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

by Jonathan Schneer

  For the first time45 in all the years of our friendship I take the liberty of speaking to you not only as a friend … but like an older and more experienced comrade who was in the fight when you were still a schoolboy and who probably directly or indirectly influenced to a certain extent the molding of your opinion in Jewish problems. Now in this capacity I must say that what you intend doing is literally a “stab in the back” to the whole Zionist cause … You are too clever to fail to see that the effect of your so-called “resignation” would be the lowering of the prestige of the Zionist representatives in the eyes of those on whom at this critical moment depends the fate of our cause. It is not because you are absolutely indispensable. No man is absolutely indispensable. Had you left the work for some reasons beyond your control, such as serious illness or an accident, that would have been bad and harmful enough. Yet the work could have been carried on by someone else and would not have been shaken in its very foundations. [Or] … had you from the start appeared before those in power as the elected representative of the Zionist organization, as its “diplomatic” representative (as it was later the case with Sokolow) your “resignation” would not have caused great surprise either, since they are used to the principle of elected representation and would have found nothing odd in the replacement of one person by another …

  Your case however is quite exceptional. You did not start as an elected representative of a “collective” unit but as an individual Zionist. Your personal qualities coupled with favorable conditions in a comparatively short period of time have caused a great number of influential people to regard you as something of a symbol of Zionism. Now suddenly out of the blue you announce that you have resigned. Who did you tender your resignation to? Who were those who elected you to have now the right to accept your resignation? You were elected by the circumstances and the circumstances alone will dismiss you in God’s good time, when either complete success or complete failure will render your further work unnecessary. Until then you cannot leave your post without creating a most disastrous impression about the Zionists and Zionism in the minds of those with whom you have been in contact until now …

  There is of course no need to add that from a personal point of view such an act would be moral suicide. That however is your own affair and you are perfectly aware of it.

  Did this letter have a chastening effect? It is hard to imagine otherwise. Did Weizmann’s threats to resign chasten the majority of his colleagues? Undoubtedly they had. For whatever combination of reasons, he retracted his threat to resign next day and would not broach the subject again during our period.

  CHAPTER 23

  Lawrence and the Arabs on the Verge

  TODAY WE CAN SEE that the Zionists and the Arabs were entering the home stretch of a historic race for position in Palestine. But during the six months prior to release of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917, neither party really understood that they were in a race at all, and both parties incorrectly identified their adversary. Zionists in Britain fixed their gaze upon Whitehall, hoping that the use of skillful diplomacy would persuade the British government to support them. Of King Hussein and his armies in the Hejaz and Syria, they rarely thought. Meanwhile the Arabs sought to improve their military capacity and effectiveness against the Ottomans, with British aid. If they thought themselves to be in a race, it was not against the Zionists but against the French, who they knew had designs upon Syria. They believed the British would help them to establish control over that country, including most probably a good bit of Palestine. Zionism they rarely considered.

  British officers on the spot who knew something about the Sykes-Picot Agreement may also have thought a race was taking place between the Arabs and the French, with the track tilted in favor of the latter and with Syria the prize. They did not consider Palestine, however, because whatever Sykes and Picot had envisioned, they aspired to assert British influence there after the war. Some British officers undoubtedly hoped the Arabs would win their race against France, or would at least gain meaningful authority in the part of Syria that lay east of Palestine and south of Damascus. That would constitute a buffer between a British-dominated Mesopotamia and a French-dominated Syria and Lebanon and it would be more or less under their control. But they were not yet thinking much about Zionism.

  At least one British officer, however, may have seen a little further. He even may have hoped the Arabs would establish something more than a mere puppet buffer state.

  It seems likely that T. E. Lawrence had developed genuine sympathy for Arab nationalist aspirations by early 1917. He saw too that they would run up against Zionist, French, and British aspirations. He had met Aaron Aaronsohn in Cairo and learned of Zionist plans for Palestine. These troubled him. He knew enough to suspect that McMahon’s correspondence with Hussein contradicted aspects of the agreement that Sykes had negotiated with Picot, even though he did not yet know the agreement’s details. Like many British officers in the Middle East, Lawrence had concluded, even with only partial knowledge, that Sykes had ceded too much territory to France. In other words, even before he knew its details, he objected to the Sykes-Picot Agreement both for Arab nationalist and for British imperialist reasons.

  In July 1917 he interviewed King Hussein and became painfully aware that the latter misunderstood British intentions for Mesopotamia, as well as French plans for the Syrian coastal region. But Lawrence had concluded long since that if Hussein wished to stake any convincing claim to any part of Syria, his troops, led by his son Feisal, must enter Damascus before the troops of any other country did. One night at Wejh he and Feisal and some of the latter’s advisers discussed the matter. “We all swore1 to not go to Mecca till after we had seen Damascus,” Lawrence recorded in his diary. But the evidence about his attitude is ambiguous, as is most evidence about this extraordinary figure. Some months after making this pledge, he wrote to Mark Sykes (in a letter never delivered):

  I quite recognize2 that we may have to sell our small friends [Arabs] to pay our big friends [the international Zionist movement and France] or sell [to France] our future security in the Near East to pay for our present victory in Flanders. If you will tell me once more what we have to give the Jews and what we have to give the French I’ll do everything I can to make it easy for us.

  He was, he added, “strongly pro-British and also pro-Arab.” But he increasingly came to realize that he could not be both, and the realization wore him down.

  Lawrence had met Sykes in Cairo in early May 1917, when the latter arrived on the joint mission with Picot, the one that led King Hussein to conclude erroneously that the French would treat Syria’s coastal region in the same manner that he thought the British would treat Mesopotamia—that is to say, as temporarily occupied territory, generously paid for. This appears to have been when Lawrence concluded, to the contrary, that the Arabs must stir themselves if they did not wish to lose Syria altogether. Shortly after the meeting with Sykes, he embarked from Wejh on the famous expedition north into Syria dramatized in David Lean’s celebrated film. Accompanying him were, among others, seventeen Ageyli soldiers from the towns of central Arabia, and most notably, Auda abu Tayi, sheikh of a section of a northern tribe, the Howeitat, which, with Auda’s help, Lawrence intended to mobilize against the Ottomans.

  Auda abu Tayi is the fabled figure portrayed by Anthony Quinn in the movie: a warrior who had once reputedly cut the beating heart from a dying enemy and bitten into it, and who had killed seventy-five men in battle—not including Turks, whom he considered not worth counting. He possessed the ravaged face of a tragedian with “large eloquent eyes, like black velvet in richness,” Lawrence thought, and a mind “stored with poems of old raids and epic tales of fights.” More important, Auda believed in the creation of the greater Arab kingdom envisioned by King Hussein. Lawrence valued him less for his remarkable personal qualities than because he could swing an important tribe, the Howeitat, behind Hussein’s revolt.

  Their joint expedition has a
ssumed mythic status. It had several purposes: to recruit to Feisal’s cause northern Arab tribes in addition to the Howeitat; to make contact with the surviving Syrian revolutionaries in Damascus and perhaps spur them to activity (to facilitate this goal a member of the al-Bakri family accompanied them); to further disrupt Turkish communications with Medina by destroying track along the Hejaz Railway. But by far the most important goal was to capture the tiny but strategically crucial port of Aqaba, at the northernmost point of the Gulf of Aqaba, which extends from the northern end of the Red Sea like a finger pointing farther north into Syria. Famously, the Ottoman defenders of the port kept powerful guns facing the water, protecting against French and British warships. Lawrence and Auda (which man devised the strategy is unclear) intended to surprise them by attacking by land from the east, with Howeitat and other tribal soldiers, although to come out on the right side would require an epic trek through the waterless and broiling desert. Once captured, however, Aqaba could become the jumping-off point for further northern campaigns. The Arab forces engaged in them could constitute the right wing of a largely British army that, as Lawrence correctly anticipated, soon would advance northward into Palestine. As the Arabs moved north from Aqaba in parallel to the British, they could assert control, by virtue of military occupation, of a good part of Jordan and Syria, northern Palestine included. Which aspect of this strategy lay uppermost in Lawrence’s mind remains uncertain.

  On the afternoon of May 9, 1917, Lawrence and his party left Wejh and headed north into the desert. A report among the papers of General Gilbert Clayton (entitled “Notes on Capt. Lawrence’s Journey”) provides a barebones summary of what followed:

  They marched to Abu3 Raga where the force was increased to 36 men and thence to the Railway at km. 810.5 which they dynamited on 19th May … He went west … to Ras Baalbek on June 10th and dynamited a small plate girder bridge there … From Um Keis they went to Ifdein (Mafrak on map) the first station below Deraa and destroyed a stretch of curved rails … thence to Atwi where they failed to take the station but killed 3 out of the 5 of the garrison, captured a large flock of sheep and destroyed a telegraph party of 4 men repairing the wire. They also dynamited a stretch of line.

  And so they continued, blowing up or digging up railway track, hitting Turkish outposts in deadly lightning attacks and then vanishing back into the desert, recruiting additional members of various tribes until “from Guweira they marched on to El Kethira (wiping out a post of 3 officers and 140 men) and thence to El Khadra in the North of Wadi Ithm, where the Aqaba garrison surrendered at discretion.”

  This utilitarian account doubtless served its purpose as a military report but perforce left out much interesting material. For example, on May 24, as the scorching sun beat down mercilessly and the heat reflected upward from the desert floor so that the men upon their camels could not tell whether it came from above or below but only how much they suffered from it; as the horizon was dissolved in shimmering mirage so that men could not estimate distance either before or behind; and as each man retreated deep within himself simply in order to endure the brutal day, Lawrence suddenly realized that he could not see his personal servant, Gasim. The man had fallen behind and must be lost—a certain death sentence unless someone quickly rescued him. Lawrence wheeled his camel around and began retracing his steps, alone now in the furnace, with only a compass to guide him. After an hour and a half, he found Gasim “nearly blinded4 … his black mouth gaping open.” But he was still alive; Lawrence had saved him.

  Another occasion, at night this time: Lawrence and his companions sat by the fire “while the coffee5 maker boiled up his coffee … when there came a volley from the shadowy dunes east of us and one of the Ageyli toppled forward.” Death could come unexpectedly and in an instant. And not only from enemy guns—poisonous snakes proved equally dangerous, if slower: “Twice puff-adders6 came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain and a swelling of the poisoned limb.”

  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this fabled adventure took place inside Lawrence’s head. “I could see,”7 he wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his famous book about the Arabian campaign, that

  if we won the war the promises to the Arabs [made by McMahon in the correspondence with Hussein] were dead paper. Had I been an honorable adviser I would have sent my men home, and not let them risk their lives for such stuff. Yet the Arab inspiration was our main tool in winning the Eastern war. So I assured them that England kept her word in letter and spirit. In this comfort they performed their fine things: but, of course, instead of being proud of what we did together I was continually and bitterly ashamed.

  He finally attempted to resolve this terrible contradiction, at least to his own satisfaction. “I vowed to make the Arab Revolt the engine of its own success, as well as handmaid to our Egyptian campaign,” he records in Seven Pillars. He “saw the liberation of Syria happening in steps, of which Aqaba was the indispensable first.” Successive steps, he now realized, must be taken rapidly thereafter. But first he must ride alone much farther north, indeed all the way to Damascus and beyond, to spy out the land and to plot what those steps should be. “Also,”8 he wrote in his book, “a rash adventure suited my abandoned mood.” But at the time, in a message to General Clayton (also never delivered), he wrote: “I’ve decided9 to go off alone to Damascus hoping to get killed on the way. For all sakes try and clear this show up before it goes further. We are getting them to fight for us on a lie and I can’t stand it.”

  In this frame of mind, Lawrence embarked upon a journey more extraordinary than the one from which he had just taken temporary leave. His route led from Wadi Sirhan, home base of the Howeitat and their romantic chieftain, Auda, all the way to Ayn al Barida, 130 miles northeast of Damascus, where he made contact with another tribe, the Wuld Ali, whose support would be helpful when it came time to engage the Turks there. From this location he traveled westward into modern Lebanon and then south, to the very gates of Damascus itself. There he met Ali Riza al Rikabi, the Arab nationalist general who had kept his true beliefs secret from the Turks and who had been entrusted by them with defense of this most important Syrian city. The general warned Lawrence that Damascus would not rise up, which would only have confirmed the Englishman in his belief that Feisal’s army must make those next steps north if they were to seize control of their homeland. Next he rode south, making contact with the leader of the Druze people and then, more important, with the sheikh of the powerful north Arabian Rwala tribe. He returned to Wadi Sirhan on June 18, having been gone nearly two weeks. He had exorcised the suicidal mood, if ever it had truly existed, with constructive work.

  Finally the advance began. It took place in stages: from Wadi Sirhan to Bair; from Bair to El-Jefer; from that town to Ghadir el Haj, where they carried out extensive demolition work on the railway line; and then to “the low rolling10 grass-covered hills that flank each side of the Aqaba road near Ain Aba el-Lissan.” An Ottoman detachment occupied this town and had to be disposed of before the march could continue. Lawrence and his men held the high ground and pinned them there for a day, but “it was terribly hot11—hotter than ever before I had felt it in Arabia.” Even the hardened Bedouin tribesmen could not take it “and crawled or had to be thrown under rocks to recover in their shade.”

  At dusk Auda broke the impasse with fifty horsemen in a wild dash down the hill into the teeth of the Ottoman guns. The Turkish defenders broke, just as Lawrence and another detachment rolled in upon them from the flank. A massacre ensued: three hundred Ottoman soldiers dead in just a few minutes. The Arabs lost two men. For once Lawrence wrote of himself not as the hero but as a sort of goat. At the height of the charge, firing wildly, he had shot his own camel in the back of the head. It had fallen as if poleaxed; he had flown from the saddle over its ears and landed hard, and then lay stunned for the remainder of the battle. By contrast, Lawrence records, the Turks had
shot Auda’s horse out from under him; their bullets had smashed his binoculars, passed through his holster and scabbard, but never touched his body. He had taken part in the bloody work from beginning to end. We do not know how many Auda killed in this battle, perhaps because, as noted, he did not bother to count his victims if they were Turkish.

  Lawrence and his army collected capitulations as they marched south toward a still-unsuspecting Aqaba, finally accepting the surrender of the port’s only defensive outpost on the landward side. As they approached the town itself, “all the Turks12 we met were most happy to surrender, holding up their arms and crying ‘Muslim, Muslim’ as soon as they saw us.” So the epic journey ended on July 4, 1917, with Arab troops splashing in the warm salt water of the gulf, and Lawrence already pondering the next move north—but whether primarily in aid of Arab nationalism or British imperialism, we still do not know.

  So: As the Zionists in London moved during the spring and early summer of 1917 to assert control over the British Jewish community and to influence the Foreign Office, the Arabs pushed north from Wejh up to Aqaba. They intended to head into Syria proper and claim their homeland—almost certainly they thought that meant claiming Palestine. Had they reached Damascus before November 2, 1917, it is an interesting point whether the British would have felt confident enough about the future of that territory to release the Balfour Declaration at all. The tragedy from the Arab point of view was that the war in the East moved at a significantly slower pace than diplomacy and politicking now moved in the imperial metropolis. It took Feisal much longer to blow up the Hejaz Railway, raise the tribes, help defeat the Ottoman Army, and enter Damascus than it took for Weizmann to arrange meetings with British politicians and vanquish the Conjoint Committee. Feisal did not know that a Balfour Declaration was being contemplated; he moved as fast as he could. The British seemed happy to help, but they had a very different end in view than he did. In any event, Feisal did not move fast enough. And meanwhile poor Lawrence of Arabia, Britain’s man on the spot, tore his soul into pieces trying to juggle his country’s and Arab interests.