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

by Jonathan Schneer

  Mecca itself was a city of 70,000, surrounded by hills, some fifty miles inland from Jeddah; a nine-hour ride on a fast donkey, a two-day trip by mule, a three-day journey by camel. It contained a great mosque called the Beit Allah, with a vast courtyard and colonnades, and major and minor bazaars in the surrounding neighborhood; three forts stood in districts to the southeast, west, and north. Chief among the city’s houses was the grand sharif’s palace, called the Imaret. Made of five stories, massive “as a mountain,”29 according to one who saw it for the first time, it contained one hundred rooms, some of them exceedingly grand. A second palace, even more sumptuously furnished, contained the sharif’s sleeping quarters and was the domicile of his wife.

  Mecca’s other houses were mainly of stone; those near the mosque rose to three or four stories, with large windows facing the outlying hills. Water carriers, with swollen dripping leather skins draped over their shoulders, supplied the houses from pits sunk into an underground conduit that connected with springs outside. There were baths, hospices, hospitals, and a court, where the sharif’s wakil (or general factotum) dispensed rough justice: “In the event of a quarrel30 in which knives were used an official measurer of wounds … estimates by the depth and length of the wound the amount of the fine payable: the total of the smaller wound having been deducted from that of the larger, the inflictor of the latter has to pay the difference.” A single building contained a post office, telegraphs, and telephones. There were three schools and a library, but according to Hussein Ruhi Effendi, a Persian employed by the English in Jeddah and later in Cairo, Mecca possessed “only fifty people who are educated at all and there are not more than three per cent who can read and write.” Hogarth thought the place “clean,”31 which is curious since Ruhi deemed it “not clean,” and a second Arab agent employed by the English (called only X but who was in fact Ruhi’s father-in-law, Ali Effendi), reported, “Everything exceedingly filthy.” For what it is worth, Ruhi also claimed that “morality seems to be32 at a very low ebb, very many of the men having unnatural taste.” There were no local industries—the population mainly lived off the annual hajj in one way or another—but a few marts still carried on in several inns, where men might purchase Sudanese and Abyssinian slaves.

  Mecca’s soil was barren. Fruits and vegetables were brought in from a town called Taif, two days’ ride up in the hills, where the emir had another palace as refuge from the summer heat. Rice and foreign products came from the port city, Jeddah; poultry, mutton, milk, and butter arrived from the desert Bedouins. It was almost always hot, the mean annual temperature higher than eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Shielded from most breezes by the surrounding hills, Mecca on a still summer day reminded Hogarth of a furnace: “The heat reflected from the rock-faces [of nearby hills] increases the glare by day and the closeness of the atmosphere at night.” And it was dry. Rain rarely fell; when it did, it descended in torrents and routinely flooded the mosque.

  Here then was Sharif Hussein’s kingdom, intimately known to him since early childhood and now, finally, his inheritance. He took it up like a familiar garment. It fit like a glove. Two of his four sons accompanied him to Mecca; they came to know the tribal sheikhs and local notables almost as well as he did. Together father and sons discussed tactics and strategies. Perhaps they were already dreaming tall dreams: not merely of an autonomous Hejaz, restored to the freedom of action that had preceded 1803, but of a semi-independent principality with a hereditary monarch under the protection of Great Britain, for which Hussein had developed great admiration. Britain would treat33 the Hejaz as Hussein fondly believed she did Afghanistan, refraining from interference in internal matters.

  Did they dream too of uniting the Arab tribes under their own leadership? It is possible. During the spring of 1911 Hussein made common cause with the Turks, to defeat a potential rival and anti-Ottoman rebel whose territory lay immediately to the south of the Hejaz. During the campaign Hussein’s sons gained valuable military experience. Meanwhile the grand sharif established friendly relations with the chiefs and notables of most of the other Arabian tribes. Only Imam Yahya of Yemen and Abdul Azziz ibn Saud—the inscrutable, ambitious, indeed ferocious Wahhabi chief in the desert regions called el-Nejd, directly east of the Hejaz—rejected his overtures and denied his religious paramountcy. Nevertheless his position was a platform34 capable of supporting vast ambitions. Perhaps Hussein already dreamed of wresting the caliphate from Ottoman hands. Or perhaps his son Abdullah cherished it for him, or even for himself.

  In the meantime Hussein and his sons played the CUP with consummate skill. No vali could outmaneuver them; seven tried during 1908–14; all were defeated and recalled to Constantinople. When CUP directives encroached upon his prerogatives, he evaded, or gave the appearance of acquiescing, while considering future options. Above all he opposed extension of the railway from Medina to Mecca, as it would give the Turks a direct line from Damascus into his stronghold and it would deprive Hejazis of their lucrative trade guiding and supplying the pilgrims traveling on foot or by hired camel. He opposed even35 the extension of the telegraph to Mecca; and he opposed the abolition of slavery, which the modernizing Young Turks favored. Apparently these reactionary positions were popular among his subjects. “He is very generous,36 kindhearted and liberal,” said one. “He does not refrain from stretching out his hand to salute a rough looking and dirty Arab who puts his sandals round his wrists and holds out his hand to shake the hand of the Sherif.”

  When war came and the sharif decided to establish contact with the English, he sent his son Abdullah. It was a natural choice, for by now this young man had practical experience as a politician, and some knowledge of the English, perhaps more than his father did.

  Abdullah was a short stocky figure, “with merry dark brown eyes,37 a round smooth face … straight nose, brown beard.” He was canny and ambitious. When the CUP reinstated the Ottoman parliament, he ran successfully for one of the two seats allocated to the Hejaz, receiving 144 votes. (Very few Hejazis possessed the franchise.) He owed his election to the influence of his father. He does not appear to have been much of a parliamentarian; says one account, “On one occasion38 he quarreled with the wayward Enver Pasha and cursed him in front of a great multitude and was on the point of striking him.” His biographer writes39 that Abdullah played little part in the Ottoman assembly; the press never mentioned him, and he does not figure in the memoirs of contemporary politicians. Surely aware of the developing nationalist movement, surely sympathetic to the Liberal Union Party’s giving voice to opponents of Ottoman centralization, he nonetheless joined no political party and evidently developed little respect for representative government. He believed the Ottoman parliament had been fixed to favor Turkey. “It purports40 [emphasis added] to be a government by the people for the people,” he wrote dismissively, many years later, of parliamentary rule.

  Abdullah contacted the British not out of respect or admiration but rather because Hussein desired a powerful ally against the CUP. When Abdullah made first contact is uncertain, but the location can be fixed. From 1910 to 1914 he attended Ottoman parliamentary sessions41 in Constantinople, journeying there every winter and spring via Cairo, where he often stayed with the Egyptian khedive. The latter, although supposedly a vassal of the Ottoman sultan, was in fact little more than a British puppet, because the British had controlled Egyptian finances since 1882. The British felt obliged to control Egypt one way or another since it contained the Suez Canal, in which they owned a majority interest and through which traveled much of their foreign trade. So while Egypt remained ostensibly part of the Ottoman Empire, in reality it was part of the British. And it was in Egypt that Abdullah approached them.

  He may have met42 Sir Ronald Storrs, oriental secretary at the British Agency in Cairo, as early as 1912, for he mentions in his memoirs that by 1914 they had kept up friendly relations for two years. During the same period Abdullah records, he developed great respect for Storrs’s chief, the consul gene
ral, Lord Kitchener.43 The British, deeply interested as they were in Arab affairs, likely knew of the sharif’s politically active son. But there is no reference to their having made Abdullah’s acquaintance during 1912–13, whereas a series of meetings held in February 1914 are well chronicled.

  By that month relations between Emir Hussein and Constantinople had sunk to a new low. The CUP dispatched a fresh vali to the Hejaz, accompanied by an additional detachment of troops. His orders were to enforce a law passed in 1912 that removed Medina from Hussein’s control, and to secure the emir’s consent to extension of the railway from Medina to Mecca. Hussein intended to block these moves as he had blocked previous Ottoman encroachments, but he feared the CUP response.

  Meanwhile Abdullah was passing through Cairo on his way to Constantinople for the opening of parliament. According to his account, Lord Kitchener called upon him at the khedivial palace. They chatted about unimportant matters. Two days later when Abdullah returned the call, however, “I decided to speak openly to Kitchener.” (Records being sparse, we have no indication that his father suggested the meeting.) Abdullah described to Kitchener “the realities of the situation in the Hejaz, the delicacy of the Sharif’s position, the causes of the disaffection between Turks and Arabs and the aims of the Arab movement as a whole.” He thought Kitchener listened attentively. “When I asked him to tell me whether in the event of a rupture the Sharif could count upon any support from Great Britain, Kitchener replied negatively on the plea that British relations with Turkey were friendly and that in any case the dispute was an internal matter in which it would be improper for a foreign Power to intervene.” Abdullah pointed out that Britain had intervened in other countries’ internal matters. (He was too tactful to say it, but Kitchener himself had done so, on Britain’s behalf.) The consul general only laughed.

  Two months later, on his way back from Constantinople, Abdullah appears to have tried again to interest the British in his father’s plight. At a second meeting with Kitchener he confined himself to small talk, but a few nights later he requested that Storrs call upon him at the khedive’s palace. Storrs obliged. First the two men discussed poetry. “I was astonished and delighted at the range of his literary memory,” Storrs recalled. “He intoned for me brilliant episodes of the Seven Suspended odes of Pre-Islamic Poetry, the glories and the lament of Antar ibn Shaddad.” Then carefully, obliquely, “by a series of delicately inclined planes,” Abdullah broached the true reason for the meeting: “whether Great Britain would present the Grand Sharif with a dozen or even a half dozen machine guns.”

  Storrs demurred. He thought Abdullah could have expected nothing else, “and we parted on the best44 of terms.” But the son of Sharif Hussein had laid down a marker. When World War I began only six months later, the British would remember it, and they would pick it up.

  CHAPTER 3

  First Steps Toward the Arab Revolt

  ON NOVEMBER 5, 1914, when Turkey entered World War I on the side of Germany, she posed no immediate threat to Great Britain, although that country would have preferred her neutrality or active support. But grave dangers to Britain existed much closer to home. During August and September 1914 the German juggernaut rolled westward, smashing through Belgian and French defenses; it crushed the British Expeditionary Force sent to halt it, the boom of the big guns carrying like the rumble of distant thunder all the way to Dover and Folkestone. The Allies finally did stem the German tide, but they could not throw it back. Soon muddy trenches rimmed by barbed wire extended from the North Sea to the Swiss border, the two sides separated by a thin ribbon of cratered no-man’s-land, dotted with mines, unexploded shells, and rotting human and animal corpses, or pieces of them. Now commenced the war of attrition, where advances of even half a mile were rare and not worth the blood spilled and lives lost. The world had never experienced war on so vast a scale, and there would be no let-up for four years. The major powers lost millions of men.

  Against this backdrop of carnage on the Western Front, the British strove mightily, sometimes stealthily, sometimes bloodily, for gain in the Middle East; and diplomats maneuvered silkily for their own country’s benefit, and contending lobbies and pressure groups vied determinedly for advantage in London, where the decisions were made and directions cabled to British agents around the world.

  But if the Middle East was far from the main battlefield, nevertheless war of another kind had begun there. The Ottomans could not immediately bring military force to bear upon British troops, but as the seat of the caliphate, Turkey was revered by Muslims across the world. Already the Ottomans were calling upon believers to wage jihad, holy war, upon the enemies of Turkey. If Britain’s Muslim subjects on the Indian subcontinent and in Egypt and Sudan heeded this call, then her position would be more parlous than it was already. The steps taken by British imperialists in India to protect against a Muslim jihad do not concern us. In the Middle East, however, they are of the essence. The Suez Canal was Britain’s windpipe. Without that crucial line of trade and communication, she would suffocate.

  Having taken charge of Egyptian finances in 1882, Britain now discarded the pretense that the Turks exercised ultimate authority over this Ottoman province and declared her own protectorate. She deposed the Egyptian khedive, Abbas Hilmi, who was inconveniently pro-Ottoman, but conveniently absent in Constantinople, and proclaimed his Anglophile uncle, Hussein Kamel, to be the country’s sultan, Hussein I (a new title for the leader of Egypt). Through him Britain decreed martial law. Through him she curtailed civil liberties and imposed censorship.

  An imperial power typically fears the people subject to its rule and keeps tabs on individuals and groups who oppose it; an imperial power at war is even more vigilant. The new sultan’s puppet government went so far as to outlaw the singing of certain songs, like one that went:

  The Turkish Army is in1 the Peninsula of Sinai.

  It will come to us during this month …

  Our khedive will come.

  Tomorrow we’ll celebrate his return.

  And slay Hussein I with a knife, by God we will.

  British intelligence agents2 identified potential troublemakers in Egypt and collected seditious circulars, pamphlets, and wall posters. “Now the One Powerful God has come forth to take vengeance,” threatened a fatwa issued by a cleric in Constantinople and brought to the attention of Sir Ronald Storrs. “Behold the sun of the Glory of Islam and his grandeur rise up over you. Watch it arise out of the horizon which is dyed with crimson gore and lit up with blazing fires.” The unflappable oriental secretary placed this document, along with similar messages, in an in-tray on his desk between four telephones presided over by an ivory figure of the Buddha. A warning arrived, issued by the commandant of the Fourth Turkish Army, that the Turkish force would soon be ready to invade Egypt: “The Ottoman Army is3 coming to embrace you. Shortly by the will of God you will see its sharp swords and glittering bayonets thrust into the hearts of its enemies, tearing their entrails up.” Storrs slipped it into the tray.

  Storrs was the Englishman to whom Abdullah had appealed for machine guns in April 1914, after the consul general, Lord Kitchener, turned him down. Portraits reveal a squarely built and fine-featured youngish man sporting a dandy’s mustache, perhaps to compensate for a receding hairline. He had studied Eastern literature and Arabic at Pembroke College, Cambridge, gaining a first-class degree. But he was not completely at ease with the language, a fact that would have significant repercussions later. Within a year of graduating in 1903, he had gone out to Cairo to work in the Egyptian civil service. He gained the appointment as oriental secretary in 1909. Storrs was urbane, knowledgeable, arrogant, and catty, “too clever by4 three-quarters,” according to one expert, but his boss, Lord Kitchener, regarded him highly.

  Even before Turkey entered the war on the German side, Sir Ronald thought it might, and picked up the marker so fortuitously laid down by Abdullah during his visit to Cairo the previous spring. Perhaps Britain could supply machine
guns to Abdullah’s father after all, and much else besides. Storrs could think of no better figure to undermine a Turkish call for jihad than a descendant of the Prophet himself who was also the grand sharif of Mecca. And no one in Britain could think of a better bridge to the Middle Eastern Muslim world either. The Imam Yahya was pro-Turk or at best neutral in the war and would not oppose the Turkish call for jihad; Ibn Saud had British backers, especially in the British government of India, but the leader of the Wahhabi sect could not speak for a broad Muslim movement. Hussein seemed the obvious choice then, but Storrs, a civilian, lacked authority to send him military aid; nor was he senior enough to set policy. A higher-ranking official, with military connections, must be enlisted.

  Storrs consulted Sir Gilbert Clayton. Before the outbreak of war, Clayton had been director of intelligence and Sudan agent in Cairo; with the onset of war, he assumed the additional position of director of military intelligence. (Soon he would become unofficial father figure of a newly established agency, the fabled Arab Bureau, in which swashbucklers like T. E. Lawrence were to cut such a dashing figure.) Clayton sat at the nexus of Egyptian and Sudanese politics and military intelligence. He too had no doubt that Britain should pick up Abdullah’s marker. He directed Storrs to put the matter to Lord Kitchener in writing.

  Kitchener, however, was no longer in Cairo. When war broke out, he had been in England intending to return to Egypt to resume his duties as consul general. While standing upon the deck of the ferry at Dover, he received the summons from Prime Minister Asquith to become Britain’s secretary of state for war.