To Lloyd George, who claimed to have been familiar with the kings of Israel long before he had known the names of the kings and queens of England, the capture of Jerusalem was more resonant than most victories. For the first time since 1914, celebratory bells pealed at Westminster Abbey. Yet victory and occupation of the city would have to be handled carefully, for the empire claimed to protect all religious beliefs. Indeed, Allenby himself could hardly have been unaware of the sensitivity of the issue: there were 90,000 Indians – many of them Muslim – deployed in Egypt, Palestine and, later, Syria. A ‘D-notice’ – that distinctively British form of censorship – had already gone out to all newspapers advising that there was to be no suggestion of a religious element to the capture. But Jerusalem was Jerusalem, and the most theologically contentious city in the world had been in Muslim hands since the Middle Ages. An official camera crew was dispatched to witness the historic moment when a place sacred to three faiths was ‘liberated’.
The thing to avoid was any hint that Allenby came as a ‘crusader’. Specifically, there was to be no suggestion of the bombast which had marked the Kaiser’s visit to Jerusalem in 1898, when he had ridden into the city accompanied by brass bands, standard bearers, squadrons of enormous German hussars in burnished helmets, detachments of Turkish lancers and the sultan’s bodyguard in wide blue oriental trousers, red waistcoats and green turbans. He had been followed by a cavalcade of pashas who looked as though they ate nothing but Turkish Delight three times a day. The Kaiser himself sat smugly on his horse, his chest splattered with decorations and his shining helmet decorated with what he took to be a silk keffiyeh. Allenby, by contrast, obeyed the stage directions he had been given, dismounting from his horse and entering the city by the Jaffa Gate on foot in his British army uniform. He was attended by the usual small gaggle of staff officers, among them Major T. E. Lawrence, who had borrowed a uniform for the occasion. The politicians also insisted that Allenby be accompanied by representatives of France, Italy and the United States, despite the fact that they had played no part in the fighting, much of which had been conducted by Australian and New Zealand troops. To forestall unpleasantness with other Christian denominations, the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem was denied a role, even though he had offered to dress as an army chaplain for the day. No flags were hoisted. Allenby walked to the Citadel, where Pilate is believed to have judged Jesus, and there proclaimed martial law, asked people to continue going about their daily business and promised to protect all sacred sites. As the Daily Mirror explained to any of its readers who might be worried that the British weren’t making quite enough of their victory, ‘This is because British generals and the British people hate boasting.’ Unlike the arrogant Kaiser, Allenby was in Jerusalem merely to see fair play. It was not so much a victory as the shouldering of a high responsibility.
Just before Christmas, Lloyd George rose in the House of Commons and invited MPs to imagine how 1917 would look from the vantage point of 2017. He believed, he said, that ‘these events in Mesopotamia and Palestine will hold a much more conspicuous place in the minds and in the memories of the people than many an event which looms much larger for the moment in our sight’. He was wrong. Most of today’s British have long forgotten, even if in the Middle East they remember their history slightly better.*
Allenby stayed firmly on message, repeatedly stating in the years ahead that his campaign had not been a crusade, that many of his soldiers had been Muslims and that Jerusalem’s significance lay in its strategic position. He was a talented soldier who had executed his campaign brilliantly. But the capture of Jerusalem seemed to many to prove that the British Empire had some divine benediction: it is very hard to believe that the taking of any other Middle Eastern city would have merited quite the peal of bells. But if we were to take up Lloyd George’s invitation to see the thing from the twenty-first century, the engagement with the Holy Land was the point at which the reach of the empire finally exceeded its grasp.
Allenby pushed on. His most impressive victory came at the battle of Megiddo – Armageddon of the Book of Revelation.† Damascus and Aleppo fell to his forces. But it is the figure of T. E. Lawrence – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – charging about the desert in flowing white robes at the head of a force of Arab irregulars, who is remembered in preference to the Bull. Lawrence’s escapades were militarily much less significant, but carried political plangency, promised propaganda dividends and – especially by contrast with the quagmire of the Western Front – had about them an aura of dashing romance. The ‘Uncrowned King of Arabia’ fulfilled the sort of role in the public imagination that David Livingstone and Charles Gordon had once occupied – the courageous, half-cracked maverick unshakeably loyal to the empire.
But playing God in the Holy Land was a dangerous game, which the empire turned out to play badly. The British ruling class had a romantic affection for the desert Arabs* – their dignity, their hospitality, their ease in the unownable wilderness – and many sincerely wanted to advance the cause of unity and freedom from Turkish rule. But the British also had a war to fight. And on top of that there was the historical problem of the French, who had their own imperial ambitions in the region. It is very hard indeed to look at the public and private agreements made by the British and not to feel embarrassment, disappointment and anger. The fact that they were all made in the customary combination of serpentine syntax and sonorous moral certainty does not help.
To begin with, there were the promises made to the Arabs. Britain had been a trading presence in the area since the time of Queen Elizabeth I, and as the pre-eminent imperial power had special status. An Arab revolt against Turkish rule would open another front in the war. The task of securing their agreement to fight against the Turks was in the hands of the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, who might have known plenty about India (he had been born there, drawn borders there and been impresario for the royal visit there in 1911) but was out of his depth in Arabia. McMahon wrote to the leader of the Hashemite clan, the Sharif, or religious leader, of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, suggesting that an uprising would herald the arrival of that eternal will o’ the wisp, an Arab nation. Hussein claimed descent from the prophet Muhammad, and was not to be bought cheaply. In return for rising against the Ottoman Empire, he expected money, guns and the title ‘King of the Arabs’.† The first two commodities presented no problem to the British, and to appease Hussein’s vanity the British letters opened with eighty-two words of fawning honorifics, including describing this romantic yet ineffectual man as ‘him of the Exalted Presence and the Lofty Rank’ and ‘the Lodestar of the Faithful and the cynosure of all devout Believers’. Had the ‘King of the Arabs’ bothered with the details of the offer being made by the British, he might have wondered precisely what some of the small print about the promised Arab state meant, for example the condition that ‘the districts of Mersin and Alexandretta, and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, cannot be said to be purely Arab, and must on that account be excepted’. But he did not hesitate.
And, anyway, the British were soon to make another, contradictory set of promises to their allies, the French. This deal was the work of Sir Mark Sykes. At the outbreak of the First World War, Sir Mark had raised almost an entire army battalion from the tenants and workers on his Yorkshire estates and separately offered the government his expertise on the Ottoman Empire. Both were readily accepted. Sykes was given the job of reconciling the competing ambitions of Britain and France for the spoils of war when, as was expected, the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. Fortunately, since the French eyed Lebanon and Syria, while the British were after Transjordan and the oilfields of Iraq, Sykes and his French counterpart, Georges Picot, had a deal within a week. The two governments proclaimed a commitment to ‘recognise and protect an independent Arab state or a confederation of Arab states’, but the map they drew had lines sweeping across the Middle East, dividing it into zones shaded red or blue in whic
h either Britain or France would have ‘control’. Only what remained was left to the Arabs.
On top of the understandings given to their French and Arab allies the British now made a third commitment. In November 1917 they told the Jews of their new-found enthusiasm for a homeland in Palestine. The Zionist project was not a British invention, of course. At the turn of the century Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian, had tried and failed to get the Turks to allow the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine. Chaim Weizmann, who was to die as president of the newly founded state of Israel, was Russian, but moved to Britain convinced that ‘England will understand the Zionists better than anyone else.’ This was partly because he had recognized the British people’s prevailing conviction about their mission in the world and he pitched Zionism to them as a means of securing the empire, while promising that Jewish settlement in Palestine ‘would develop the country, bring back civilization to it’. It was the sort of language the imperial British could understand. The influence of the Zionists upon the British ruling class had nothing much to do with their numbers inside the country: the 1911 census revealed there were no more than 120,000 Jews in Britain, most of them pretty recent refugees from persecution in Poland and Russia. But that meant that the British elite was not only well aware of the religious myths of Judaeo-Christianity, but well aware of anti-Semitism, too. And, unlike many of the indigenous Palestinians, for whom there was a generalized romantic attachment, the Zionists had assiduously cultivated friends in high places. Winston Churchill, for example, was one. In 1908 he had decided that the creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East would not only offer Jews freedom from the danger of persecution, but would act as a ‘bridge between Europe and Africa, flanking the roads to the East’, and so would ‘be an immense advantage to the British Empire’.
Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary in whose name the declaration of support for a Jewish homeland was issued on 2 November 1917, was an unlikely father for the bloody tragedy of Palestine and is best known for the observation that ‘nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all’. Unfortunately, his statement of British attitudes to Palestine mattered very much indeed. Like Sir Mark Sykes, who had made the deal with the French, Balfour had been born immensely wealthy, inheriting a Scottish estate and a pile in St James’s which gave him the means to indulge his interest in philosophy without too many irritating distractions about having to keep the wolf from the door. Eton and Cambridge conferred the finical nicknames – ‘Pretty Fanny’, ‘Clara’, ‘the scented popinjay’ – which adorned his political career. If anything, he seemed to accentuate the foppishness to disguise a calculating and often ruthless character: a newspaper reporter watching him at the dispatch box in the House of Commons wrote that ‘Mr Balfour’s whole life seems to be a protest against being called upon to do anything but sniff a heavily perfumed handkerchief while he sprawls in poses of studied carelessness on the benches of the House of Commons.’ He was handsome, rich and clever, and, as fortunate people sometimes are, emotionally inept – his friend, rival and successor as foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, once remarked that ‘Were any of us to die suddenly, he would dine out that night with undisturbed complacency, and in the intervals of conversation or bridge, would be heard to murmur, “Poor old George.” ’ In November 1917, the sixty-nine-year-old Balfour was past the pinnacle of his career (he had previously been leader of the Conservative party and Prime Minister) and was serving as foreign secretary in the wartime coalition government. He had already supported a scheme to build a Jewish homeland in colonial east Africa. The Balfour Declaration, which now shifted this commitment to Palestine, was worthy of the man whose name it bore, and has been accurately described by one eminent historian as ‘about as intelligible as the Athanasian Creed’.
The attractions for the British in yet another opaque document were obvious enough. But the audacity of the pledge was staggering: they were offering land belonging to one people as a gift to another, and disregarding the fact that the whole area lay within a different empire altogether. The promise of a homeland ensured Jewish support for the war effort and, by clothing British imperialism in the garments of Zionism, would also appeal to the Americans. The British would be there to see fair play between Jews and Arabs. But the reason for the convoluted form of words in the letter sent to the Anglo-Jewish leader Lord Rothschild was that the British recognized the trouble it could cause:
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
At the time, Palestine was over 90 per cent Arab.
The tortuous form of words has the stamp of a committee all over it, and, moreover, a British committee – sophisticated, ponderous and, on contentious points, oblique. What was ‘a national home’? What would the British actually do if the ‘civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’ were compromised or violated? The cabinet wasn’t much bothered: the document which Jews claimed gave the state of Israel its founding legitimacy was just one of several agreements knocked out in the region. Cynical doesn’t really seem to do justice to the British behaviour. ‘I do not deny that this is an adventure,’ Balfour declared later. ‘Are we never to have adventures? Are we never to try new experiments?’ As for the Arabs who were to be dispossessed, he hoped that ‘they will not grudge that small notch – for it is no more geographically, whatever it may be historically – that small notch in what are now Arab territories being given to people who for all these hundreds of years have been separated from it … That is the first difficulty. That can be got over and will be got over by mutual goodwill.’
If only everyone would see that nothing matters very much.
Britain emerged from the First World War battered and broke. Yet even though it was poorer, its empire was even larger. The British had learned from earlier experiences of empire and created thrones in the Middle East, on which sat pliant Anglophiles with British advisers, high commissioners and residents. These generally well-upholstered and harmless figures sent their sons to English schools and had armies trained, equipped and often commanded by British officers. Expanses of desert and mountain across which tribes wandered with herds of sheep and goats were turned into states. ‘I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq,’ wrote Gertrude Bell, the ‘oriental secretary’ at the British High Commission in Baghdad, to her father on 4 December 1921. So much of the shape of the unstable state the British created in Mesopotamia was said to have been made out with the help of a line drawn in the sand by the cloche-hatted archaeologist: the great explorer and Arabist H. St John Philby called her ‘the maker of Iraq’. Further south in the Gulf, British officials pulled the strings of ‘protected’ states or took tribal chiefs and made them potentates. And in Palestine, largely occupied by Arabs but promised to Jews, Britain accepted the authority of a ‘mandate’ on behalf of the League of Nations, which it felt no other nation on earth could take on. Near Nazareth, Jewish settlers had established an agricultural co-operative. They named it Balfouria, to honour the British Foreign Secretary who had endorsed Zionism.
High on a hill overlooking Jerusalem, within an octagonal ochre stone wall, the British built a headquarters for their High Commissioner. It was close enough for the Muslim calls to prayer and the tolling bells of the Christian churches inside the Old City to waft across in the dry air. From the elegant formal garden the High Commissioner could look at the gold dome of the mosque – built at the point from which Muhammad was said to have ascended to heaven – and wonder whether a force of policemen in sand-coloured shorts would be enough to keep a lid on things.* The site chosen for his headquarters was called the Hill of Ev
il Counsel.
The spoils of war may have broadened the empire. But the effects of war weakened it. It was true that the acquisition of most of what had been German East Africa almost made possible Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a railway line from the Cape to Cairo on British territory, should anyone ever get around to building it. Lord Curzon, who had served in Lloyd George’s War Cabinet, sighed that ‘The British flag never flew over more powerful or united an empire than now.’ Figures like Curzon expected that the experience of shared hardship might have deepened the unity of empire. Had not the government of India given £100 million towards the war effort and sent so many thousands of soldiers? Canada had supplied wheat and vast quantities of munitions. Why, even the people of Marakei Atoll in the Gilbert Islands had offered coconuts for the troops.
Empire Page 25