A History of the Middle East (30 page)

Zaghloul and his Wafd had achieved most but not all of their aims. Now Zaghloul showed his fatal lack of statesmanship. Unwilling to admit that he had failed to achieve Egypt’s total independence, he refused to urge the mass of his supporters in the country to accept the terms of the treaty. When, as prime minister, Adly Pasha went to London in July 1921 to conclude the treaty (without Zaghloul, who had insisted that he should lead the delegation), he did not dare to make the concessions demanded by Lloyd George’s cabinet, which was hardening its position. Adly knew that Zaghloul could bring out ‘the street’ to denounce him for treachery. When Adly returned from England empty-handed, Zaghloul and his followers stepped up their protests with strikes and violent demonstrations.

Allenby now acted firmly by ordering Zaghloul’s second deportation – this time to the Seychelles – having ensured with a heavy use of force that there would be no repeat of the 1919 uprising. He then proposed that Britain should make a unilateral declaration of Egypt’s independence while reserving its vital interests. The British cabinet was divided between moderates led by the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, and hardliners represented by Winston Churchill, the
new young secretary of state for the colonies. Allenby stormed into London threatening to resign if his proposals were not accepted. Lloyd George gave way, and on 28 February 1922 Britain published a declaration recognizing Egypt as ‘an independent sovereign State’ but reserving to its discretion four points to be the subject of Anglo-Egyptian negotiations in the future. These were ‘The security of the communications of the British Empire in Egypt; the defence of Egypt against all foreign aggression or interference, direct or indirect; the protection of foreign interests in Egypt and of minorities; and the Sudan.’

Two weeks later Sultan Fuad assumed the title of King Fuad I. A constitutional commission produced a constitution based on the Belgian model, providing for a Senate and an elected Chamber of Deputies. Although this gave the king considerable powers – including the right to dissolve parliament and to appoint some of the senators – these were not as great as the king would have wished, and Allenby had to intervene to prevent the establishment of a royal dictatorship. The ultimate consequence was that for the next thirty years Egypt was governed by an uneasy and ultimately unworkable balance of forces: the palace, where the powers of the Muhammad Ali dynasty had been partially restored; parliament and the politicians, among whom the Wafd party was usually but not always dominant; and the British residency (which, despite independence, was still not an embassy). Repeated efforts to negotiate an Anglo-Egyptian treaty to settle outstanding differences broke down because Britain’s minimum demands were unacceptable to Egyptian national pride. The most enduring of these differences concerned the Sudan, which the monarch and the Wafd united in claiming for Egypt – a claim which Britain resolutely rejected. Indeed it was the Sudan problem which caused a final break between Britain and Zaghloul. The 70-year-old leader, allowed back from exile, won a sweeping victory for his Wafd in the first parliamentary elections. As prime minister, he pressed Egypt’s claim to the Sudan. There was a full-scale mutiny by Sudanese military cadets, who were Sudanese nationalists but ready to co-operate with their Egyptian counterparts
against Britain. Anglo-Sudanese officials naturally blamed Egypt for the disturbances. In this fevered atmosphere in the summer of 1924, Sir Lee Stack,
sirdar
of the Egyptian army and governor-general of the Sudan, was murdered by a group of ninety Egyptian terrorists. An outraged Allenby drove to the Egyptian parliament with a cavalry escort to deliver a harsh ultimatum which included the banning of all demonstrations, the payment of a heavy indemnity and – most important – the withdrawal from the Sudan of all Egyptian troops. Rejecting the ultimatum, Zaghloul resigned. Although still Egypt’s national leader, he never regained power. He died in 1927. The king dissolved parliament and was able for a time to establish a royal semi-autocracy with weak ministers, but his powers were insufficient for this to last and the unstable façade of parliamentary democracy survived.

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In Egypt, Britain had already been effectively governing the country for nearly forty years, but it was there dealing with a people who had constituted a nation for some 5,000 years, even while under the rule of a series of empires. In the rest of the former Ottoman provinces the victorious Allies were confronted with a very different situation. With the exception of the remote and mountainous kingdom of Yemen, there were no nation-states. Sharif Hussein’s ambitious claim to become ruler of a unified kingdom was summarily rejected by the Allies and he was confined to the weak and impoverished kingdom of the Hejaz.

Despite strong French opposition, Hussein’s son, Emir Feisal, secured a place at the Paris peace conference, although it was made clear to him that he represented only the Hejaz and not the Arabs as a whole. From this weak position in Paris, he attempted to retrieve what he could of Arab aspirations. Taking his stand on the various declarations by the Allies in favour of self-determination, he proposed that a commission of inquiry be sent to Syria and Palestine to examine the wishes of the inhabitants. President Wilson enthusiastically accepted the proposal, and his suggestion that the commission should consist of French, British, Italian and American
representatives was endorsed by the conference. But in reality the French were strongly hostile to the commission, while the British were lukewarm, and eventually all the parties except the Americans withdrew. The American appointees, Henry King and Charles Crane, decided to go on their own, and their report fully explains British and French hostility towards the commission.

They found that the inhabitants of Syria/Palestine overwhelmingly opposed the proposal to place them under great-power mandates which were a thinly disguised form of colonial administration. They acknowledged the need for outside assistance, provided it came from the United States or, as second choice, from Britain. On no account did they want assistance from France. The King–Crane commission started out strongly favourable towards Zionism but soon concluded that the Zionist programmes would have to be greatly modified if the promises of the Balfour Declaration to protect the rights of the non-Jews in Palestine were to be upheld. After discussion with Zionist leaders in Jerusalem, they had no doubt that the Zionists looked forward ‘to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine’.

The King–Crane report was ignored by the Allies. It was clearly repugnant to Britain and France; and the United States, after raising so many expectations, was about to retreat into twenty years of isolationism. But a serious rift between the Allies also seemed possible, as the British government regarded French ambitions in Syria as excessive – a view that was strongly held by all the leading British Arabists, such as T. E. Lawrence. Britain also felt some obligation towards the Hashemites – a sentiment that was in no way shared by the French. When France wanted to garrison Syria with French troops, Britain refused to agree.

Meanwhile, after Emir Feisal’s return from Paris in May 1919, his supporters organized elections wherever they were possible throughout Syria (although they were blocked by the French in the coastal regions). A General Syrian Congress, meeting in Damascus, called for recognition of the independence of Syria (including Palestine) and Iraq and for the repudiation of the Sykes–Picot agreement, the
Balfour Declaration and the mandatary system. But the realities of power soon reasserted themselves. Britain persuaded Feisal that he must compromise with France. In November 1919 he went to Paris and reached an agreement with the French premier, Clemenceau, providing for French occupation of the coastal areas and a French monopoly of assistance to the fledgeling Arab state in the interior.

Feisal was quite unable to persuade his followers to accept the dismemberment of Syria, and on 8 March 1920 the General Syrian Congress in Damascus passed a resolution proclaiming the independence of Syria/Palestine with autonomy for Lebanon. At the same time a similar meeting of Iraq’s leaders declared Iraq’s independence, with Emir Abdullah as king.

Britain and France responded swiftly. Refusing to recognize the Damascus resolution, they hastily convened a meeting of the Supreme Council of the League of Nations, which announced its decision on 5 May 1920. Syria was to be partitioned into the two French mandates of Lebanon and Syria and the British mandate of Palestine, while Iraq was to remain undivided as a British mandate. The British mandate for Palestine carried with it the obligation to carry out the terms of the Balfour Declaration.

Aroused by these decisions, the Arabs of Syria urged Feisal to declare war on the French. Aware of his military weakness, Feisal allowed his hot-headed younger officers to attack French positions on the Lebanon border. The French commander-in-chief, General Gouraud, sent an ultimatum on 14 July demanding that French forces be allowed to occupy Aleppo, Homs, Hama and the Bekaa plain. Feisal accepted the ultimatum but the action was pointless because the French had already decided to seize Syria. A French column, including Senegalese and North African Arab troops, advanced and took Damascus on 25 July. Brave resistance by Feisal’s ill-trained troops could do little against French tanks and planes. France invited Feisal to leave Syria, and he was received in exile by an embarrassed British government. The colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, told the Imperial Conference in 1921 that French operations against Syria had been ‘extremely painful’ but ‘we have these
strong ties with the French and they have to prevail, and we were not able to do anything to help the Arabs in the matter…’

Having been awarded the mandates for Syria and Lebanon, one of France’s first acts was to enlarge Lebanon at Syria’s expense. France’s intention was to make Lebanon the headquarters for its Middle Eastern operations. The Maronites of Lebanon traditionally looked to France as their protector, whereas Syria had become a focus of Arab nationalism. In his decree of 31 August 1920, General Gouraud declared the creation of
le Grand Liban
, consisting of the former autonomous
sanjak
of Mount Lebanon plus the Bekaa plain to the east and the coastal towns of Tripoli to the north and Sidon and Tyre to the south. The population of
le Grand Liban
had a small Christian majority, but this was threatened by the stronger Christian tendency to emigrate and the higher Muslim birth rate.

The Allies’ decisions on the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire were not carried out peacefully. Apart from the fighting in Syria, there was an uprising against the Jews by the Arabs in Palestine, whose alarm intensified as the objectives of the Zionist leaders became clear. In Iraq, where Arab hopes had been thwarted by the establishment of an Anglo-Indian administration on colonial lines with virtually no Arab participation, the tribes of the middle Euphrates rose in a rebellion which was put down only at heavy cost.

The urgent need for post-war economy caused the British government to act. Churchill, with T. E. Lawrence as adviser, held a conference in Cairo in March 1921. No Arabs were present, but the meeting was attended by the high commissioner for Iraq, Sir Percy Cox, and the newly appointed high commissioner for Palestine, Sir Herbert Samuel, who had first put forward the Zionist idea to the British cabinet. It was decided to carry out the arrangement already prepared in London to make Feisal King of Iraq. The future of Emir Abdullah created a problem. Disappointed in his hopes of becoming King of Iraq, he had arrived from the Hejaz at Maan near Aqaba in November 1920 at the head of tribal forces, declaring his
intention of attacking the French in Syria to avenge his brother Feisal.

From Cairo, Churchill travelled to Jerusalem, with the joint purpose of reassuring the Palestinian Arabs that there was no intention of allowing Palestine to become a Jewish state and of conferring with Abdullah. He rejected Abdullah’s various proposals for the incorporation of Transjordan (that is, the east bank of the River Jordan) into either Iraq or Palestine under an Arab administration, but a provisional arrangement was reached whereby Britain agreed to recognize Abdullah as emir of Transjordan with an annual British subsidy until Britain could persuade France to restore an Arab state in Syria with Abdullah at its head. Since the French were adamant against this, the provisional arrangement became permanent, and the state of Transjordan came into existence until, following the first Arab–Israeli war (1948–9), it was incorporated with the West Bank of Jordan to form the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan.

The mandates for Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq were formally approved by the Council of the League of Nations in July 1922 and became effective in September 1923. In 1924 the United States, which was not a member of the League of Nations, gave its approval to them. Transjordan was added to Britain’s Palestine mandate, but the mandatary was permitted to exclude it, and in fact did exclude it, from the area of Jewish settlement.

***

The dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire thus resulted in the creation of five new states – Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Iraq and Palestine. All of them were under the tutelage of Britain or France, which had also been chiefly responsible for establishing the shape of their frontiers. With the Treaty of Mudros (1918), Turkish suzerainty over Yemen, which had never been very effective, finally came to an end. The country’s remoteness and inaccessibility, reinforced by the wishes of its rulers, ensured that it remained backward but independent. Another new state – the kingdom of the Hejaz, the residue of King Hussein’s dream of an independent Arab federation
under Hashemite rule – was short-lived. In the rest of Arabia, Ibn Saud, ‘Sultan of Nejd and its Dependencies’, was extending his rule. Having finally subdued his Rashidi enemies to the north, in 1920 he sent his 15-year-old son Feisal to the south-western Arabian highlands of Asir to secure the allegiance of its people. He did the same with the Jawf region on the borders of the newly created emirate of Transjordan. But Ibn Saud was faced with a recurring problem: his undisciplined and ferocious tribal warriors, who had no regard for international frontiers, launched raids deep into the territory of Transjordan and Iraq. British planes and armoured cars joined the local tribesmen to drive them back with heavy losses.