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

by Jonathan Schneer

  Feisal and his retinue, forty strong, disembarked from the train at the Damascus railway station to find themselves in a city gripped by hunger, illness, dread, and revulsion. Djemal suspected everyone, possibly even Feisal and his father. He insisted that the grand sharif’s son stay with him, at Ottoman army headquarters. Was he trying to keep his enemy close, or was it simple courtesy? Either way Feisal had no option but to accept. Imperturbably he presented his host with gifts from Mecca, including a sword of honor. Djemal claimed to have interpreted this at the time “as the greatest proof12 of friendship.” Did he really? Feisal thought not. He wrote of the Ottoman leadership to his father: “There can be no trust13 in their sayings or their writings.” His letters to Mecca traveled in cakes, in sword handles, in the soles of his servants’ sandals. He wrote them in code, in invisible ink. And meanwhile, in the famished, terrorized city, he attended banquets and receptions arranged by Djemal in his honor.

  In Aleyh, to which all eyes had turned, trials of the second batch of suspects proceeded. Among the prisoners now suffering the same vile torments as had been meted out to the first group were Arab deputies to the Ottoman parliament; delegates to the prewar Arab Congress in Paris, including its president; lawyers, journalists, and army officers; indeed, “some of the best known14 and most influential names in Syria.” A few were Christian, but most were Muslim. “In my opinion,”15 wrote Djemal Pasha, “the punishment of a man who betrays his faith and his country should be in proportion to the social position he enjoys.” The outcome was a foregone conclusion, although (as we know today) a number of the condemned had in fact held aloof from the nationalist movement. Their innocence did not save them. Now it was Feisal’s turn to sail close to the wind. “He came to see16 me every day,” Djemal Pasha continues, “and always brought the conversation round to the question of pardon.” From Mecca the grand sharif, too, exhorted the commander of the Fourth Army, and leading Young Turks in Constantinople and even the sultan himself, to show mercy.

  There was to be none. On the evening of May 5, 1916, a jailer read out the names of twenty-one prisoners. They were divided into two groups: one entrained for Damascus, while the other boarded horse-drawn carriages bound for Beirut. In the first city soldiers had erected seven gallows in the main square; in the second they had built a scaffold in Liberty Square (known today as Martyrs’ Square). “O paradise of my17 country,” cried one prisoner as they placed the rope around his neck, “carry our feelings of brotherly love to every Lebanese, to every Syrian, to every Arab, tell them of our tragic end and tell them: ‘For your freedom we have lived and for your independence we are dying!’” Then he kicked away the stool himself, denying that honor to the hangman.

  On the very day of the executions, Djemal caused the army to publish a summary of the trials, including some of the evidence used to convict. That morning Feisal was taking his ease with the al-Bakris, at their house five miles outside Damascus. A servant brought them the army summary. One of the Bakri family read aloud the twenty-one names. At last, and only for a moment, the mask slipped from Feisal’s face. He leaped to his feet, a cry for vengeance wrenched from deep within him: “Death will now18 be a pleasure for us!” But two hours later he stood before Djemal protesting his good intentions: “I swear by the19 memory of my ancestors,” he is supposed to have told him, “that had I known how heinous was the offence of those criminals I should not merely have refused to intervene for them. I should have asked for them to be torn limb from limb to prolong their sufferings. God’s curse be upon them!”

  That was play-acting. The real Feisal met again secretly with the remaining members of al-Fatat at the al-Bakris’ house. Their number was much diminished, not only by the dispatch of the 35th Division to Gallipoli but by the transfer of nearly all Arab officers out of Syria and into Turkey, and of course by the executions, deportations, and other removals. Djemal, now also contemplating the chessboard, was taking off as many of his opponents’ pieces as possible before the game began. With them gone, and with Damascus effectively traumatized, Feisal and the remaining conspirators came to the only possible conclusion. The revolt could not begin in Syria. Feisal advised his father that the initial blow must be struck elsewhere, in Medina or Mecca or both.

  But first he must escape from Damascus and make his way to one or the other of those cities. Once more he appeared before Djemal Pasha, wearing his dissembler’s mask. Historians do not agree about precisely what he said, but in some way he gave reason to join his brother Ali in Medina. Djemal believed him (as most would have it) or did not (as Djemal himself later told it, but he was an interested party). Either way, he raised no objection. Feisal left Damascus. Djemal Pasha had had him in his grasp and let him go.

  Could the grand sharif launch a successful rebellion without the Syrians playing a leading role? He thought so. He had his two knights now and fifteen hundred warriors in Medina. The tribal desert fighters were champing at the bit in the surrounding wastes. At his signal Ali and Feisal would gather them all and lead them in an attack upon the railway that connected Medina with Damascus. Tear up enough line, and the Ottoman path into Arabia would be blocked. Then they must besiege and capture Medina itself. Simultaneously a portion of the grand sharif’s own army would take Mecca, forcing surrender of the Ottoman troops there. Abdullah would lead another force, local tribesmen with whose sheikhs he had been consulting, against Taif, where the Turkish vali already was seeking refuge from the early summer heat and where the bulk of Ottoman troops usually posted in the holy city spent the summer months. Still other desert tribes would attack the Turks in the port of Jeddah and other Hejazi towns occupied by Ottoman soldiers.

  But first Hussein sought once again to bring even more powerful pieces onto the board. He thought the British should land at Alexandretta. With the eastern Mediterranean’s best port as their base, they could fall upon Djemal’s Fourth Army and then turn north to join up with the Russians. Together the armies of the two great powers could push west into Anatolia toward the Ottoman capital. Hussein wrote to McMahon: “Since this war20 started we had thought that this plan will be that of the Allies in the Turkish theatre of war. This is why I could not understand [that] they have preferred to take operations in the Dardanelles.” But the British would not land at Alexandretta. They had just accepted the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which among other things allocated that harbor to France. Of course McMahon could not say so; he reiterated instead that given clear evidence of a genuine rebellion, Britain would be willing to pay and supply the Arabs and, if necessary, to assist by bombarding the Red Sea ports held by Ottomans. But Britian would provide no significant detachment of troops to aid the rebellion.

  Ali wrote to his father from Medina, “The movement should21 take place in the hot season; i.e., in the middle of the summer, so that the hot climate also might help us against them.” This was indeed the schedule, but an unforeseen development precipitated matters earlier. A Turkish force22 of 3,500 arrived in Medina, aiming to pass through the Hejaz en route to a final destination in Yemen. Stationed there, it would strengthen the Ottoman presence in the Arabian Peninsula as a whole; it would menace British-dominated Aden; it could even prove helpful to German troops across the Red Sea in East Africa.

  There was more to this Turkish mission than was apparent. A small party of Germans, led by a major of the general staff, Baron Othmar von Stotzingen, accompanied the Turkish division. Von Stotzingen’s servant was a Muslim Indian deserter; his interpreter was “the notorious Jew, ex-storekeeper, ex-prisoner of the caliphate, Heinrich Neufeld.” Neufeld had brought23 with him a Kurdish bride fifty years his junior. The party contained three additional officers, two wireless operators, and a few attendants. As non-Muslims, they were not permitted to travel by train to Medina. Djemal Pasha instructed them to take the coastal road and to rejoin the troops south of the Hejaz. The Ottoman Muslim troops, however, could go right on through.

  The arrival of Turkish soldiers in Medina set off alarm bells, and A
li immediately communicated with his father. Suppose the division’s real target was not Aden but the Hejaz? Even if it was not, Ali said, the presence of 3,500 Ottoman troops permanently stationed south of the sharif in Yemen would be a direct threat, and the passage through his father’s territory an insult. Hussein agreed. He determined that the Ottoman troops would not enter his kingdom at all. It was time to launch the rebellion.

  On May 23, 1916, McMahon received a telegram: “Sharif’s son Abdallah24 urgently requires Storrs to come to Arabian coast to meet him. Movement will begin as soon as Faisal arrives at Mecca.” The delighted high commissioner informed the Foreign Office back in London: “Will send Storrs25 as required.” He dispatched his oriental secretary almost immediately, and with him Kinahan Cornwallis and David G. Hogarth, both leaders of the newly established Arab Bureau in Cairo, which would oversee British intelligence operations in the Middle East for the rest of the war. The three men carried with them two sacks of a British propaganda newspaper called al-Haqiqa (The Truth) for distribution as the sharif saw fit, and £10,000 for his rebellion; also news that Britain would send £50,000 more once it had clear evidence that the revolt was in progress.

  From Cairo the trio went to Suez, where they boarded HMS Dufferin, which took them down the canal and into the Red Sea all the way to Port Sudan. They sailed under a blistering sun on flat and shining water, with their singular cargo in Storrs’s cabin. At Port Sudan the three met with Oreifan, an experienced go-between. Oreifan reported that the grand sharif wished to consult with him one more time before sending Abdullah to meet the British. HMS Dufferin ferried Oreifan across the Red Sea, landing him close to Jeddah, the port nearest Mecca. They would rendezvous at the same spot when Oreifan returned from Mecca three days later.

  It was a nervous interval. To fill it, HMS Dufferin cruised the Arab side of the coast, a forbidding, gorgeous, picturesque shoreline. “We made the near acquaintance26 of an island as scorched by heaven as any vent of earth’s fires, and of long miles of submerged coral, greens and blues dappled with gold,” Hogarth would recall. High mountains towered in the near distance. Tiny port villages, still under Turkish control, baked in the sun. Then “a naked fisherman paddled his bark canoe through the shark-infested sea to tell an incredible tale of German officers and a German lady gone southward to Yambo a few days before.” It was von Stotzingen’s party; the German lady was Neufeld’s Kurdish bride.

  At one P.M. on Monday, June 5, HMS Dufferin anchored off Jeddah. Oreifan was waiting. He had news: Bedouin marauders had murdered seven Germans the previous day—obviously some, or all, of the contingent described to them by the naked fisherman. If the Englishmen wished, Oreifan continued, he would bring them their heads. Storrs declined, telling Oreifan that he would prefer to see the Germans’ papers.

  Then Oreifan presented a letter, signed by Hussein but written in Abdullah’s hand: “I deeply regret my inability27 to send Abdallah for an urgent reason which bearer will explain: but his brother will represent him with one of his cousins.” Oreifan handed over another letter, from Abdullah to Storrs, containing the same message, but ending: “My request of you is to start operations in Syria to the best of your ability.” Evidently he and his father still pined for a British landing at Alexandretta. Finally Oreifan proffered a third letter, unsigned, but very much to the point: “Please order by28 wireless immediately 500 rifles of same pattern as those already sent us … also 4 machine guns, both with ammunition.”

  In addition to conveying the letters, Oreifan delivered a verbal report, which surely came as music to the ears of the waiting Englishmen. The Arab revolt they had so ardently wished for, planned for, and more or less patiently nurtured, finally was about to commence. Oreifan told them that the reason Abdullah could not meet them was that he had left Mecca to begin the siege of Taif. Feisal and Ali were about to attack Medina; the sharif would turn upon the Turks in Mecca; the Harb tribe would fall upon Jeddah. All these actions,29 so long contemplated by the sharif, were to be launched by the coming Saturday. In the meantime telegraph lines between Mecca and Jeddah already were in the sharif’s hands; the line to Medina had been cut; the railway was cut also. Zeid, the sharif’s fourth and youngest son, was on his way to Samima, six miles southwest of Jeddah, where he would meet the three British men next day at dawn.

  “We had not come so far30 to see a boy,” Hogarth sniffed, “but there was no help for it.” HMS Dufferin slipped down the six miles of coastline to anchor just outside the reefs at the desolate spot appointed. At five-thirty next morning, Tuesday, June 6, Storrs, Hogarth, and Cornwallis, still carrying their precious cargo of propaganda and £10,000, were taken by a small boat just inside the reef offshore from Samima. There was no sign of Zeid on the beach. But an Arab contact awaited them in a dhow half-full of sacks of maize, with a sail rigged to provide the Englishmen some shade. Even at that early hour the sun was broiling hot. On the shore Oreifan was waiting too, with a tent of honor erected for the conclave soon to occur.

  Finally ten camels and riders appeared silhouetted against the shimmering horizon and made their way to the tent by the shore. Moments later Oreifan was paddling a canoe out toward the dhow. He told the Englishmen that Zeid and his cousin wished to meet alone with Storrs. Evidently the Arabs did not wish to be outnumbered in council. The three devised a counterstrategy: Storrs would step ashore alone, as requested, but then so firmly invite the Arabs to return with him to the ship that they could not politely refuse. Even at this initial meeting, maneuvering for precedence was essential; perhaps it is so at every meeting between emissaries of governments. On this occasion it was not a fair fight, however: Zeid, aged twenty, confronted three masters of the game.

  “I stepped into Oreifan’s31 canoe, the bottom of which was so full of water that I elected for obvious reasons to stand up in it,” Storrs reported. “The last ten yards I was carried to the beach by two slaves.” Immediately he commenced to maneuver: “Without looking up I saw Zeid and Shakir [the cousin] slowly advancing upon me. I continued to arrange my clothes so as to bring the two down in front of their guard to welcome on their threshold one who was, after all, representing the High Commissioner.”

  The three men walked back up the beach to the tent, passing Zeid’s protectors. Storrs scrutinized the sharif’s youngest son: “He is about 5.5′32 in height, fair in complexion, with fine eyes and the round face and Greek profile characteristic of Circassians. He is evidently attempting to encourage the growth of a somewhat backward beard.” The young man wore a caftan of Egyptian silk. Brilliant gold cords fixed the head shawl. In fact, both Zeid and his relative were so faultlessly attired that Storrs believed they must have stopped and changed costume just before reaching the beach. This was, perhaps, an Arabian attempt at maneuver.

  The three waited in the tent for coffee, sitting on divans, the sand beneath their feet covered by two Shirwan rugs (of poor quality, Storrs judged) and two Killim carpets. Zeid confirmed the plan and schedule for the risings. Storrs asked for details. “We will summon the Turks to surrender and shoot them if they refuse,” Zeid said. “If they surrender we will imprison them until the end of the war. We intend to destroy the Hijaz railway as far north as Medain Salih, which will be our advance guard.” Then Zeid returned to the talking points provided by his father and older brother. The grand sharif wanted guns,33 ammunition, and money. He asked once more that the British send reinforcements to land on the Syrian coast. “His father felt very strongly on this point,” Storrs recorded. Storrs stuck to the British line: Money and weapons would be forthcoming, and perhaps advisers to train Arab soldiers in their use, but not soldiers in any quantity. At this juncture a slave dressed in white and silver served the coffee. “As soon as decently possible after this,” Storrs reports, I “took [Zeid’s] arm and told him it was time to be getting to the ship.”

  By now he had taken his measure of the man: “soft in his ways and vague in his ideas … and though by no means intelligent quite capable of understan
ding and conveying to or from his father any instructions or explanation with which he may be entrusted.” With this judgment Hogarth concurred: “Zeid struck me34 as amiable but weak … not a man of action but a Harem Arab.” The business conducted on HMS Dufferin therefore, when the men clambered aboard, merely reprised what had taken place earlier on shore. The British promised to send guns and ammunition and, later, more money. Then Storrs arranged a meal, and for the Arabs to be photographed, and a guided tour of the ship: “I had them shewn [sic] and explained the wireless, which appeared to fascinate them, the guns, the Captain’s bath-room and other wonders of the deep.” Here as elsewhere in Storrs’s memoirs and papers, we recognize a tone. That same condescending attitude allowed Sykes so cavalierly to redraw Arabian borders, and the British government in India to look upon Mesopotamia as its own preserve, and McMahon to write to Lord Hardinge that promises made to Arabs need not be binding upon the British government.

  Then it was over. The two young men disembarked from the ship into a canoe with the bundles of al-Haqiqa, the £10,000, and one thousand cigarettes, which Storrs thoughtfully added as a gift for Feisal and Ali, the only smokers in the sharif’s family. Then with the Arabs gone, the three Englishmen shared impressions. That the revolt would now take place none doubted. “The conception,35 plan and intended execution of the rising have every appearance of genuineness,” Storrs concluded. That the revolt was well conceived and would succeed remained an open question in their minds. “Far too much36 has been left to the last moment and to luck,” Hogarth warned.

  Still, England had evidently gained a prime objective. Merely by taking place, regardless of its success or failure, the Arab Revolt would divert the Turks; it would blunt their call for jihad; it would convert many Arabs to the Allied cause. And it would have another entirely unforeseen consequence as well. Somehow on their journey across the Hejaz, von Stotzingen’s party caught wind of the impending revolt and, frightened by that prospect, decided to turn back. It was then that they met up with the Bedouins, with fatal consequences for some but not all of the party. (Von Stotzingen himself, Neufeld, and Neufeld’s bride eventually made it back safely to Germany.) Von Stotzingen’s mission had been to recruit soldiers for jihad against the Allies, not only on the Arabian Peninsula but across the Red Sea in the Sudan and Egypt. The repercussions could have reached east too, across the Indian Ocean into South Asia. “Had the sherifian revolt37 never done anything else than frustrate that combined march of Turks and Germans to southern Arabia in 1916, we should owe it more than we have paid to this day,” Hogarth would write in 1920. HMS Dufferin steamed slowly northward upon a molten and breathless sea. Upon its deck three Englishmen congratulated themselves on a job well done.