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

by Jonathan Schneer

  In January 1915 Hussein’s oldest son, Ali, led a contingent of Hejazi volunteers into Medina. They were some of the troops his father had raised to take part in the Turkish attack on Suez, which was scheduled to commence on February 2. The Turkish vali of the Hejaz3 accompanied Ali. Somewhere between Mecca and Medina the vali misplaced his briefcase. One of Ali’s men happened upon it and brought it not to its rightful owner but to his own master. Naturally, given his father’s attitude toward the Turkish government, Ali opened the briefcase and read the documents inside. Probably he was not astonished to learn that the vali was playing a double game. Although outwardly friendly, this gentleman really intended to depose Hussein and to assert Ottoman control over the Hejaz. Immediately Ali, and the soldiers under his command, turned back to Mecca and brought the briefcase with incriminating documents to his father. The vali continued on to Suez where, on February 2, 1915, the British easily repulsed the Turkish attack.

  As Ali was arriving back in Mecca, another young man, Fauzi al-Bakri, was setting out from Damascus for the same city. The Turks had conscripted him, but he belonged to a prominent Syrian family that had long been friendly with the family of Grand Sharif Hussein. As a result, the Ottomans awarded him with a decorative posting—they made him a member of the sharif’s personal bodyguard. Unknown to them, however, Fauzi had recently joined the Arab secret society al-Fatat. Just before his departure from Damascus, the society commissioned him to sound out the grand sharif. If Arab nationalists rose against the Turks in Syria and Iraq, would he consent to be their leader? And if so, would he send a deputy to concert plans with them beforehand?

  Al-Fatat’s plans were well advanced already. Since the outbreak of war, its members’ views had altered considerably: Arab autonomy within the Ottoman Empire would no longer satisfy them, since the Ottomans likely could no longer protect Arabia from European imperialist designs. Now they believed that Arab interests required complete independence from Turkey. Thus the war hastened the society’s transition from Ottomanism to Arabism, as it hastened the development of revolutionary movements in Ireland, Russia, and elsewhere. In Syria, al-Fatat combined forces with the other major secret society, al-Ahd. Together the two groups planned a rising. Arab army officers stationed in Damascus would lead their soldiers into revolt. Syrian desert tribes whose sheikhs already belonged to the societies would join. The leaders hoped the revolt would spread to the Arabian Peninsula as well. Who would lead a rebellion there? They turned first to Ibn Saud, but he politely turned down their emissary—he had to deal with the disaffected sheikh to his north. And then the nationalists recalled the grand sharif of Mecca—and chose Fauzi al-Bakri to approach him.

  Fauzi arrived in the holy city late in January 1915 and quickly contrived a meeting alone with the grand sharif. Perhaps it was in the same great room at the top of the palace where Hussein had received X, the emissary from Cairo, for it is recorded that while Fauzi delivered the message from Damascus, the emir stared out the window over the rooftops of his city as he listened without comment, without even acknowledging the young man’s presence. The young nationalist, thinking no doubt that other members of the sharif’s bodyguard or household might be within earshot and might not be trustworthy, did not raise his voice above a whisper. When he finished, he slipped silently from the room. Hussein, seemingly, took no notice.

  In fact, he had listened intently. He was accustomed by now to discuss important political matters with his sons, and a family council ensued. In comparison with Abdullah and Feisal, Hussein’s oldest son, Ali, played a minor role in these family conclaves, and the fourth son, Zeid, played little part at all. Feisal distrusted Western4 imperialist designs in the Middle East and had hitherto favored maintaining relations with the Ottomans. Abdullah, on the other hand, had held anti-Turk and pro-British views since at least early 1914. Abdullah largely accepted the Arab nationalist position, but his father remained, as always, more a pan-Islamist than an Arab nationalist, although increasingly doubtful that he could continue to cooperate with the Ottoman regime. Perhaps the contents of the Ottoman vali’s briefcase encouraged him to look favorably upon Fauzi’s invitation. At any rate, the result of the meeting was a decision to send Feisal to Constantinople, to convey to the Ottoman authorities his father’s outrage at the vali’s double-dealing. En route Feisal was to stop at Damascus and stay with the al-Bakri family. He was to meet clandestinely with representatives of the secret societies in order to gauge them and their plans. If appropriate, he was to sound them on their attitude toward the British, with whom the sharif had been in contact. Then he was to report back to his father.

  It was an undertaking fraught with peril, but the tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted Feisal had been brought up (like his father and like all his brothers, for that matter) in an atmosphere of political intrigue that could on occasion turn deadly. Hussein was confident that Feisal could cope; Feisal was too. Not yet thirty years of age, he had gained military experience in his father’s prewar campaigns and was, according to David Hogarth, Hussein’s “most capable military5 commander.” “Clear-skinned as a pure Circassian,” Hogarth described him, “with dark hair, vivid black eyes set a little sloping in his face, strong nose, [and] short chin,” he seemed to the Englishman “far more imposing personally than any of his brothers,” although he was high-strung: “very quick and restless in movement … full of nerves.” Yet very much the son of his father, he could keep his face impassive and hold his tongue when necessary, or he could dissemble.

  In Damascus the top Ottoman official was Djemal Pasha, minister of marine, commander of the Turkish Fourth Army, and along with Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha, a member of the Young Turk ruling triumvirate. A formidable not to say intimidating figure, thick-set, black-bearded, with “a pair of cunning cruel6 eyes,” he already knew that Arab nationalists in Syria were planning an uprising. He had learned about it when the French dragoman brought the authorities the incriminating papers that the departing diplomat François Georges-Picot had left in the French consulate safe. Eventually Djemal would take ruthless action against those incriminated, but to begin with he merely directed his agents to keep close watch over them. At this stage he wished to win the goodwill of Syrians, not to provoke them.

  Still, when Feisal arrived at the Kadem Station in Damascus on March 26, 1915, he was entering a city on edge, its atmosphere heavy with fear and intrigue. Djemal greeted him warmly, probably with sincerity, having no inkling of the young man’s double mission. A few years after the war, he wrote in his memoirs, “Although I had never7 believed in the honesty of the Sherif of Mecca, I could never have conceived that in a war, upon which the fate of the Khalifate depended, he would ally himself with the States which desired to thrust the Slav yoke upon the whole Mohammedan world.” Feisal vindicated his father’s wisdom in sending him. He neither said nor did anything to raise Djemal’s suspicions—rather the opposite. Already Djemal was planning a second attack upon the Suez Canal. Feisal made a speech to the Ottoman headquarters staff in which “he swore by the glorious8 soul of the Prophet to return at an early date at the head of his warriors and help them to fight the foes of the Faith to the death.”

  That, and like declarations, he made during the day. At night, when his ceremonial and official obligations could not be carried out, he was meeting in secret with emissaries from al-Ahd and al-Fatat at the home of the al-Bakri family. There in the eastern suburbs of the city, amid groves of apricot and pomegranate and walnut trees in full spring bloom, these emissaries told him of their aims and something of their plans. They impressed him deeply; in fact, they worked a revolution in his mind. Where previously Feisal had thought his father should stick with the Ottomans and have nothing to do with Arab nationalist schemes, now he thought his father should lead the Arab nationalist attempt to throw off the Ottoman yoke, even if it led to a strengthened role for Britain in the Middle East. Better the British than the Turks. He told the Syrians about his brother’s prewar meetings with Stor
rs and Kitchener and about the correspondence that had ensued. The conspirators talked long and searchingly about what should be their attitude, and the attitude of the grand sharif and his sons, toward England. Then Feisal took the plunge. On one of those scented spring Damascene nights, he swore the blood oaths of both secret societies.

  From Damascus he traveled to Constantinople, arriving on April 23. There too he had to maintain a poker face. While meeting with leading Turkish politicians and military figures, he played the loyal subaltern. He complained to them that his father, the faithful grand sharif, had been betrayed by the vali with the briefcase. In turn Talaat and Enver, among others, explained that so far as they were concerned, Hussein would have nothing to fear if he publicly endorsed the jihad against Turkey’s enemies. Feisal promised to convey this message to his father with all sympathy. He paid his respects to the new sultan. “When he was received9 in audience by the sultan,” recalled Djemal Pasha, “he protested his loyalty and that of his father and family in words of such humble devotion that His Majesty could not have the slightest doubt about his honesty.” All the while, however, Feisal was longing to get back to Damascus to continue the discussions with the conspirators in al-Ahd and al-Fatat.

  Within a month he had realized this aim and was again lodged at the al-Bakri residence on the outskirts of Damascus. As before, his days were taken up with courtesy calls, public appearances, and the like, but the clandestine meetings recommenced at night; Arab army officers quietly appeared at the back gates and slipped noiselessly inside. The discussions were more urgent than before. The plotters had set the fuse, they told Feisal. It remained only to light it. Feisal promised the support of the Hejazi tribes—without consulting his father. But “we do not need them,”10 answered the Arab chief of staff of the Twelfth Corps of the Ottoman Fourth Army. “We have everything.” All they wanted was for the grand sharif of Mecca to lend his prestigious support to their uprising and for Feisal himself, the grand sharif’s most effective general, to become their visible leader.

  They had settled, too, the question of Great Britain’s role in their rebellion and its aftermath:

  The recognition by Great Britain of the independence of the Arab countries lying within the following frontiers:

  North: The line Mersin-Adana to parallel 37° N. and thence along the line Birejik-Urfa-Mardin-Midiat-Jazirat (Ibn Umar)-Amadia to the Persian frontier;

  East: The Persian frontier down to the Persian Gulf;

  South: The Indian Ocean (with the exclusion of Aden, whose status was to be maintained);

  West: The Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea back to Mersin.

  The abolition of all exceptional privileges granted to foreigners …

  The conclusion of a defensive alliance between Great Britain and the future independent Arab state.

  The grant of economic preference to Great Britain.

  This was the Damascus Protocol, at once the foundation document and the lodestar of the Arab Revolt. It envisioned a federation of Arab countries organized within a single independent Arab state or empire, containing Palestine, and backed by Britain, which would receive in return economic preferences. Implicit in the document, Grand Sharif Hussein would preside over the great state. Feisal promised to bring the protocol to his father and to recommend that he accept it and leadership of the movement that had produced it. A scribe copied the protocol in tiny letters onto a small sheet. It was sewn into the lining of a boot worn by one of Feisal’s servants. Should some mishap befall the grand sharif’s son on his return journey to Mecca, the message would nevertheless be delivered. Feisal probably thought his father’s reaction would be positive; but whether Great Britain would accept the terms of the Damascus Protocol was something none of the conspirators could predict.

  By the beginning of 1915 a new man was running Britain’s Cairo operation. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Arthur Henry McMahon replaced Sir Milne Cheetham, who had filled in briefly for the consul general, Lord Kitchener, detained by war work in London. The Foreign Office viewed McMahon as a placeholder for Kitchener too, but McMahon himself appears to have regarded the position as permanent. Strangely, although he had extensive experience of the subcontinent, where he had risen to become foreign secretary of the British government in India, he had no experience of the Middle East. “I cannot say that I know it more than an ordinary traveler would,” he confessed to an Egyptian journalist sent to interview him before his arrival in Cairo. “I don’t speak Arabic [but] … there are so many Arabic words in Indian languages—Persian, Afghan and Hindustani—which I know well.” Even so, near total ignorance of the relevant language seems an unlikely qualification for the top job in the world’s cockpit.

  A British dispatch boat brought McMahon and his wife to Alexandria, and a special train conveyed them to Cairo, where they were greeted with much pomp and circumstance. The newspapers reported that he had made a good impression. “His eye is kindly,” Sir Ronald Storrs remembered an Egyptian of the welcoming party remarking. Storrs himself wrote in his diary that McMahon seemed “quiet, friendly, agreeable,11 considerate and cautious,” estimates he would later considerably revise. Aubrey Herbert, then in Cairo, wrote of McMahon in his own diary: “He seems a stupid little man.”

  In India, McMahon’s last posting, British officials strongly opposed Cairo’s plan for an Arab uprising led by Sharif Hussein. They especially opposed Kitchener’s suggestion that an Arab might repossess the caliphate from the Turks. That, they argued, would have disastrous repercussions among Muslims everywhere outside Arabia, not least in their own South Asia. Moreover they did not believe for a minute that the Arabs could organize or govern a great kingdom or empire. Specifically, they discounted the sharif’s personal influence and abilities. They already had relations with the principalities running along the Arabian coast of the Indian Ocean from Aden to the Gulf of Oman. Insofar as they favored any Arab leader for a larger role, it was Ibn Saud, who as chief of the sectarian Wahhabis could never become caliph. And they nursed annexationist dreams, which the establishment of a great Arabian state headed by Sharif Hussein would render nil. Having sent troops across the Indian Ocean into Mesopotamia, they intended to keep that territory after the war. They assumed that McMahon, so recently one of them, still supported their position. Having departed India, however, the new high commissioner of Egypt was not bound by Indian interests. Once he arrived in Cairo, Storrs, Clayton, Herbert, and other members of the British intelligence community went to work on him. He “understood our design12 at once and judged it good,” T. E. Lawrence recorded with satisfaction.

  Despite McMahon’s ready acceptance of the plan, for six months it got no further. These were the months when Sharif Hussein was sounding the other Arab leaders and putting off the Ottoman demand that he endorse the jihad, and when Feisal was playing his dangerous double game in Damascus and Constantinople. Of some of these activities, the British had gleanings: They were aware of Hussein’s inquiry to Ibn Saud about the Turkish call for jihad, and of Saud’s advice to ignore it. Otherwise they knew little of the sharif’s thinking or activities. They were impatient for decisive action on his part, none more so than the governor general and sirdar of Sudan, Sir Francis Reginald Wingate. Although cut off from Cairo by distance (his address was the grandest in the British Empire—“The Palace, Khartoum”), Wingate knew of Kitchener’s offer to Hussein from Gilbert Clayton, British director of military intelligence for the Middle East, who was also his protégé, former private secretary, and despite his other duties, still his agent in Egypt.

  Once Wingate digested the correspondence between London/Cairo and Hussein, he too understood the design and judged it good. In fact, he had favored something along the same lines since the outbreak of war. Like the Cairo men, India men, and London men, he doubted that Hussein could lead a great independent Arab kingdom: Wingate judged Arabia to be “scarcely an embryo13 [of a state] and during the process of conception and being actually born and indeed through the boyhood stages s
ome nation will have to mother them.” But he believed strongly that an Arab rebellion would aid the British war effort. Moreover he cherished a secret personal ambition: that Cairo would “mother” a great Arab empire, as Delhi had “mothered” Britain’s empire in India, and that he would be its viceroy. In one cable after another, therefore, he urged first Clayton, then McMahon, and then, through McMahon, both Grey and Kitchener in London, to make Hussein an offer he could not refuse.

  And so the cables poured into London. In those from Khartoum and Cairo, Wingate, Clayton, and McMahon all urged the British government somehow to induce Sharif Hussein to act; in those from Delhi, its viceroy, Lord Hardinge, urged the opposite, that the sharif not be encouraged. Wingate and Hardinge sent each other conflicting cables setting out their positions as well. Debate raged in the Foreign Office, but in the end Cairo and Khartoum prevailed. “You should inform14 Wingate,” Grey instructed McMahon, “that I authorize him to let it be known if he thinks it desirable that His Majesty’s Government will make it an essential condition in any terms of peace that the Arabian Peninsula and its Moslem Holy Places should remain in the hands of an independent Sovereign Moslem state.” Wingate undertook to spread the news “far and wide,15 and as it is now authoritative it will be believed and credited.”