kitchener’s lieutenants who exercised day-today control of British Cairo’s Middle Eastern policy; thus the chances that his policy would actually be carried out were improved.

  Taking office as 1916 turned into 1917, the new Prime Minister brought old-fashioned Radical fervor to such emerging war goals as the destruction of the reactionary Ottoman Empire—goals that harked back to the glorious days of nineteenth-century Liberalism. One of Lloyd George’s first actions on becoming Prime Minister was to order his armies in Egypt onto the offensive. One of the others was to order John Buchan, whom he installed at Milner’s suggestion as Director of Information, to launch a propaganda campaign portraying the destruction of the Ottoman Empire as a major purpose of the war. The campaign captured the imagination of the public: “The Turk Must Go!” proved to be an effective slogan.1 Like Wilson’s proclaimed points and principles, it also proved, at least in the short run, good politics.

  Lloyd George’s program of sending troops to fight in the East brought him into immediate conflict with his generals; they continued to demand supreme control over military decisions, and in this were supported by King George. Their strategy, as always, was to concentrate all resources on the western front, and they complained that their professional judgment was being defied by the new Prime Minister. Their newspaper friends on Fleet Street took up the cause. In early January the press lord, Lord Northcliffe, in a heated conversation threatened “to break” Lloyd George unless he called off his eastern strategy.2 Northcliffe gave himself the credit for having overthrown Asquith in December, and appeared confident that he could bring down Lloyd George in January if he chose.

  At about the same time, the War Office asked someone close to Lloyd George to warn him that the generals were going to fight him and that he “might not get the best of it [original emphasis].”3 In Germany the General Staff was in the process of sweeping aside the civilian Chancellor. With the King, the leaders of his own Liberal Party, the press, and the generals against him, the Prime Minister could not be certain that the British Imperial General Staff would not attempt something similar. It was one of those times in world politics when anything, even the previously unimaginable, seemed possible.

  Yet he stood as firm as he could on his eastern strategy, scornful of his military advisers. Long afterward, he wrote that “nothing and nobody could have saved the Turk from complete collapse in 1915 and 1916 except our General Staff.”4 According to Lloyd George, a victory over the Ottoman Empire before the end of 1916, when Bulgaria entered the war, would “have produced a decisive effect on the fortunes of the War.”5 It would have been easy to beat Turkey at any time, he said: “the resolute façade the Turks presented to the Allies…had nothing behind it. It was part of the War Office game to pretend that the Turks had formidable forces with ample reserves. They may have believed it, but if so, either their information was defective, or they were easily taken in.”6

  From the beginning of the war, Lloyd George had argued that Germany could be beaten by an attack through the Balkans. Defeating Turkey would open up the Balkans to such an attack. Writing long afterward, he was able to support his position by quoting von Hindenburg, the chief of the German General Staff: “If ever there was a prospect of a brilliant strategic feat, it was here…Why did England never make use of her opportunity?…Some day history will perhaps clear up this question…”7

  Lloyd George wanted to do it, but his problem was that he lacked the political strength to face down the generals and to commandeer troops and equipment in sufficient quantity to do the job. Throughout 1917 and well into 1918, he and Britain’s military leaders fought a war of maneuver and intrigue against each other. Lloyd George’s position was precarious; he had no depth of support in Parliament, where he was sustained for the time being by former enemies and distrusted by former friends. The most dangerous politician to attack the government was his one-time protégé Winston Churchill. “His tone was rather bitter in speaking of Lloyd George whom he had evidently come to consider as his detested antagonist,” noted a friend of the two men.8 Churchill had cause to be bitter; Lloyd George had excluded him from the Cabinet. “He brought Turkey into the War,” the Prime Minister said. “Such men are too dangerous for high office.”9

  In speeches and newspaper articles, Churchill brought to bear his vast knowledge of military affairs and his grasp of detail in criticizing the conduct of the war. As Lloyd George knew well, there was much to criticize; he was powerless to impose his own views on the Allied commanders, yet as Prime Minister he was responsible to Parliament for their continuing costly failures. Keeping his lines of communication open, Churchill sent a private warning to the Prime Minister that, dissatisfied with the conduct of the war, the disparate opposition groups in the Commons might unite to bring him down.

  On 10 May 1917 Churchill and Lloyd George happened to meet after a session of the House of Commons, and the Prime Minister spoke of his desire to have Churchill in the Cabinet. Though he still thought Churchill had “spoilt himself by reading about Napoleon,” Lloyd George confided to Frances Stevenson, his secretary and mistress, that he needed Churchill to cheer him up and encourage him at a time when he was surrounded by colleagues with gloomy faces.10

  As always, it was a question of whether it was a greater risk to leave Churchill out or to bring him in. In mid-July he appointed Churchill Minister of Munitions; and, even though the post did not carry with it membership in the War Cabinet, the appointment immediately aroused such opposition that for a time it endangered the government’s existence.*

  Churchill’s aunt, writing to congratulate him on becoming Minister of Munitions, added “My advice is stick to munitions & don’t try & run the government!”12 The new appointment prompted The Times to warn that the country “is in no mood to tolerate even a forlorn attempt to resuscitate amateur strategy.”13 Churchill’s family and friends, who were worried for him, and his legions of enemies and detractors, who were worried for the country, would have been dismayed but not surprised to learn that, within a week of his appointment, he had approached the Secretary of the War Cabinet with a revived plan to invade the Middle East. He proposed to land British armies at the port of Alexandretta to invade northern Syria and cut across the lines of transportation and communication of the Ottoman Empire.14 The War Cabinet ignored his proposal, and it came to nothing.

  II

  Within months of taking office, Lloyd George was engaged in secret negotiations with the Young Turk leader, Enver Pasha. The Prime Minister’s agent in the negotiations was Vincent Caillard, financial director of the giant armaments firm Vickers, who had spent many years in Constantinople as president of the council of administration of the Ottoman Public Debt. Caillard, in turn, acted through his close business associate, Basil Zaharoff, who had risen from the underworld of Smyrna to become the world’s most notorious arms salesman, known in the popular press as the “merchant of death.” Zaharoff journeyed to Geneva in 1917 and 1918 and reported that he was able to conduct negotiations there with Enver Pasha, at first through a go-between and then face-to-face.15

  Through his emissary, the Prime Minister offered bribes—large bank accounts—to Enver and his associates to leave the war on Britain’s terms, which were: Arabia to be independent; Armenia and Syria to enjoy local autonomy within the Ottoman Empire; Mesopotamia and Palestine to become de facto British protectorates, like Egypt before the war, though under formal Ottoman suzerainty; and freedom of navigation through the Dardanelles to be secured. In return, Lloyd George offered to pledge that the Capitulations (the treaties giving preferential treatment to Europeans) would remain abolished, and that generous financial treatment would be given t
o Turkey to aid her economic recovery. The terms offered by Lloyd George differed in two important ways from those envisaged by the prior Asquith government: France, Italy, and Russia were to get nothing; and Britain was to take Palestine as well as Mesopotamia.

  Zaharoff’s reports—the veracity of which it is difficult to judge—indicate that Enver, after mercurial changes of mind and mood, did not accept Lloyd George’s offer. It does not sound as though he ever seriously intended to do so. But the instructions that Zaharoff received reveal Lloyd George’s intentions with regard to the Middle East.

  III

  In a secret session of the House of Commons on 10 May 1917, the Prime Minister surprised even a close collaborator by saying unequivocally that Britain was not going to give back the German colonies in Africa captured during the war, and that Turkey would not be allowed to keep Palestine or Mesopotamia.16 Though Lloyd George had definite ideas about the future of the liberated Ottoman lands, few of his colleagues were aware of them. He avoided official channels and made his ideas known in detail only in the course of the secret negotiations with Enver Pasha; hence the importance of what they revealed.

  The Prime Minister intended to deny France the position that Sir Mark Sykes had promised her in the postwar Middle East, and took the view that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was unimportant; that physical possession was all that mattered. Regarding Palestine, he told the British ambassador to France in April 1917 that the French would be obliged to accept a fait accompli: “We shall be there by conquest and shall remain.”17

  Lloyd George was the only man in his government who had always wanted to acquire Palestine for Britain. He also wanted to encourage the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His colleagues failed to understand how strongly he held these views.

  There was a background to Lloyd George’s beliefs of which his colleagues were largely ignorant. He was not, like Asquith and the other members of the Cabinet, educated in an exclusive public school that stressed the Greek and Latin classics; he was brought up on the Bible. Repeatedly he remarked that the Biblical place names were better known to him than were those of the battles and the disputed frontiers that figured in the European war. He expressed himself about these places with fervor. In his later memoirs he wrote that he had objected to the division of Palestine in the Sykes-Picot Agreement (most of it going to France or into an international zone) on the grounds that it mutilated the country. He said it was not worth winning the Holy Land only to “hew it in pieces before the Lord.”18 He asserted that “Palestine, if recaptured, must be one and indivisible to renew its greatness as a living entity.”19

  IV

  Unlike his colleagues he was keenly aware that there were centuries-old tendencies in British Nonconformist and Evangelical thought toward taking the lead in restoring the Jews to Zion. Indeed they formed the background of his own Nonconformist faith. He was only the latest in a long line of Christian Zionists in Britain that stretched back to the Puritans and the era in which the Mayflower set sail for the New World. Promised lands were still much thought about in those days, whether in the United States or in Palestine.

  In the mid-seventeenth century, two English Puritans residing in Holland—Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright—petitioned their government “That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Izraell’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for an everlasting Inheritance.”20 Guided by the Scriptures, the Puritans believed that the advent of the Messiah would occur once the people of Judaea were restored to their native land.

  The idea recurred: in the mid-nineteenth century, the social reformer Anthony Cooper, who became Earl of Shaftesbury, inspired a powerful evangelical movement within the Church of England that aimed at bringing the Jews back to Palestine, converting them to Christianity, and hastening the Second Coming. Shaftesbury also inspired Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary and his relation by marriage, to extend British consular protection to Jews in Palestine: “Palmerston had already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people,” Shaftesbury noted in his diary.21

  Palmerston acted from a mixture of idealistic and practical reasons not unlike those of Lloyd George in the next century. He pressed a Jewish Palestine on the Ottoman Empire in the context of the Great Game rivalry with France, at a time in the 1830s and 1840s when the rebelling Viceroy of Egypt, Mehemet Ali, backed by France, marched from Egypt on Syria to threaten the territorial integrity of the empire and the throne of its Sultan. As usual, Palmerston upheld the Ottoman cause. One of his purposes in advocating a Jewish Palestine was to strengthen the Ottoman regime, by providing it with Jewish support. Another was to foil the French and their protégé Mehemet Ali by placing along their line of march a British-backed Jewish homeland which would block their advance. Another was to provide Britain with a client in the Middle East, and therefore an excuse for intervention in Ottoman affairs. The Russians, as defenders of the Orthodox faith, and the French, as champions of the important and strategically located Maronite (Roman Catholic) community in Lebanon, claimed to represent significant Middle Eastern interests and communities. For the want of Protestants in the area, Britain had to adopt some other protégé in order to be able to make a similar claim.

  Palmerston’s notion of restoring the Promised Land to the Jewish people also proved to be shrewd domestic politics. It struck a responsive chord in British public opinion that harked back to Puritan enthusiasm.* According to the leading authority on Palmerston’s diplomacy, his policy “became connected with a mystical idea, never altogether lost in the nineteenth century, that Britain was to be the chosen instrument of God to bring back the Jews to the Holy Land.”22 This somehow coexisted, at least in Britain’s upper classes, with pervasive anti-Semitism.

  In 1914 the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war appeared to have brought about the political circumstances in which the Zionist dream at last could be realized. “What is to prevent the Jews having Palestine and restoring a real Judaea?” asked H. G. Wells in an open newspaper letter penned the moment that Turkey came into the war.

  A similar thought occurred soon afterward to Sir Herbert Samuel, Postmaster General in Asquith’s Cabinet, one of the leaders of the Liberal Party, and the first person of the Jewish faith to sit in a British Cabinet. In January 1915 he sent a memorandum to Prime Minister Asquith proposing that Palestine should become a British protectorate—because it was of strategic importance to the British Empire—and urging the advantages of encouraging large-scale Jewish settlement there. The Prime Minister had just been reading Tancred—a novel by Benjamin Disraeli, the nineteenth-century British leader (baptized a Christian, but born of a Jewish family), who advocated a Jewish return to Palestine—and Asquith confided that Samuel’s memorandum “reads almost like a new edition of Tancred brought up to date. I confess I am not attracted by this proposed addition to our responsibilities. But it is a curious illustration of Dizzy’s [Disraeli’s] favourite maxim that ‘race is everything’ to find this almost lyrical outburst proceeding from the well-ordered and methodical brain of H.S.…”23

  In March 1915 a revised version of Samuel’s memorandum was circulated to the Cabinet. It did not attract support, and Asquith’s private comment was that “Curiously enough the only other partisan of this proposal is Lloyd George, who, I need not say, does not care a damn for the Jews or their past or their future…”24 The Prime Minister was unaware of the complex of motives behind the position taken by Lloyd George, who told the Cabinet that it would be an outrage to let the Christian Holy Places in Palestine fall into the hands of “Agnostic Atheistic France.”25 Asquith found it odd that Samuel and Lloyd George should advocate a British protectorate for Palestine for such different reasons: “Isn’t it singular that the same conclusion shd. be capable of being come to by such different roads?”26 It was a prescient remark for, in the years to come, British official
s traveling along many different roads happened to arrive at the same conclusion: a distinctive characteristic of Britain’s evolving Palestine policy was that there was no single reason for it.

  Kitchener threw the great weight of his authority against Samuel’s proposal. He told the Cabinet that Palestine was of little value, strategic or otherwise, and that it did not have even one decent harbor.27 Samuel’s proposal, therefore, was not adopted; but Lloyd George continued to disagree with Kitchener about the strategic importance of Palestine.

  V

  Lloyd George, though of a Welsh family, was born in Manchester, Britain’s second-largest city, and the home of the Radical Liberal tradition which he was to uphold throughout much of his political life. Manchester was also, next to London, the home of Britain’s largest Jewish community; and Members of Parliament from the area, such as Balfour and Churchill, were aware of the special concerns of their Jewish constituents.

  C. P. Scott, editor of the great Liberal newspaper the Manchester Guardian, was converted to Zionism in 1914 by Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish chemist who had settled in Manchester. Scott, who was considered to be Lloyd George’s closest political confidant, took up the cause with all the force of his idealistic nature. The military correspondent of the Guardian, Herbert Sidebotham, saw a complementary aspect of the matter: a military advantage to Britain. In the issue of 26 November 1915, he wrote that “the whole future of the British Empire as a Sea Empire” depended upon Palestine becoming a buffer state inhabited “by an intensely patriotic race.”28

  The Manchester Guardian’s conversion was brought about in the context of the First World War, but Lloyd George had come to Zionism—or rather it had come to him—more than a decade before. In 1903 he had been retained as the British attorney for the Zionist movement and for its founder, Dr Theodore Herzl, in connection with an issue that caused an agonizing split in Zionist ranks: whether a Jewish state necessarily had to be located in Palestine. As one who represented Herzl at the moment of decision, he was in a position to understand the movement’s dilemmas.