Tension between Zionists and British officials eased after 1922, but in 1930 a Labour Government, wishing to assuage Arab resentment of the Jewish presence, accepted a white paper issued by Colonial Secretary Lord Passfield, the Fabian socialist formerly known as Sidney Webb. Webb questioned the very bases of the Zionist program: Jewish immigration into Palestine (again); exclusive labor practices; the wholesale purchase of Arab land. Against this paper Zionists protested so vehemently that the government backed down, but in 1937 a Conservative government, hoping to settle the problem once and for all, accepted the recommendations of another investigative commission, this one led by Lord Peel: Palestine should be divided into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and a territory still under British mandate. Among Zionists this plan aroused grave suspicion and a storm of protest, although Weizmann ultimately urged acceptance. Then in 1939 Neville Chamberlain’s government repudiated the Peel Report: Palestine should not be partitioned; it should become an independent binational Arab-Jewish state. Over the next five years seventy-five thousand more Jews would be allowed to enter; then Jewish immigration should cease altogether. At this point Arabs outnumbered Jews in Palestine by about three to one, and Zionist mistrust of British intentions scaled new heights. It hardly diminished even during World War II, despite the fact that Chamberlain’s plan remained on the drawing boards only.
Arab mistrust and resentment also grew after 1918. Hussein did not get his Arab kingdom but merely the kingdom of Hejaz (and that only until 1924, when Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi fundamentalists overthrew him and established Saudi Arabia). Feisal never became king of an independent Syria: The French expelled him from Damascus in 1920; a year later the British established him as their puppet ruler of Iraq and his brother Abdullah as an equally dependent ruler of Transjordan. Were they better off with British or Ottoman overlords? It seems fair to conclude at least that their attitudes toward Britain, and the attitudes of their followers, were not simple.
As for the majority of Palestinian Arabs, they directed their resentment against Jews (whom they thought were stealing their land) and against British officials (whom they thought were protecting the Jews). In 1920 and 1921 Arab rioters killed more than half a dozen. In 1929 pogroms in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and elsewhere resulted in the deaths of 133, the injury of hundreds more, and the destruction of much property. In 1936 a full-blown Arab Palestinian revolt developed. The recommendations of the Peel Commission, which were meant to tamp it down, only added fuel to the fire. Arab leaders denounced Peel even more vociferously than Zionists did and rejected his proposals unanimously. A general strike of Arab Palestinians demanded immediate cessation of Jewish immigration, prohibition of the sale of Arab land to Jews, and establishment of a national government. Something like civil war ensued. Volunteers from throughout the Arab world poured into Palestine to fight Zionists and Britons alike.
Britain had a mandate10 to govern Palestine but lacked the means. Her empire reached the zenith of its extent just after World War I weakened it irreparably. In the Middle East during the spring of 1919, General Allenby was demobilizing soldiers at the rate of twenty thousand a month. A year later the chief of the general staff complained, “In no single theatre11 are we strong enough. Not in Ireland, nor England, not on the Rhine, not in Constantinople, nor Batoum, nor Egypt, nor Palestine, nor Mesopotamia, nor Persia, nor India.” Britain would experience during the coming half century something like what the Ottomans endured half a century before: gradual diminution of an empire whose subject peoples demanded control of their own destinies and would take up arms to gain them. In Palestine, Jews and Arabs took up arms; Britain had not the strength to keep the peace.
The Jews established a paramilitary organization, Haganah, in 1920 because Britain failed to defend them effectively during the pogroms of that year. Two additional armed groups appeared in the 1930s: Etzel (which the British called Irgun), and Lechi (which they called the Stern Gang), a breakaway from Etzel. Both groups moved from defensive to offensive operations and eventually to terrorist campaigns against Arabs and Britons too. They reached a bloody climax in the years immediately after the Second World War, when Etzel and Lechi carried out assassinations, beatings, and bombings, most notoriously against the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where they killed 91 and injured 46.
To such a low ebb had sunk British-Zionist relations, but British-Arab relations sank lower still. The most important Palestinian leader of the Mandate period, Haj Amin al-Husseini, gained the lifetime post of grand mufti, the highest Muslim religious office in Jerusalem, with the support of none other than Herbert Samuel, who thought he would help maintain order among Arabs. In fact, al-Husseini was an uncompromising Palestinian nationalist, thus an implacable enemy of British occupation and Zionism both. He led the Arab Revolt in 1936. Hunted by the British, he fled, landing finally in Nazi Germany during World War II, where he sought Hitler’s support for Arab independence. Al-Husseini would be sidelined during the 1948 war between Arabs and the nascent state of Israel when hatred and violence overboiled yet again, this time with decisive results. But al-Husseini’s viewpoint was not sidelined. It remains potent as ever.
During World War I, then, Britain and her allies slew the Ottoman dragon in the Middle East. By their policies they sowed dragon’s teeth. Armed men rose up from the ground. They are rising still.
Acknowledgments
I had a lot of help on this project.
First I want to thank the archivists with whom I worked in the United States, Britain, and Israel. All of them went out of their way to help me, none more than Debbie Usher at the Middle East Centre Archive, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University, and Merav Segal, director of the Weizmann Archives, Weizmann Institute, Rehovot.
I am grateful to Bruce Henson, a librarian at Georgia Tech, who managed after much effort to track down the weather report with which this book begins.
Then I wish to thank Natalya Staros for helping with translations from Russian, Uri Rosenheck for helping with translations from Hebrew, and Shari Youngblood for helping with translations from French. I am grateful, too, to Luke Dickens, and to an old friend, Jim Obelkevich, both of whom tracked down, photographed, and sent as email attachments documents I realized I wanted from England months after I had left the country. Alexandra Ramirez helped me find images for reproduction in the book.
I am grateful to Leonard Smith for inviting me to lecture on the Balfour Declaration at Oberlin College, and to Oded Irshai, who arranged for me to give a seminar on the same subject at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In both places students and faculty in the audience asked questions that helped me to clarify my thinking.
Peter Oppenheimer, former director of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Yarnton Manor, oversaw my stay there, enabling me to visit British archives; Tony Judt arranged my stint as a visitor at the Erich Remarque Center, New York University, which enabled me to work at the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research and at the New York Public Library. Thanks to both of you.
Tony Judt, Lisa Anderson, Stephen P. Cohen, David Taal, Dorothy Gilbert Goldstone, John Drucker, and John Krige all read the manuscript, or sections of it, and gave good advice for which I am grateful. But I alone am responsible for errors of fact and interpretation and for such infelicities of style as remain.
During the years this book has been in preparation, I have discussed it, always to my advantage, with many friends, including Bernard Wasserstein, David Gilbert, Chris Clark, Peter Weiler, David Large, Ross McKibbin, Peter Schizgal, Peter Mandler, Peter Dimock, Gary Kornblith, Carol Lasser, Kurt Tauber, and most of my colleagues in the School of History, Technology and Society at Georgia Tech. Thank you all.
My editors, Amy Black in Toronto, Bill Swainson in London, and Will Murphy in New York City, have encouraged me when necessary and offered helpful suggestions when a draft of the manuscript finally became available. To them too I offer thanks.
I acknowledge with thanks the Georgia Tech Foundation, wh
ich twice granted subventions for travel to archives abroad.
My agents Peter Robinson and Christie Fletcher have been terrific.
So have been my wife and two sons. By now they realize I am happiest when working on a big project.
Jonathan Schneer
Atlanta, Georgia
August 10, 2009
Notes
CUL Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, England
CZA Central Zionist Archive, Jerusalem, Israel
OUNBL Oxford University, New Bodleian Library, Oxford, England
NA National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, England
WI Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel
POSTLUDE AS PRELUDE
1. London on December 2, 1917 … “Cold Northerly wind all day gradually increasing in force. Rain gradually dropping off from 12 hrs. Clear intervals in evening.” Symon’s Meteorological Magazine.
CHAPTER 1: PALESTINE BEFORE WORLD WAR I
1. And it was small … But the entry for “Palestine” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica states that Palestine is 140 miles long and between 23 and 80 miles wide depending on the latitude.
2. “cool, shady, hung …” Twain, Innocents Abroad, 334–35, 351.
3. A horseman riding … Great Britain and the Near East, March 23, 1917. The rider on horseback was Dr. E.W.G. Masterman of the Royal Geographical Society.
4. “of a Scotch glen …” Palestine, February 8, 1917.
5. “many more whose names …” Estelle Blythe, daughter of Jerusalem’s last Anglican bishop, writing in Great Britain and the Near East, December 15, 1916.
6. other European visitors … See, for example, ibid., August 14, 1914.
7. “such as his poverty …” Entry for “Fellah,” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
8. When on the move … Entry for “Bedouin,” ibid.
9. “striking want of beauty …” Entry for “Jerusalem,” ibid. For an evocative portrait of the city, see Marcus, Jerusalem 1913.
10. Meanwhile Jerusalem had … The walls were 38½ feet high according to Baedeker, Palestine and Syria, 23.
11. “The streets are ill-paved …” Ibid.
12. “fanatical and quarrelsome” … Ibid., 220.
13. “They usually crowd …” Ibid., 128.
14. The so-called Young Turks … Although not sufficiently, according to Arab critics: “Eighty per cent of the public funds were spent exclusively in Turkish areas.” See Graves, Memoirs of King Abdullah, 98. Still, as a result of Tanzimat, at the outset of Abdul Hamid II’s rule it took three days to journey by horse from Jaffa to Jerusalem; in 1912 it took eight hours, along newly built or improved roads, by horse, and four hours by rail. This speed of travel expedited internal trade. Moreover, what had been grown in the interior could be conveyed by rail to the ports and exported, while goods shipped to the ports from abroad could be transported inland. Palestine’s foreign trade increased annually by 1 percent from 1875 to 1895 and by 5 percent from 1895 to 1913.
15. They were not themselves … Land prices rose from 300 to 500 francs per hectare to 3,000 to 5,000 francs per hectare.
16. Now a new source … On Palestine before World War I, see especially Divine, Politics and Society, from which much of the material and all the statistics above are drawn; see also McDowall, Palestinians, 3–7. For conditions in south Palestine, see Arab Bulletin, no. 38.
17. “aboriginal Palestinian Jews,” T. E. Lawrence, “Syria, the Raw Material,” Oxford University, St. Antony’s College, Middle East Centre, William Yale Papers, box 2, file 1. For more on pre-1914 Jews in Palestine, see Roth, History of Jews, 366–74; Eban, My People, 312–25; Great Britain and the Near East, February 9, 1917.
18. Together Russians and Romanians … See Shaw, Jews of Ottoman Empire, 215–16; and Blumberg, Zion Before Zionism, 158–60.
19. self-consciously Jewish nationalists … Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, xxi.
20. “There was scarcely …” Ibid., 37. See too Porath, Emergence, 25.
21. “Had we permitted …” Arab Bulletin, no. 64, p. 389. The author is described merely as “one of the leaders of the Jewish movement.”
22. “Ignorant and stupid …” Conder, Eastern Palestine, 17.
23. “The Jewish planters obtain …” Palestine, October 17, 1917.
24. In 1891 authorities … Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, 39.
25. The quarter century before … Porath, Emergence, 29.
26. “Their labor competes …” Quoted in Mandel, Arabs and Zionism, 81.
27. “[The Jews’] right …” The young Arab nationalist was Khalil al-Sakakini. See his diary entries for February 23, 1914, “and a few days later,” quoted ibid., 211–12.
28. But it was Palestine … For Ottoman policy toward the Jews during this period, see Shaw, Jews of Ottoman Empire, 206–33.
CHAPTER 2: OTTOMANISM, ARABISM, AND SHARIF HUSSEIN
1. full-fledged Arab nationalism … See first of all C. Ernest Dawn, “The Origins of Arab Nationalism,” in Khalidi et al., Origins of Arab Nationalism, 3–30, and Rashid Khalidi, “Ottomanism and Arabism in Syria Before 1914: A Reassessment,” ibid., 50–69. Among the most important of the early nationalists were Jamal al-Din al-Asadabadi (1838–97), commonly known as al-Afghani, an early pan-Islamist; Abdullah al-Nadim (1843–96), an advocate of Muslim unity but also of imitating Western political practices; Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1849–1902), who believed that Islam and tyranny were incompatible; and Muhammad Abduh, an Egyptian advocate of an Arab-led Muslim revival. See Haim, Arab Nationalism, 6–29, and Dawn, From Ottomanism, 122–35.
2. Nothing could disguise … For Abdul Hamid II, see Haslip, Sultan; see too Antonius, Arab Awakening, 60–75.
3. On July 3, 1908 … The CUP major was Ahmed Niyazi.
4. The CUP deposed him … It replaced Abdul Hamid II with Prince Reshad, now styled Mehmed V, and when he died, it installed his brother as Mehmed VI.
5. One of them shot … The minister of war was Nezim Pasha.
6. “to awaken the Arab …” Quoted in Duri, Historical Formation, 226.
7. Secret societies emerged … For al-Ahd, see NA, FO371/2486/157740, October 25, 1915, see too Antonius, Arab Awakening, 118–19, and Duri, Historical Formation, 225.
8. Telegrams of support … Dawn, From Ottomanism, 154.
9. On June 21 the congress … NA, F0371/1827/29037. “Il import d’établir dans chacun des vilayets syriens et arabes un régime décentralisateur approprié à ses besoins et à ses aptitudes”; “La langue arab doit être reconnue au Parlement Ottoman et considérée comme officielle dans les pays syriens et arabes.”
10. Turkish spies kept … “At the moment the Syrians in Cairo are very active … spurring each other on,” one spy reported on March 28, 1913. Cairo was headquarters of the Decentralization Committee. Early in 1914 the CUP established an intelligence bureau there to keep more systematic tabs on the various societies and activists. During the bureau’s first year of existence, it spent 182,500 gold Turkish liras (“an immense sum”). During its second year it employed 513 agents, received 4,131 reports, and maintained files on 8,938 suspects, but such extraordinary assiduity may be explained in part by the fact that Turkey had just entered World War I. See Tauber, Arab Movements, 37.
11. “The heart’s desire …” Quoted in Djemal Pasha, Memories, 229. The French dragoman was Philippe Zalzal.
12. “It is to be hoped …” Mallet to Grey, October 29, 1913, NA, FO371/1848/50838.
13. “There is every sign …” NA, FO371/1822/23816.
14. a new Islamic university … NA, FO371/1848/5519298. The Egyptian pan-Islamist was Sheikh Abdul Aziz Shawish.
15. “With one or two exceptions” … NA, FO371/1822/24353.
16. “large and expressive brown …” Hogarth, Hejaz, 54.
17. “He is such an old dear” … Lawrence to General Clayton, October 18, 1916, OUNBL, T. E. Lawrence Papers, MS Eng. C. 6737/f.12.
18. “outwardly so gentle …” Hogarth, Hejaz,
54.
19. “integrity, energy …” El Qibla, no. 87, June 15, 1917.
20. It chose instead another … It chose his uncle, Abd al-Ilah.
21. “I pray that God …” Quoted in Graves, Memoirs of King Abdullah, 45.
22. Hussein had been courting … Report #2, “The Arabia and Hejaz Situation,” November 5, 1917, p. 6, Oxford University, St. Antony’s College, Middle East Centre, William Yale Papers. See also Wilson, King Abdullah, 15. The Anglophile grand vizier was Kamil Pasha.
23. But as markers … Ibid.
24. “This country abides …” Quoted in Graves, Memoirs of King Abdullah, 62.
25. He may have promised … “If your Majesty were to come to the Hejaz with our household, money would be brought to you and you would be beyond the reach of any insurgents.” Ibid.
26. “a miserable country” … Report #2, p. 2, Oxford University, St. Antony’s College, Middle East Centre, Yale Papers.
27. “of exceptionally predatory …” Hogarth, Hejaz, 16.
28. Residents of all classes … Ibid., 27–28.
29. “as a mountain” … Sharif of Mecca, Verbal Report of “X,” October 29, 1914, Sir Ronald Storrs Papers, Adam Matthew Publications Microfilm, reel 4, box 2, folder 3.
30. “In the event of a quarrel …” Ibid.
31. “clean” … “not clean” … Storrs, Memoirs, 164. Storrs wrote: “I … chose for secret messenger X the father-in-law of my little Persian agent Ruhi.”
32. “morality seems to be …” “A report written by Hussein Ruhi Effendi, a member of Colonel Wilson’s staff at Jeddah,” NA, FO371/3047/13365.
33. Britain would treat … “I had it last Spring from the lips of his favorite son Abdullah that the State of Afghanistan is always before their eyes as an attainable summum bonum.” Storrs to illegible, February 22, 1915, Storrs Papers, reel 4, box 2, folder 3.
The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict Page 49