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

by Jonathan Schneer

  When the Liberal-dominated War Council met on March 19, 1915, the traditional Liberals’ increasing isolation quickly became apparent. Speaking for the anti-annexationist outlook, Sir Edward Grey asked his colleagues to consider a fundamental question: “If we acquire fresh territory shall we make ourselves weaker or stronger?” Lord Haldane, the minister of war, argued that when the German and Ottoman Empires had been defeated, they should not be broken up: “All experience showed that a permanent peace could not be obtained except by general consent.” Likewise the home secretary, Reginald McKenna, urged that “we should put forward a suggestion that none of us take anything.”

  More characteristic of the country’s mood, however, was the position taken by the sole Conservative Party representative on the War Council, Arthur Balfour. “In Europe,” Balfour explained to Haldane, “he understood there was a general consensus that divisions of territory should be by nationality. But in Asia we had to deal with countries which had been misgoverned by the Turks.” The often bellicose Winston Churchill, presently serving as secretary of the navy, seconded: “Surely we did not intend to leave this inefficient and out-of-date nation which had long misruled one of the most fertile countries in the world still in possession! Turkey had long shown herself to be inefficient as a governing Power and it was time for us to make a clean sweep.” At this stage neither Balfour (certainly) nor Churchill (probably) knew of the correspondence with Grand Sharif Hussein. In arguing for British annexation of portions of Turkey already promised to him, they were not being duplicitous, merely traditionally imperialist. But what of Lord Kitchener, who also weighed in on the side of British territorial aggrandizement? “India [by which he meant British India, which was sending troops to Mesopotamia] would expect some return for her effort and losses.” He favored annexation of the land that Indian troops occupied in Mesopotamia, the annexed land to be ruled by the British government in India. And what, finally, of Asquith, who saw which way the wind was blowing and who surely knew of the inducements Kitchener and Grey had held out to the grand sharif? Although “he had great sympathy13 with Sir Edward Grey’s first proposition that we have already as much territory as we are able to hold … the fact was we were not free agents … If for one reason or another, because we didn’t want more territory or because we didn’t feel equal to the responsibility, we were to leave the other nations to scramble for Turkey without taking anything ourselves, we should not be doing our duty.”

  Asquith appointed a committee to study and make recommendations on British desiderata in the Middle East. Its chair was Sir Maurice de Bunsen, an assistant under secretary at the Foreign Office, formerly British ambassador to Vienna and previous to that secretary to the British embassy at Constantinople. The report that his committee wrote did not so much make foreign policy recommendations as explain Britain’s foreign policy options. Assuming as it did the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after the war, it was the first British government committee to consider the future of Palestine (it anticipated that an international condominium would govern the place). The individual who dominated its sessions was ultimately as important as Balfour himself among non-Jews, during the events leading up to publication of the Balfour Declaration.

  That individual was not the chairman, de Bunsen, but rather Sir Mark Sykes, sixth baronet of Sledmere. Sykes was a Yorkshire squire, the owner of an estate of 34,000 acres. The seat of his estate, Sledmere Hall, “lay like a ducal demesne14 among the Wolds,” writes one of his biographers. It was “approached by long straight roads and sheltered by belts of woodland, surrounded by large prosperous farms.” Gates and walls “ornamented with the heraldic triton of the Sykes family … [guarded] the mighty four-square residence and the exquisite parish church” adjoining it. The family’s famous stud farm lay behind. Sykes could have devoted himself to the pleasures of an extremely privileged life but was destined to cut a larger figure. We cannot say how much larger because he died in 1919 at age forty, of the influenza epidemic in Paris. He achieved much, but had he lived he probably would have achieved a good deal more.

  His father, the ill-tempered Sir Tatton Sykes, took young Mark on frequent and extensive journeys, some through the Middle East and South Asia. Of formal schooling the boy had little, although a succession of tutors ensured an eclectic range of knowledge to complement what he gained by experience and travel. His mother, an unhappy, delicate woman, was chained by marriage to a choleric, intolerant, and uncomprehending husband and found refuge in drink and Catholicism. Over the years she resorted increasingly to both, and the second had lasting influence upon her son. Those who knew Mark Sykes believed that religious devotion constituted the bedrock of his soul.

  But he wore his Catholicism lightly. He had an effervescent personality; he could turn a gathering into a party, a party into a festival. He bubbled with ideas, and he swept up his listeners with his enthusiasm. In addition he had a remarkable talent for sketching caricatures and for mimicry. “Mark Sykes had vitality15 beyond any man I have ever met,” wrote a close friend. “When one had been in his company one felt almost as if one had been given a draught from the fountain of life.” Despite the miserable marriage of his parents, he radiated happiness. He was, apparently, a sort of human champagne.

  A few remained immune to his charm. T. E. Lawrence considered him a lightweight, but Sykes was actually a serious student of politics and war and imperial policy. He went to South Africa for the Boer War, although he did not see combat. For nearly a decade after the war’s conclusion, he traveled again. He knew the Ottoman Empire well and regarded it with Disraelian tolerance: In other words, he was prepared to overlook its defects in order to preserve it as a buttress of British interests, especially since it blocked Russian access to the Mediterranean. He shared the prejudices of his era and class: Although he looked down upon Turks by and large, he judged them to be racially superior to the peoples they governed. He was an anti-Semite—during his travels he sketched grotesque cartoons of fat Jews with big noses. But other peoples ranked lower still in his estimation. He wrote in one of his early books, “Even Jews have their16 good points, but Armenians have none.” Given that he would become Chaim Weizmann’s staunchest and most effective Gentile ally, and champion of the national aspirations of Armenians as well, we may say at the outset that he was capable of changing his mind and of adapting to circumstances.

  During 1907 Sykes served as honorary attaché at the British embassy in Constantinople. There he met and befriended two other young Englishmen serving in the same capacity. They were George Lloyd, scion of a wealthy Birmingham industrial family, and Aubrey Herbert, son of the fourth earl of Carnarvon. Like Sykes, both men shared a fascination with the East; both were extremely able. All three returned to Britain, and by 1911 all three had secured seats as Conservatives in the House of Commons, where they formed the nucleus of a group of old-fashioned romantic Tories. They believed implicitly in the goodness of the British Empire and in its civilizing role. They distrusted Liberal anti-imperialists and reformers, hated trade unions and socialism, and believed in the virtues of a sturdy yeomanry and in the natural bonds connecting peasant with landowner. But they were hardly simple. Sykes, for example, could be both radical and reactionary at the same time: He favored home rule for Ireland (as did Aubrey Herbert), although the vast majority of Conservatives opposed it fanatically; simultaneously he unavailingly supported the hereditary power of the House of Lords to block the Liberal Home Rule Bill in the House of Commons, an anachronistic parliamentary prerogative that more moderate and up-to-date Conservatives eventually abandoned.

  With the outbreak of war, Sykes returned to Sledmere Hall to raise a battalion of volunteers from the estate. He hoped to lead them to France. But the government, wishing to make use of his knowledge of the Middle East, attached him to the Intelligence Department. This was a disappointment that he may have inadvertently helped make happen by writing to Sir Edward Grey, urging a more aggressive attitude toward the Turks, even though they we
re not yet in the war. He expertly summarized recent British policy with regard to the Ottomans and explained what British passivity in the Middle East might lead to among “the Arabs of the Syrian desert17 and those south of the Dead Sea … [also those of] S. Mesopotamia … [and] the Kurds.” Then he laid out the probable repercussions in Afghanistan and India. Shortly thereafter, quite possibly as a response, the summons from Intelligence arrived. In London, Sykes was put to work writing pamphlets urging the people of Syria to rebel against the Ottomans.

  He knew already the Foreign Office men with Middle East expertise. One of them18 introduced him to Lord Kitchener’s devoted secretary and assistant, Colonel Oswald Fitzgerald. Turkey had not yet entered the war, and in London much wishful thinking had her staying out or even joining the Allies. Sykes told Fitzgerald that Turkey would come in soon, however, and on the side of Germany. He backed up the prediction with an explanatory letter that Fitzgerald carried to Kitchener. The latter kept it. When the Turks intervened as Sykes had prophesied, Kitchener decided to make use of the prophet. But how? When Prime Minister Asquith formed the de Bunsen Committee to ascertain British desiderata in Asiatic Turkey, Kitchener requested that Sykes be placed upon it. He told Fitzgerald that he wished to be kept informed of its deliberations—this was Sykes’s job to begin with. “But,” Sykes recalled, “I never saw Lord Kitchener19 except once and then only for a moment. I used to report to Fitzgerald each night at York House on the various problems that had come up for discussion and received instructions as to the points that Lord Kitchener desired should be considered. This I did as best I could.” Sykes was too modest. Historians agree that he crucially influenced the committee’s report. Certainly his letters reveal a mind in full flow and a personality more than willing to dispense advice. What preoccupied him? “Turkey must cease20 to be,” he wrote to a friend. But he did not pine for its colonized subjects. “All black people21 want sound, strict, unbending government,” he declared in the same letter.

  Once the de Bunsen Committee had concluded its deliberations and written its report, Fitzgerald informed Sykes that Kitchener wanted him to travel “right round the Middle East and report back to him on the various situations.” Before he left, Sykes saw Kitchener “for about fifteen minutes and he gave me nothing more than the same instructions Fitzgerald had mentioned to me.” It seems a strange way of running the largest empire in the world. “I could never understand22 what he thought and he could never understand what I thought,” Sykes was to remark of Kitchener a year later, but “Fitzgerald was a very good intermediary in that way with a man who was difficult to explain things to or understand what was meant.”

  To go “right round the Middle East,” Kitchener had instructed Sykes, for the war had cast that region into the crucible, and he had to know how Britain might reshape it. The Cairo contingent already had definite plans, as Sykes would learn upon arrival. Clayton, Storrs, and others were pushing for Britain to throw the Turks out of Syria and to attack Alexandretta, a port at the northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea. This would relieve Turkish pressure, they held, both on Suez and on British soldiers facing difficult conditions in Gallipoli; once taken, Alexandretta might also prove an entryway for British forces into Turkey. Hence its possession might even tilt the balance of the war. At least it afforded Mesopotamia convenient access to the Mediterranean Sea, and they assumed that Britain would take Mesopotamia as a spoil of war. Thus Alexandretta was “the key of the whole23 place,” as T. E. Lawrence, recently arrived in Cairo, wrote to a friend. Even now Lawrence and his superiors in Cairo were thinking of Britain’s imperial position after the war and of potential future wars. Alexandretta was “going to be the head of the Baghdad [railway] line and therefore the natural outlet for Northern Syria and Northern Mesopotamia; it’s the only easy road from Cilicia and Asia Minor into Asia, etc. etc. Also it’s a wonderful harbor and … can be made impregnable.” No other country but Britain must possess it. “If Russia has Alexandretta it’s all up with us in the near East,” Lawrence warned. France must not control it either since “one cannot go on betting that France will always be our friend.”

  Nor had Cairo forgotten the grand sharif of Mecca. Although the British would not hear from him again until July 14, 1915, they were already spinning elaborate schemes in which he figured prominently. Lawrence, for one, saw the emir as a crucial player in the British interest, both during the war and afterward. “I want to pull them24 all [the smaller Arab principalities and tribes] together and to roll up Syria by way of the Hejaz in the name of the Sharif … and biff the French out of all hope of Syria. It’s a big game and at last one worth playing.” In other words, he wanted Hussein ruling “Arabia”—still undefined but now including Syria, which would have encompassed Lebanon and Palestine—under the influence of Great Britain. Likewise Storrs looked forward to Hussein’s rise—under Britain’s indirect control. He would become caliph: “His allegiance to us25 inspired, as his revenues derived, from annual subventions and the proceeds of an annual pilgrimage—guaranteed against foreign and especially Turkish aggression … it is to this ideal that we should shape our course.”

  Although the sharif had refrained from contacting the British, he had hardly been inactive, as Kitchener might have guessed. What he had done, and what it led to, is the subject of our next chapter. But it is fair to say that Kitchener expected Sykes, as he traveled the Middle East, to get a grip on the sharif too.

  So the sixth baronet of Sledmere set off from England, on a journey that would take him, in six months, to Sofia, to British headquarters at the Dardanelles, to Egypt, to Aden, to Simla in India, and back to Egypt. While in Egypt, he held cheerful reunion with Aubrey Herbert and George Lloyd, both now Egyptian army intelligence officers; he met often with Clayton and Storrs and with Cheetham’s replacement as high commissioner, Sir Henry McMahon. From the last we may glean something of the atmosphere of their conferences. “He is a very pleasant26 change from the ordinary,” McMahon wrote to his old chief in India, the Viceroy Lord Hardinge. “Among other things he is an extraordinarily clever mimic and you should get him to give some of his impersonations such as the Old Turk, Young Turk, Syrian, Naval Division, &c.”

  But Sykes had done much more than indulge his talent for mimicry. Wherever he went, he reported on the policy options enumerated by the de Bunsen Committee, and he also listened and learned and conferred. The Egyptian high commissioner brought him up-to-date on the promises made and inducements held out to the grand sharif. In mid-July the emir finally ended his seven-month silence and wrote again to Sir Ronald Storrs; Sykes was no longer in Cairo but soon knew of the letter’s contents, and of the correspondence that ensued among the parties planning the Arab Revolt. Sykes endorsed that cause immediately. A British-supported Arab uprising to free Arabia (including Syria) from the Turks fit his own outlook and temperament and appealed to his imagination. He returned to England on December 8, 1915, determined to obtain the government’s backing for the Arab Revolt and for what the Cairo contingent were calling the “forward policy”—which meant the larger effort to attack Alexandretta and “roll up Syria,” refashioning the Middle East to suit Britain’s imperial interests. On December 16 he had an audience with the War Council or War Committee, as it now was called. Aside from Sykes, only Asquith, Balfour, David Lloyd George, and Kitchener spoke at this meeting. All the opponents of expanding Britain’s reach were absent or silent. Sykes made his report, a masterly performance. “I should just like to conclude,”27 he wound up, “by putting before you the dangers that I think confront us if matters are allowed to slide. If we adopt a perfectly passive attitude … the Sharif, I think, will be killed.”

  “Will be what?” asked Arthur Balfour.

  “Will be killed,” Sykes repeated, “and a Committee of Union and Progress nominee will be put in his place. That gives the Turks and the Germans Mecca. The Christians in Syria will be exterminated … The anti-Committee [of Union and Progress] elements will be destroyed among t
he Arabs, the intellectual Arabs will be hanged and shot … The Arab machine will be captured … then we shall be confronted with the danger of a real Jehad.”

  But Sykes was preaching to the converted.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Next Steps

  WHILE SYKES WAS REPORTING to London, the Ottomans were pressing Grand Sharif Hussein to raise an army: They wished to throw his soldiers against the British at the Suez Canal. More important, they wanted him to endorse their call to jihad: His endorsement would inspire millions of British Muslim subjects in Egypt, Sudan, and India to rise up against their colonial infidel masters, making Britain’s worst nightmare come true.

  The grand sharif prevaricated. He supported the jihad personally, he told the Turks, but a public declaration was too risky. It would result in an English blockade of his country and perhaps in bombardment of its ports. His people would starve or worse. Moreover the annual hajj would be endangered. He could not in this instance do as they requested. But he would raise troops for the attack on the Canal.

  What he did not tell the Turks was that he was secretly dispatching emissaries to the main Arab leaders. Without divulging his own plans, he needed to know their intentions with regard to the war and their likely reaction if he took the English bait and did indeed launch a rebellion. Soon enough his messengers1 returned with answers. One sheikh hoped to enlist the Turks against the dangerous Ibn Saud: he would declare the jihad as a quid pro quo for Turkish support, but he protested his continuing love for the grand sharif. Another, the Iman Yahya, was noncommittal. The rest, however, including Ibn Saud, supported Britain against Turkey. Saud urged Hussein to ignore2 the Ottoman call to wage jihad. If the grand sharif decided to move against the Ottomans, then one or two of the great Arab chiefs might disapprove, but none were likely to oppose him actively.