A few days later he wrote to Sykes in a more conciliatory vein that “I quite see your arguments regarding an Arab-Jew-Armenian combine and the advantages that would accrue if it could be brought off. We will try it, but it must be done very cautiously and, honestly, I see no great chance of any real success. It is an attempt to change in a few weeks the traditional sentiment of centuries.” Cautioning especially against the Jewish aspect of the combine, he added that “We have…to consider whether the situation demands out and out support of Zionism at the risk of alienating the Arabs at a critical moment.”18
The next day Clayton’s closest associate, the High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Reginald Wingate, wrote to Allenby that “Mark Sykes is a bit carried away with ‘the exuberance of his own verbosity’ in regard to Zionism and unless he goes a bit slower he may quite unintentionally upset the applecart. However Clayton has written him an excellent letter which, I hope, may have an anodyne effect.”19
Nonetheless Clayton held a meeting with Syrian representatives in Cairo, as Sykes had asked, and appears to have told them, as he had been instructed, that only if Jewish support for the Allied side were forthcoming would the Arab cause, which was bound up with that of the Allies, stand a chance of winning. He told them that Jews desired a home in Palestine but had no intention of creating a Jewish state there.20
The Syrian Arabs responded favorably, and an Arab Bureau report to Clayton quoted a spokesman for the Syrian committee as saying that its members “fully realized that their best and only policy was to co-operate with the Jews on the lines you suggested. He assured me that the Syrians quite understand the power and position of the Jews and that they now wish to disseminate propaganda to emphasize Syrian-Jewish fraternity and unity as regards Palestine.”21
Clayton reported to Sykes that he believed Jews and Arabs were in fact coming together. He also reported that he had instructed T. E. Lawrence, the British liaison officer with Feisal, to impress upon Feisal his need to form an entente with the Jews.22
In administering the liberated areas of Palestine, however, British officials made no attempt to take advantage of this favorable disposition. Although the Balfour Declaration was published in London a month before Allenby entered Jerusalem, the British military authorities refused to publish it in Jerusalem. Thus it did not enter into the policy of the provisional military administration established by Allenby under Ronald Storrs, who declined to raise potentially disturbing issues while the war was being fought. Cairo Intelligence told the Foreign Office that applications by Jews to proceed to settle in Palestine should be denied until the military situation was resolved and until an organization had been created to deal with the various problems that might be expected to arise.23
There was an evident tendency on the part of military administration officials to believe that officials at home in London did not appreciate the very real difficulty of reconciling Moslems in Palestine to the prospect of an increase in Jewish settlement in the country. They therefore gave the impression of being unwilling to carry the Balfour Declaration into effect. Some observers noted, too, a tendency to prefer Moslems, who were treated as “natives,” to Christians and Jews, whom it was more difficult to treat as such. William Ormsby-Gore, one of the three assistant secretaries of the War Cabinet, wrote to his colleague Mark Sykes from Tel Aviv in the summer of 1918 that the military occupation officers, drawn from service in Egypt and the Sudan, were persons “whose experience…does not make for a ready realisation of the very wide questions of world policy which affect Palestine. One can’t help noticing the ineradicable tendency of the Englishman who has lived in India or the Sudan to favour quite unconsciously the Moslem both against Christian and Jew.” He added that “The Arabs in Palestine are, I gather, showing their old tendency to corrupt methods and backsheesh and are endeavouring to ‘steal a march’ on the Jews.”24
Clayton forwarded the Orsmby-Gore letter to Sykes with a covering letter of his own, saying that he felt it was somewhat misleading. Clayton protested that he personally was in favor of Zionism.25 Apparently he had come around to the view that an agreement between Arabs and Jews could be worked out. He held no high opinion of the local Arabs and he wrote to Gertrude Bell, the author and traveler in the East who was serving in the British administration in Baghdad, that the “so-called Arabs of Palestine are not to be compared with the real Arab of the Desert or even of other civilised districts in Syria and Mesopotamia.”26
Ronald Storrs, who was appointed military governor of Jerusalem, wrote to Sykes in the summer of 1918 that non-Jewish elements in the population, having eventually to take “a lower place in the land which the others are in the end absolutely certain to possess, the transaction should be effected so far as possible with decency, gentleness, and tact, and that the outgoing garrison should be allowed something of the honours of War.” Urging a policy of going slowly, he wrote that “It will take months, possibly years, of patient work to show the Jews that we are not run by the Arabs, and the Arabs that we are not bought by the Jews.”27
In the same letter, Storrs wrote that “it is one thing to see clearly enough the probable future of this country, and another thing to fail to make allowances for the position of the weaker and probably disappearing element. The results of the changes will be more satisfactory and more lasting if they are brought about gradually with patience, and without violent expressions of illwill, leaving behind them an abiding rancour.”28
The question this raised for Sykes and his colleagues in London was whether this policy advocated by the man on the spot was better calculated to achieve, or to defeat, their objectives.
IV
In early 1918 Sykes and his colleagues at the Foreign Office took steps to carry their Palestine policy into effect. On 13 February the Foreign Office dispatched a cable to Sir Reginald Wingate at the Residency in Cairo to inform him that a Zionist Commission had been created and was being sent out to the Middle East. Composed of representatives from British and other Zionist movements, it was headed by Dr Chaim Weizmann and was to be placed in the charge of William Ormsby-Gore. Its object was to prepare the way to carry out the Balfour Declaration.29
Inaugurating the work of the Zionist Commission, Alan Dawnay, of Allenby’s staff, arranged for Weizmann to meet Prince Feisal, and wrote to Lieutenant-Colonel P. C. Joyce, the senior British officer with Feisal, that “From what I gathered of the Zionist aims, in rather a short conversation, I think there should be no difficulty in establishing a friendly relationship between them.”30
Weizmann was introduced to Prince Feisal and was enthusiastic about him. Of Feisal, Weizmann wrote to his wife that “He is the first real Arab nationalist I have met. He is a leader! He’s quite intelligent and a very honest man, handsome as a picture! He is not interested in Palestine, but on the other hand he wants Damascus and the whole of northern Syria…He is contemptuous of the Palestinian Arabs whom he doesn’t even regard as Arabs!”31
This was in line with what Ormsby-Gore told a Zionist meeting in London some months later. According to a summary of his speech, he told the Zionist Political Committee that
the true Arab movement really existed outside Palestine. The movement led by Prince Feisal was not unlike the Zionist movement. It contained real Arabs who were real men. The Arabs in trans-Jordania were fine people. The west of the Jordan the people were not Arabs, but only Arabics-speaking.* Zionists should recognise in the Arab movement, originally centered in the Hejaz, but now moving north, a fellow movement with high ideals.32
Feisal’s senior British military adviser, Lieutenant-Colonel Joyce, attended the Weizmann-Feisal meeting and reported his personal opinion that Feisal welcomed the prospect of Jewish cooperation and in fact regarded it as essential to the realization of Arab ambitions. Though Feisal was unable to express definite views without receiving authorization from his father, according to Joyce, he would accept a Jewish Palestine if doing so would influence the Allies to support his claim to Syria.33 The meeting
went well, and paved the way for the public support of Zionism offered by Feisal at the Peace Conference the following year.
In Jerusalem, Weizmann found his Moslem audiences less receptive, though he assured them that Palestine was large enough to accommodate all its communities and that Jewish settlement would not be undertaken at the expense of Moslems or Christians. He was disquieted by the attitude of British administrative officials in Palestine: when Weizmann urged them to avow their government’s Balfour Declaration policy openly and to explain it to the Moslem community, Ronald Storrs and his colleagues refused.
In his comments to the Foreign Office, Storrs took issue with Weizmann’s contention that it was the business of the military administration to bring home to the Moslem population the seriousness of Britain’s pro-Zionist intentions. That had already been done, he said, by Balfour in London and by the world’s newspapers. What was needed was for the Zionist Commission to imagine itself in the position of non-Jewish inhabitants of the country and to recognize how very much reassurance they would need. “Palestine, up to now a Moslem country, has fallen into the hands of a Christian Power which on the eve of its conquest announces that a considerable portion of its land is to be handed over for colonisation purposes to a nowhere very popular people.” It was not lost on the urbane Ronald Storrs that he was governor of Jerusalem in line of succession from Pontius Pilate; and as such he washed his hands of an issue for which he did not hold himself responsible. He insisted to the Foreign Office, however, that he spoke “as a convinced Zionist.”34
Gilbert Clayton also advocated delay. His strategy, of which he gave an indication in early 1918, was not merely to postpone the Zionist issue but to link it to the issue of an Arab Syria, as Feisal also proposed to do. To the strongly pro-Zionist Leo Amery, Clayton explained that “the two most important points are not to make too much of a splash locally with Zionism until the Arabs have got a slice of cake themselves, i.e., Damascus, and to get the French to come out clearly…disavowing any ideas of Colonial annexation and emphasizing their adherence to the idea of Arab autonomy.”35
Neither Clayton nor Storrs addressed the question of whether, if they refused to admit in Jerusalem that their government had issued the Balfour Declaration in London, Arabs and Jews in Palestine would ever learn to trust the British any more than Moslems in Syria and Lebanon trusted the French. As it was, the Zionist leaders were given cause to worry that the Balfour Declaration policy proclaimed in London might be undermined in Palestine by Clayton, Storrs, and other officers on the spot.
V
In Baghdad and Basra, not much more than lip service was paid to the pro-Arab independence policies proclaimed by Sykes and the Foreign Office. Sir Percy Cox was obliged to leave on a lengthy tour and eventually to return to Persia; in his absence, his deputy, Captain Arnold T. Wilson, acted in his place and then succeeded him as civil commissioner. Wilson, an officer in the Indian Army, believed neither in independence for the provinces he governed nor in a role for King Hussein of the far-off Hejaz in their affairs.
The most famous author of books about Arab lands of her day, Gertrude Bell, had come up to Baghdad with the Army of the Tigris and served as Wilson’s assistant. She at first employed her great prestige and extensive network of family and social friendships to back up his policy. Not much of a political thinker, she was given to enthusiasms and, at the time, was enthusiastic about Wilson’s views. In February 1918 she wrote to her old friend Charles Hardinge, Permanent Under-Secretary of the Foreign Office, that “amazing strides have been made towards ordered government…There’s no important element against us…The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased. What they dread is any half measure…” She concluded that no one in Baghdad or Basra could conceive of an independent Arab government.36
This was a far cry from the proclamation drafted by Sir Mark Sykes on the liberation of Baghdad, calling for a renaissance of the Arab nation, such as was proposed by the Emir of Mecca in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, and hinting that Hussein would become the leader of the Arab nation.
Elsewhere, too, Sykes’s alliance politics were modified as British officials moved away from their wartime enthusiasm for the ruler of Mecca. While Sykes continued to champion Hussein’s cause, British officials noted the deterioration of the King’s position vis-à-vis his rival, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, lord of the Arabian district of Nejd, whom India had backed all along. Sykes had received a hint of this deterioration when he visited the Hejaz in the spring of 1917; Hussein had been surprisingly conciliatory in agreeing to cooperate with Britain in Mesopotamia and even with France in Syria, adding “but we do ask that Great Britain will help us with Ibn Saud.”37*
In January 1918 King Hussein told an Arab Bureau officer, Major Kinahan Cornwallis, that he was thinking of proclaiming himself Caliph. Three years earlier this had been Lord Kitchener’s plan, prompted by memoranda from Clayton and Storrs, and had been championed by the officers who later formed the Arab Bureau (see Chapter 22).
By January 1918, however, the Arab Bureau, which now held Hussein in low esteem, had come around to the opposite view. Cornwallis, attempting to discourage Hussein, pointed out to him that serious problems would arise if he attempted to assume the caliphate. On receipt of Cornwallis’s news, the High Commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, sent off a dispatch to the Foreign Office saying that he hoped for an opportunity of “checking premature or ill-considered action” by Hussein.40 This was the same General Wingate who on 17 November 1915 had induced an Arab religious leader to tell Hussein that he was “the right man to take over his rightful heritage and verify the hopes of his people—the Mohammedans and Arabs to recover their stolen Khalifate” and calling upon the Hashemite leader to establish “the Hashemite Arabian Khalifate.”41
Kitchener’s followers found it inconvenient to remember that once they and their chief had encouraged Hussein to claim the caliphate; erasing it from their minds, they would later ignore it in their books and edit it out of official documents. In memoirs published three decades later, Sir Ronald Storrs deleted the caliphate section from Kitchener’s historic cable in 1914 to Hussein. T. E. Lawrence wrote that Kitchener and his followers had believed in Arab nationalism from the beginning—when in fact they did not believe in it at all. They believed instead in the potency of the caliphate; that Hussein could capture it for them; and that in the East nationalism was nothing while religion was everything.*
Indeed, in 1918 politics and the desire to rewrite history both dictated a shift in emphasis: Feisal, not Hussein, began to emerge as Cairo’s preferred Arab leader, for Feisal showed a disposition, lacking in his father, to accept British counsel and guidance.
By the autumn of 1918, the armies commanded by Hussein’s sons were reckoned by British sources to total only a few thousand trained troops. In public the British claimed that vast numbers of Arabs had flocked to the standard of the Hejazi princes; in private they had a different story to tell. Secret British government documents filed in 1919 admit that “The followings quoted during the war were grossly exaggerated.”42 A report from the British Agency in Jeddah in 1919 pictured King Hussein as militarily inconsequential: his following was estimated at only 1,000 regulars, 2,500 irregulars, and possibly several thousand more from Bedouin tribes, and their fighting qualities were rated as “poor.” According to the report, King Hussein “indulged in wild dreams of conquest,” but the withdrawal of British support would leave him “at the mercy of Ibn Saud and the rising wave of WAHHABISM.”43
An Arab Bureau report on the Hejaz revolt in 1918 stated that “The real importance of this revolt has only made itself felt in the course of the last few months and it is spreading from day to day. At the same time it must be said that 90% of the Sherif’s troops are nothing more than robbers…” According to the report, Arabs rose up against the Turks only when British forces had already arrived, so that “In a word, the extent of the Sherif’s revolt depends entirely on
the ability of the British to advance.”44 Colonel Meinertzhagen, the head of Allenby’s intelligence, wrote that “It is safe to say that Lawrence’s Desert Campaign had not the slightest effect on the main theatre west of Jordan.”45
But others disagreed. Sykes, continuing to stand by the alliance with Hussein and believing that Feisal and his brothers were making a significant contribution to the war effort, argued that in Arabia and elsewhere, by 1918 the Hejaz revolt was occupying the attention of 38,000 Ottoman troops.46 The memoirs of the enemy commander, Liman von Sanders, show that in 1918 when his armies turned to flee, they found themselves painfully harassed by Arab Bedouins.47 The tone of Gilbert Clayton’s memoranda show that he believed Feisal and Lawrence were accomplishing important objectives on Allenby’s right flank. Other evidence, too, suggests that the Arab forces in Transjordan succeeded in spreading disorder in Turkish-held areas.
Mired in politics then and ever since, the question of how much Feisal contributed to the Allied success remains unresolved; at the time it raised the question of whether Britain should back Hussein and Feisal against indigenous Syrian Arab leadership, and whether Britain should support Feisal against Hussein.
Within the Sherifian camp there were strains, as Feisal, physically cut off from the Hejaz and his family, moved into the British orbit. In cables that the British military authorities secretly intercepted and read, Hussein complained that “they have turned my son against me to live under other countries, who is rebellions & dishonest to his Father [original emphasis].”48 He complained that “Living under the orders of a disobedient son and a traitor has burdened my shoulder with this misery.” He threatened that “If Feisal still persists in destroying his good fortune his nation and his honour” it would be necessary to appoint a war council in his place.49 Meanwhile, according to Arab Bureau reports from Cairo, Syrian spokesmen indicated that they would be willing to accept Feisal as their constitutional monarch, but only in his own right, and not if he acted as deputy or representative of Hussein.50
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