But three thousand miles to the northwest, off the Orkney Islands, Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener had just perished in icy waters amid gale-force winds. He had been on his way to Russia on a diplomatic mission when his ship, HMS Hampshire, struck a German mine. Thus did fate deny the British initiator and prime architect of his country’s alliance with Grand Sharif Hussein any chance to see the fruit, whether good or ill, of his labors.
Feisal had gone to Medina, but Djemal Pasha remained uneasy. Anticipating trouble, he decided to send Fakhri Pasha, a seasoned divisional commander, after him. “I explained to him the situation and … asked him … if occasion required to arrange … all necessary measures of defence.” Djemal also prepared “two or three battalions38 and one or two mountain batteries at Damascus … they could be entrained within half an hour of receiving the first signal.” By this time, late May, Hussein had already dispatched the letter to McMahon asking him to send Storrs to meet Abdullah, and in Medina, Ali and Feisal were busy making preparations for the uprising. Ali secretly contacted the tribal chiefs to warn them that action was pending. Feisal sent word to his bodyguard back in Damascus: They must leave that city immediately. He reviewed the fifteen hundred Mujahid fighters, who everyone supposed would take part in the invasion of Sinai, and discussed its real mission with their officers. When Fakhri arrived in Medina, the two brothers brought him out to Hezret Hamza to review the troops again. “We lunched together,” Fakhri reported to Djemal. “The volunteers were39 indulging in all the sports beloved of the Beduins [sic] and singing songs about the blows they were going to inflict upon the English.” On the evening of June 440 he accepted an invitation to dine with Feisal and Ali at their Medina quarters. The brothers assured him that the first contingents of Mujahids would depart for Dara in two days’ time. It was an unexceptional occasion.
The next morning, however, Ali sent a note to Fakhri. Perhaps he had written it before dinner the previous evening. Fakhri read it with surprise and growing anger. “In accordance with my father’s orders the transport of the volunteers to Palestine will be suspended,” Ali wrote. “I have therefore decided to return with the Mujahids to Mecca instead of wasting my time here. I regret that I must go without taking leave of you. Please excuse me!” Ali did not state it plainly, but Fakhri Pasha understood what was about to happen: Ali would not be returning with his troops to Mecca, he would be throwing them against the Turks. Frantically Fakhri sought to contact Djemal Pasha, finally tracking him down by telephone in Beirut. “The railway will be attacked tonight or tomorrow morning at the latest,” he warned. “Ali Bey will interrupt our communications between Medina and Syria and attempt a surprise attack on Medina … I have assumed command of all the troops.” Djemal sent the Damascus battalions and batteries at once. Let the two brothers waste their time in the desert blowing up railway track. That could be repaired. He was determined to hold Medina against all comers.
Ali and Feisal had ridden out to Hezret Hamza at daybreak. There before the fifteen hundred Arab fighters, they fired their rifles into the air and proclaimed the independence of Arabia in the name of their father the Grand Sharif Hussein of Mecca. Then the two brothers led their now-rebel army into the desolate reaches beyond Medina to join the tribes Ali had recruited earlier. They would tear up the railway. They would besiege Fakhri Pasha and his reinforced Ottoman army in Medina. The die was cast. The date was June 5.
Abdullah had arrived in Taif three days earlier. As in Medina, Ottoman soldiers crowded the city, refugees from the blast-furnace heat of Mecca. Likewise seeking relief from the blazing sun, the Turkish vali rested there. The grand sharif had either seized or cut the telegraph lines into Mecca, but not yet those extending from it, presumably on the grounds that control of cables in meant control of cables out. Taif, then, remained on line, but its messages could be intercepted in Mecca. During that first week of June no one in Taif knew anything about Ali and Feisal’s actions far to the north.
Abdullah consulted with the local sheikhs. All was in readiness; they waited only for the word to strike. Abdullah told them that a date had been set: Saturday, June 10. Then on the morning of June 941 he received a summons to meet with the Turkish vali later in the day. A nervous Abdullah accepted quickly enough but took precautions. At the time appointed he rode with four picked men toward the vali’s palace. They reined in before it. “I left Faraj with the horses,” Abdullah recalled. He entered the building with his three comrades “and posted Hosaan at the top of the stairs”; traversed a long hallway, and stationed the two remaining sheikhs outside the vali’s room.
Then Abdullah entered it, with a pistol hidden beneath his cloak. “If there was any trouble42 I was to shoot the vali in the room and they were to dispatch anyone who tried to interfere outside.” In fact, the vali harbored no designs; he remained ignorant of events in Medina. But the continual jockeying with the emir for control of the Hejaz preyed upon his nerves. When Abdullah appeared before him, the vali reiterated these concerns. Then two Ottoman officials entered the room. One of them whispered in the vali’s ear. Abdullah tightened his grip upon the pistol. But the vali only shook his head and ordered the men to leave. Later Abdullah learned they had been urging the vali to arrest him.
It was a narrow escape, and when a shaken Abdullah left the palace, he immediately ordered that the telegraph wires into Taif be severed. Now the city was entirely cut off. The next day, as planned, he launched the siege of Taif.
Back in February the grand sharif already had devised his opening gambit: He would send a letter to Enver Pasha, first among the triumvirate of Young Turks leading the Ottoman Empire. No copy survives,43 but both Abdullah and Djemal summarize it in their memoirs. Hussein offered, in this communication, to do what the Ottomans wanted: He would send additional troops for the invasion of Egypt and still more to face the British in Iraq; he would endorse the jihad. But he stipulated that the Ottomans must do something for him in return. They must pardon the prisoners in Djemal’s jails, grant autonomy to Syria and Iraq within the empire, and recognize him as hereditary emir of the Hejaz. It is impossible that the grand sharif did not understand he was crying for the moon. Therefore he was preparing the way for revolt. When the Ottomans rejected his offer, he would have his casus belli.
Meanwhile he ratcheted up tensions in Mecca. First he asked the British to extend their blockade in the Red Sea to the Arabian coast. He believed, rightly as it turned out, that those affected would blame the Turks for provoking Britain rather than Britain for prosecuting the war. As the blockade tightened, supplies dwindled throughout his kingdom. “Purveyors have begun to refuse to give provisions,” reported the acting governor and commandant of Mecca from Hamidiye, the Ottoman headquarters in that city. “Everyone reclaims44 his money. Even wood ration is now given day by day.… provisions sent to Taif have not arrived.” A few days earlier he had warned that as a result of the blockade, people in Mecca were showing “an attitude of distrust of the government.”
In Constantinople the Ottomans were puzzling over Hussein’s letter. Enver Pasha sent it to Damascus, telling Djemal that he could not make heads or tails of it. The latter understood it well enough, according to his account, but he approached the matter obliquely. “Your father,” he cautioned Feisal, who was at that point still in Damascus, “has many enemies … in Constantinople … trying every day to rouse the Government’s suspicions against [him].” The grand sharif’s son “turned pale,” according to Djemal. The commander of the Fourth Army sent a more transparent warning to Hussein: “The men who form45 the present Government … would never forgive anyone who had the audacity to hamper them in the war upon which they have entered for the good of the Mohammedan world.”
The time for a parting of the ways was near at hand. We may imagine the grand sharif and his son Abdullah in nearly continual consultation in Mecca; messages in code and invisible ink secreted in sword hilts must have been flying to and fro between Ali and Feisal, both now in Medina, and the sharif and Abdul
lah in Mecca. When the brothers in Medina finally set the date for their rising and informed their father of it, Hussein wrote to Enver in Constantinople and to Djemal in Damascus: “He [Hussein] considered himself46 compelled to break off relations with the Government until the request was acceded to which he had made to Enver Pasha two months before.” At that point Ali sent his own brief note to Fakhri Pasha. He and Feisal rode off into the desert with their fifteen hundred soldiers.
In Mecca Bimbashi Mehmed Zia Bey, the acting governor and commandant, had no knowledge of these developments. But as tensions grew because of the British blockade and ensuing mutterings, he devised a defense, in case matters should reach the breaking point. He must hold three main Ottoman outposts in the holy city, he concluded: Hamidiye (the headquarters), Fort Jeyad (which was close by), and the Jiyad Barracks (located on the outskirts of town). But he continued to hope that it would not be necessary to implement the plan. The evidence suggests that when the crisis finally arrived, it took him by surprise.
It came not with a rush but by degrees, yet overwhelmed him nonetheless. On the afternoon of June 9, just as Abdullah, pistol hidden beneath his robe, was entering the palace in Taif for his verbal sparring match with the vali, “outlaws” blocked the Jeddah-Mecca road and cut the Jeddah-Mecca and Mecca-Taif telegraph lines. In Mecca itself “a number of armed men” could be seen “wandering about in the streets,” while others patrolled the surrounding hills. The acting governor sent men to repair the telegraph lines. He telephoned the grand sharif, asking for an explanation of the armed men. “They were simply47 the young men of the quarter who were strolling about to maintain the peace of the town,” the sharif told him. Not entirely clueless, the Turk brought in troops to defend the oven and granary upon which both fort and headquarters depended. And he sent an order to both fortress and barracks: If a battery at the fort fired three blank shots, the barracks should instantly send reinforcements from the Second Battalion, 130th Regiment.
Immediately after prayers at dawn the next morning, gunfire broke out in the streets of Mecca. “I called up the Emir and asked what all this meant,” the acting commandant reported. “Do something,” he is said to have implored the grand sharif, and Hussein is said to have replied rather ambiguously that he would. But not ambiguously enough; at last the acting commandant, realizing what he confronted, ordered that the three blank shots be fired.
The reinforcements started off from the barracks but immediately ran into a larger detachment of Arab soldiers. The Second Battalion, 130th Regiment, returned to its barracks. “I felt much grieved at this … our position in the city was very dangerous,” the acting commandant later reported. That was an understatement. Only twenty-two artillerymen occupied the fortress; they had among them only 325 rounds of ammunition. The previous night Hussein’s men had cut off their water so that the twenty-two had only a single cistern containing perhaps a day’s supply. As a result of the blockade, they had stockpiled very little food.
All that day the Arabs kept up continual firing at Hamidiye. The single detachment of soldiers protecting the bakery and granary returned fire, but the Arabs outnumbered and outgunned them. Increasingly desperate, the acting commandant appealed for help to Taif, not realizing that Ottoman forces there were under attack by Abdullah. He dispatched his personal servant with a plea for help. The Arabs captured this unfortunate man immediately. Eventually the acting commandant tried the barracks once more, this time by telephone, but “the line was cut.” Meanwhile the heavy guns at the fort remained strangely mute. “I tried to communicate with the fort but no sooner did the private pass out of the door than he was shot.” His own soldiers at the granary and the bakery had only eight to ten rounds of ammunition left.
So passed the first day of the Arab Revolt in Mecca. On the second day, June 11, the fortress at last commenced a bombardment of the ground near and about Hamidiye. But by then the Turkish position was dire. Slowly but inexorably and from all sides, the Arabs advanced upon Ottoman headquarters. They occupied adjoining buildings. Others pumped petroleum onto the great wooden gates. They would burn their way in. Soon flames were licking at the structure. The Turks had no water to put the fire out. They had run out of ammunition. The acting commandant “was overpowered by the smoke … in a fainting condition.” Then he saw a representative of the grand sharif, striding toward him through the chaos. He “heard him speak to me in reassuring terms … A minute later I was being led to the Emaret as a prisoner in the hands of the rebels.” The first and most important part of the siege of Mecca was finished, and the Arab rebels were victorious.
It was only a first gust but in mid-June 1916 Britons and Arabs together had loosed a desert wind, a sirocco, upon the Middle East. From Mecca and Medina and Taif it would reach over and down to Basra and up and across to Damascus. Palestine would feel it too, but already a countervailing storm was brewing there. Some of the very same men working the Arab bellows had sufficient strength and purpose to pump a second pair as well. They would stir up a different storm. We turn at last to the subject of London and Zion.
PART II
London and Zion
CHAPTER 8
Prewar British Jews
ON THE THIRD DAY OF MARCH 1913 an elegantly dressed middle-aged man approached the entrance to the British Foreign Office in Whitehall. Nahum Sokolow1 had receding brown hair, blue eyes, a mustache, and a trim goatee. Born fifty-three years earlier in Wyszogrod, Russian Poland, he was descended from a line of distinguished rabbis, and himself a brilliant student, indeed deemed a prodigy by his teachers, he had been destined originally for the rabbinate too. But a religious career did not appeal to him. He left the village shtetl for Warsaw and made his livelihood in the world of letters. He learned to write and speak fluently in more than half a dozen languages. By 1913 he was a newspaper proprietor and editor and one of the best-known and most prolific Jewish journalists and litterateurs in the world.
He also served on the actions committee, or executive board, of the World Zionist Organization, whose headquarters were located in Berlin. Nahum Sokolow’s diplomatic and political skills more than equaled his talent for journalism and writing. They were not the result of formal training; he had picked them up, one must assume, in the salons of Warsaw, and in Cologne, where he relocated to serve the Zionists, and later in Berlin; also perhaps from the diplomats and politicians he met as a journalist. In any event he learned them well. As one who knew and worked with him would later write: “His handsome appearance,2 his air of fine breeding, his distinguished manner, his gentle speech, his calculated expression, his cautious action, his well-cut clothes, his monocle [made him] the diplomatist of the Zionist Movement.” Already in 1913 Sokolow had traveled the world for the Zionists, honing his diplomatic expertise on European officials, Turkish bureaucrats, Arab leaders, and fellow Jewish nationalists from many countries. His purpose this day was to meet with Foreign Office representatives and through them to bring the British government up-to-date on Zionist affairs and accomplishments. The long-term goal, of course, was to enlist their support. Nahum Sokolow did not think that would happen anytime soon.
The Foreign Office occupied a grand edifice in 1913, as it does today, within surroundings that could hardly fail to impress. The building’s eastern facade stretches the length of Parliament Street in Whitehall; its Italianate western frontage includes a six-story tower overlooking the white-pebbled Horse Guards Parade, where jousting tournaments used to take place during the reign of Henry VIII. In 1913 occasional ceremonies and exhibitions still were held on the parade grounds, but usually red-jacketed, metal-helmeted, mounted sentries from the Queen’s Household Cavalry stood permanent guard there. Beyond the parade lies lush St. James’s Park and its lake, which together provide an almost pastoral backdrop, suggesting the parkland of a vast royal country estate.
Inside the building marble floors and columns, a grand red-carpeted staircase outlined by polished gleaming banisters, arched windows, glowing chandeliers, a
nd elaborately patterned ceilings and walls could not be more different from the interior of any public building in provincial Poland—or provincial anywhere. The men who worked at the Foreign Office in 1913 knew this. When it came to measuring themselves against visitors, no matter how distinguished and no matter where from, they suffered few insecurities.
The Jew from Wyszogrod had to cool his heels for nearly three months before entering. Soon after his arrival in England he applied for an appointment, and two months later, on February 12, 1913, an official grudgingly got around to acknowledging that “somebody could see him if he calls, but [because Turkey, a friendly power, opposed the Jewish nationalist movement] the less we have to do with the Zionists the better.” Three weeks after that Sokolow finally got inside the door. We cannot know what his private feelings and hesitations might have been, but he would have taken in the splendid surroundings without betraying them. When he learned that Foreign Office permanent under secretary Sir Arthur Nicolson had no time to receive him after all, Sokolow would not have allowed even a shadow to cross his face.
The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Page 15