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

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The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Page 32

by Jonathan Schneer


  Newcombe and Lloyd appear to have been troubled too by what Feisal and Fuad told them. Lloyd advised Fuad to go to Cairo right away to explain his worries to Clayton and to Wingate. Newcombe composed an extraordinary note for the Cairo contingent to ponder. Basically he condemned the way in which Sykes and Picot had conducted their meetings. Hussein had been told of the Tripartite Agreement “and asked to give a final decision upon [it] at a moment’s notice: while French and English governments have had months to consider their point of view.” Implicitly he suggested that the two Europeans had acted dishonestly. The king had “agreed to the Syrian coast being governed by the French on the same terms as Baghdad by the British, having no idea what the latter are: It was not pointed out to him either that the two countries and the conditions differ fundamentally.” Newcombe hoped that no irreparable damage to British honor had been done. Nothing had yet been signed. “Further and very much wider [emphasis in the original] discussion is possible and very desirable.”

  Newcombe then went directly to Colonel Wilson. Their discussion only heightened Wilson’s existing unease. Afterward he put together a twelve-page document, repetitive, poorly organized, but moving—in fact, extraordinary. The essence of his message was:

  As you know I have all along been a strong advocate of being as open as possible with the Sharif [Hussein]. My considered opinion is that we have not been as open and frank as we should been at this last meeting.

  Special representatives of Great Britain and France came expressly to fix things up with the Sharif and when the latter agreed to France having the same status in Syria as we are to have in Iraq surely the main points of our agreement re Iraq should have been stated to prevent all chance of a misunderstanding which might have far reaching consequences …

  Everything may be all right, as Baghdad and Iraq except Basra may be going to be entirely Arab and independent with British advisers, financial control, etc. If so well and good but if the Sharif puts one construction on McMahon’s letter and we another, there is likely to be serious trouble.

  Several lines later he put the whole thing in a nutshell. He feared that “we have not played a straight forward game with a courteous old man who is, as Sykes agrees, one of Great Britain’s most sincere and loyal admirers.” And finally he issued a warning: “If we are not going to see the Sharif through, and we let him down badly after all his trust in us, the very ‘enviable’ post of Pilgrimage Officer at Jeddah will be vacant because I certainly could not remain.”

  So did the Zionists and the Arabs learn about Anglo-French plans for the Middle East; and so did British officials in Jeddah learn how their superiors treated an Arab potentate. They all could have been forgiven for thinking that Allied statements about the rights of small nations were so much hot air. King Hussein managed to convince himself that all would be well (later he would claim that he learned the details of the Sykes-Picot Agreement only when the Russian Bolsheviks published details of Allied “secret treaties” in December 1917); other leading Jews and Arabs feared that they had been betrayed or tricked. Hussein’s credulity and Feisal’s disquiet deeply troubled Colonels Wilson and Newcombe, which is much to their credit. As for Mark Sykes, at this crucial moment he appears to have thought he could manage the Zionists, the Arabs, the French, and the British Foreign Office all at once, and perhaps he could, but to what end? Whether in May 1917 he meant for the Anglo-French agreement to be revised, reinterpreted, or implemented without alteration remains an open question. He wrote and said different things about it.

  What he most certainly did not yet do was inform the Arabs about his plans for Zionism in Palestine.

  PART IV

  The Road Not Taken

  CHAPTER 17

  British Muslims, the Anglo-Ottoman Society, and the Disillusioning of Marmaduke Pickthall

  THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE had entered World War I on the side of Germany at the end of October 1914. Three men dominated the empire’s CUP government: Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Djemal Pasha. (The last we have already met, hanging Arab nationalists in Damascus, and bidding Feisal to feast in the intervals.) Of the ruling triumvirate, only Enver Pasha, the minister of war, unambiguously favored the alliance with Germany. Daring, underhanded, and ruthless, convinced that the German war machine would prove invincible, he had secretly maneuvered his country into the conflict on Germany’s side. His two partners, and the rest of his government, and indeed his country as a whole, could not but accept the fait accompli.

  Nevertheless, doubts about the wisdom of this choice would not disappear. The political strength of those who harbored them, and their willingness to act upon them, waxed and waned depending largely upon Ottoman success in battle. The doubters were strongest and most likely to call for an end to combat when their country seemed liable to defeat; they were weakest when it seemed most likely to win. Still, the possibility that Turkey would negotiate a separate peace with the Entente powers, whether under Djemal, or Talaat, or Enver, or perhaps someone else entirely, hovered always in the air. It was part of the atmosphere.

  As we have also seen, Zionists in Britain at first thought Turkish entry into the war presaged disaster for Jews in Palestine. They feared that the Ottoman government would take advantage of the crisis by attacking a traditional scapegoat. They never completely lost this fear, which Djemal Pasha stoked more than once by threatening to employ “Armenian methods” against the Palestinian Jewish population. Nevertheless very quickly a hope surged to overshadow all else among British Zionists. “The Ottoman Government has drawn1 the sword … [It] will perish by the sword,” Prime Minister Asquith intoned prophetically on November 9, 1914. “They … have rung the death-knell of Ottoman Dominion not only in Europe but in Asia.” With the Ottoman Empire gone, so would be gone one of the greatest obstacles to Zionist progress. What would replace it? British Zionists concluded almost immediately that the best solution for Zionism would be a British protectorate in Palestine. Allied victory in the war would make that possible. It followed that they must oppose any compromise peace with Turkey that left her grip on Palestine intact.

  As for the British: Asquith might swear that Britain would fight the war against Turkey to the end, but the easterners who sought in Turkey or the Balkans a back door to central Europe might conclude that they could more easily open it by negotiation than by force. When Lloyd George replaced Asquith as prime minister, the easterners took 10 Downing Street. But not only easterners believed that removing the Ottoman Empire from their list of enemies would benefit the Triple Entente. Westerners could think that too. So just as in Turkey where the possibility of a negotiated settlement with the Allies floated always in the minds of some, so in Britain too the possibility of a compromise peace with Turkey never quite disappeared.

  Here then are three pieces on a historic chessboard: namely a never-absent, if never-realized, desire on the part of some Turks for a compromise peace with the Allies; an occasional willingness on the part of some among the Allies to consider such an arrangement with Turkey; and an adamant opposition to any such thing on the part of most British Zionists. The maneuvering of these three parties during the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration is a significant aspect of our story.

  Turkey and Britain had no sooner declared war upon each other than they opened secret negotiations to try to end it. British agents had been telling the Foreign Office for years that the CUP governments were not popular; now they added that neither had been the CUP decision to enter the war. On January 28, 1915, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, British envoy in Berne, was approached by Rechid Bey, a former Liberal Turkish minister of the interior now living in Geneva. An “Old Turk” whom the CUP had chased from his country, Rechid Bey informed the Briton that if certain assurances were forthcoming from the Entente, “the present regime2 [in Turkey] could be swept away.” On that very day, however, the War Council in London was agreeing to a British naval attempt on the Straits of the Dardanelles. Rechid Bey’s proposal appears to have been lost
in the shuffle.

  Nevertheless Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, whom Grant Duff informed about the visit, hoped to achieve by negotiation what would otherwise require the spilling of much blood. He told the cabinet, “What we really relied on3 to open the Straits was a coup d’état in Constantinople.” He had been in touch with director of naval intelligence, Admiral “Blinker” Hall, who just had enlisted into his service the erstwhile chief British dragoman of Constantinople, Gerald Fitzmaurice. Grey, with Hall’s knowledge and approval, sent Fitzmaurice on a delicate mission to Sofia, Bulgaria. Grey wrote to the British ambassador there: “When operations against the Dardanelles begin to be successful he may be able … to get into touch with the Turkish party at Constantinople who are anti-German and well-known to him.”

  Fitzmaurice and a couple of subordinates made contact with Turkish dissidents in Greece. Fitzmaurice offered £4 million if they would open the straits to the British navy. The Turks were willing but demanded guarantees, most particularly that no harm should come to Constantinople. They knew well the long-standing Russian desire for this warm-water port, and they would not risk their lives in a dangerous enterprise against Enver and his backers if it meant losing the chief city of the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, however, possession of Constantinople was a Russian war aim to which the British government had acceded. Fitzmaurice could not make the guarantee. Instead he warned that every day the Turks delayed, he would reduce the bribe by £100,000. It might have worked if not for Turkish success in battle. The Ottoman forces withstood everything the British and French navies could throw at them and inflicted terrible damage in return. Whatever dismay Turkish negotiators may have experienced as the value of their bribe diminished was balanced, therefore, by increasing confidence in the ability of their countrymen to resist the enemy. Conversely British assurance began to wane. By March 18, with the Turkish forts still holding out and passage along the straits too dangerous to yet attempt, the British cabinet instructed Hall “to spare no expense to win over the Turks.” It was too late. Now Britain would commit the army as well as the navy to what soon became another charnel house, the infamous, dreadful battle of Gallipoli. Fitzmaurice, having failed to bribe the Turks to get out of the war, returned to Sofia. There he would soon engage in an equally futile attempt to bribe the Bulgarians to get into it on the Allied side.

  Even after these early efforts to end the war with Turkey by negotiation failed, Fitzmaurice kept his ear to the ground. “Those in touch with Young Turk circles state that the latter have been discussing advisability of a separate peace,” he cabled to Grey from Sofia on May 7. Sure enough, three weeks later the idea resurfaced in Paris.4 It proved stillborn because the French could not promise to keep the Russians from Constantinople. It resurfaced in California5 in August 1915, when an Ottoman commissioner to the San Francisco Exhibition contacted a British official there. He came up against the same stumbling block: Britain could not protect Constantinople either. At the end of the year, Russia tried to bribe6 Djemal Pasha to end the war—but he would have to give up Constantinople. Arthur Balfour had it right when the Foreign Office informed the War Council of these various maneuvers. “No harm in trying,”7 he scribbled on the F.O. minute, “but it is incredible that the Turks will agree.”

  In Britain anti-Turkish sentiment ran high during the war. This was nothing new: It had been running high at least since the 1870s, when Britons learned to despise the murderous Sultan Abdul Hamid II along with the corruption of his court, the dead hand of his bureaucracy, and the brutality of his minions, in short everything that the great nineteenth-century Liberal, William Gladstone, summed up in his memorable epithet “the unspeakable Turk.” Conservatives did not dispute this judgment, only the foreign policy that flowed from it. From the floor of the House of Commons, Gladstone’s great Conservative antagonist, Benjamin Disraeli, said of the Ottomans, they “seldom resort to torture, but generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.” Where opposition to the Ottoman regime constituted a bedrock of Liberal foreign policy, therefore, willingness to overlook Ottoman faults constituted the Conservative. Disraeli held that Britain must practice realpolitik in the real world. She must defend the far-flung interests of the British Empire; she must keep the Russians out of the Mediterranean Sea and far away from the Suez Canal; and if that meant allying with the brutal regime on the Bosporus, so be it.

  The advent of the CUP in 1908 changed little. Gladstone was gone, but the Liberal government kept the Young Turk government at arm’s length; it joined the Triple Entente with France and Russia, Turkey’s traditional enemy. Disraeli was long gone too, but many Conservatives still preferred a Turkish alliance to one with Russia. Nevertheless they, as much as the Liberals, generally viewed Young Turks as atheists and radicals who aped the West without truly understanding it, and who continued all the while to indulge the inbred Oriental vices: intrigue, treachery, and violence.

  British anti-Ottoman sentiment had a religious component. Many Ottoman subjects practiced the Muslim religion, over which the Ottoman sultan presided as caliph. Ironically, Britain too ruled over a Muslim empire whose main outposts were in South Asia, Egypt, and Sudan. The British Muslim empire numbered nearly a hundred million people and was second in size only to the Ottoman Muslim empire. Inevitably British-governed Muslims flocked to the imperial center as students, business and professional men, and tourists. Muslim lascars (seamen) lived in British port cities when their ships docked. By 1914 Britain contained a small but distinct Muslim community.

  That community did not receive a warm welcome. When William Quilliam, a prosperous solicitor from the Isle of Man, converted to Islam and established what appears to have been Britain’s first mosque, in Liverpool in 1891, the response was harsh. A crowd greeted the muezzin’s call to Friday services “with ‘discordant yells8 and loud execrations,’ pelted him with mud, stones and filth; and also pelted worshippers leaving the mosque.” In 1895 “furious Christians threatened to burn Sheikh Quilliam alive.” Ten years later things had not much improved, even in cosmopolitan London. “Opposition was9 very keen in those days and many obstacles were placed in our path,” recalled one who claimed to have been the sole British-born worshipper then taking part in London’s Muslim services. During the next decade passions abated, but general ill will did not. When the war was about four months old, that first Anglo-Muslim, who now called himself Sheikh Khalid Sheldrake, wrote to the king: “Your Majesty, May I venture10 most humbly to bring to your notice the existence of a grave danger at the present crisis? The Press have issued Cartoons and articles in which the Muslim creed, and the Sultan (its Caliph) have been held up to ridicule.”

  Old habits of thought died hard among the population as a whole, but in December 1914 the last thing the British government wanted was to alienate Muslims. When Turkey entered the war, the sultan/caliph immediately declared jihad against his Christian enemies. Various imams endorsed and repeated his call. The question for Britain was how her hundred million Muslim subjects would react. Starting the Arab hare, setting up the grand sharif as an opposite pole to the Ottoman sultan, suggesting that he might become caliph himself—all this was part of Britain’s strategy for vitiating the sultan’s holy war and retaining the loyalty of her own Muslim subjects.

  The strategy was not completely successful. Muslim agitators, some of them financed by the Ottoman and German governments, made difficulties in South Asia and throughout the Middle East. Their message reached as far as Europe, even Britain. On October 26, 1915, somebody walked into the East Central London post office and dropped a letter into the box. It was a warning to Prime Minister Asquith, the third he had received so far, against making war on “our brothers and the Caliph11 of Mohammedans … The responsibility falls on you alone and the chastisement for deceiving the nation will be your deprivation from life, and in the world to come you will undergo the worst of torture … Beware, beware.”

  During the war British Intelligence
kept12 a weather eye on British Muslims great and small, whether politically moderate, liberal, or radical, and on those who sympathized with them and on the places where they gathered, not merely in South Asia and Egypt but in England too. It kept tabs, for example, on the chief Muslim cleric in Britain, Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, who appears from his writings to have been a gentle, tolerant soul; also on some of the more radical members of an Islamic Society, including its general secretary, the barrister, poet, author, and pan-Islamist Mushir Hussein Kidwai; and the pan-Africanist, anti-imperialist Dusé Mohamed Ali. It even opened the mail of a troublesome Liberal MP, Joseph King,13 who although only tangentially concerned with British Muslims publicly attacked the government for permitting the Secret Service to employ agents provocateurs against these and other groups.

  Men such as Dusé Mohamed Ali, Mushir Hussein Kidwai, and Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din figure in our story because their aims and aspirations are relevant to the movement for a separate peace with Turkey.

  Dusé Mohamed Ali was an Egyptian-born, English-educated son of a Sudanese woman and an Egyptian army officer who had died in the failed nationalist uprising of 1881–82. An erstwhile actor who toured the United States and Canada as well as Britain, Mohamed turned to journalism in 1909 at the age of forty-five. In 1911 he published to critical acclaim In the Land of the Pharos, which was said to be the first short history of Egypt written in English by an Egyptian. A year later he founded the African Times and Orient Review. This sporadically published journal provided a forum for opponents of British imperialism. It opened its pages not merely to critics who wished to soften what they deemed to be a well-intentioned if occasionally unjust and harsh movement, but also to those like Kidwai who wished to tear up the imperialist movement root and branch. Dusé Mohamed Ali also founded a League of Justice “to defend the rights of native peoples.” In a secret summation of his character, an agent of the India Office deemed him to be quite “capable of political mischief.”14

 

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