A Peace to End all Peace (69 page)

The Executive of the Palestine Arab Congress then sent a telegram to the Colonial Secretary rejecting the terms of the League of Nations Mandate and also rejecting the governmental White Paper in which Churchill had spelled out his government’s much-reduced scale of commitment to Zionism. With whatever reluctance, on behalf of the Zionist organization, Dr Chaim Weizmann accepted those much-reduced terms, hoping that they might provide a framework within which a Jewish majority might develop in Palestine and might then achieve self-government. Weizmann accepted the best terms he could get from Churchill, hoping that, with time, the terms could be improved; the Arab Executive refused to accept the best terms it could get from Churchill, hoping that, with time, it could dictate its own terms.

On 22 July the League of Nations formally and finally approved the rewritten Palestine Mandate, directing Britain to carry the redefined Balfour Declaration policy into effect west of the Jordan river.

VII

Two influential Zionist leaders, David Ben-Gurion and Vladimir Jabotinsky, considered the significance of the Arab opposition and British reactions to it and arrived (as they often did) at opposite conclusions.

Ben-Gurion, a Polish-born leader of the Labor Zionist movement, had settled in Palestine as a farmer in 1906, at the age of twenty. Though a supporter of the Ottoman Empire at the outset of the First World War, he had eventually enlisted in the British army. He was a socialist who believed that only a willingness to work confers a right to occupy a country, and that Jews and Arabs had an equal right to live and work in Palestine. In his interpretation, the Arab riots of 1920 and 1921 were the acts of “wildmen” who had been misled by the British administration into believing that violence would pay.
³⁰
As a labor union leader, his declared policy was to organize the Arab workers, for he claimed that Arab and Jewish workers and farmers had interests in common—as against employers and landlords—and his object was to show Arabs that this was so. He envisaged a Palestine in which both the Arab and Jewish communities would enjoy autonomy.

To Ben-Gurion the 1920 and 1921 riots showed that Zionists had not made clear enough to the Arabs that their religious and civil rights would never be infringed.
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As he so often did, he saw the solution in terms of educating and communicating. While he had foreseen from the beginning the possibility that Arabs might not agree to Jewish immigration and settlement, he did not dwell on that possibility or allow himself to believe it would actually occur. Some historians now believe that he was not entirely candid when he professed to believe in Arab-Jewish cooperation,
³²
but a more persuasive interpretation is that he was the sort of person who believes it does no good to think about what might go wrong; he was a “constructivist,” whose tendency was to believe that if you create and work, the future will take care of itself. He believed that the benefits of Jewish labor and creativity would flow to the Arabs of Palestine as well, and his policy continued to be cooperation both with the Arabs and the British administration.

On the other hand, Jabotinsky, the Russian-born journalist who had founded Allenby’s Jewish Legion, believed that Arabs would never stand by peacefully and allow Jews to become a majority in Palestine; that an “iron wall” of military force would have to protect the Jewish settlers as they built their community into a majority; that the British had shown they could not be relied upon to provide that protection; and that Jews therefore would have to form their own army to protect themselves.
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It was an almost hopeless assessment, and Jabotinsky found himself in the minority in accepting it.

It was a paradox that Ben-Gurion, who at the outset of the First World War had tried to create a Jewish army to fight for the Ottoman Empire, now relied upon the British government, while Jabotinsky, who had raised a Jewish regiment to fight for Britain, had lost that faith.

In the years to come, Ben-Gurion was to emerge as the leader of the mainstream within the Zionist movement, while Jabotinsky led the opposition to the official Zionist leadership throughout the 1920s and then—in the late 1930s—seceded to found his own rival Zionist-Revisionist organization, denouncing Churchill’s decision in 1922 to remove Transjordan from the territory of the Jewish National Home and demanding the establishment of a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. The schism persists to this day in the politics of the state of Israel, in which the Labor Party claims the heritage of Ben-Gurion and the Herut Party, that of Jabotinsky.

What also persists in Israel, especially in Herut ranks, is the view that Jordan either is or should be an Arab Palestinian state: that Churchill’s separation of Transjordania (as it was then called) from the rest of the Palestine Mandate in 1922 was not legitimate.

VIII

The Arabic-speaking section of the Ottoman Empire had now been politically redesigned. The Turks no longer ruled it. In the east, Kurdish, Sunni, Shi’ite, and Jewish populations had been combined into a new Mesopotamian country named Iraq, under the rule of an Arabian prince; it looked like an independent country, but Britain regarded it as a British protectorate. Syria and a greatly enlarged Lebanon were ruled by France. A new Arab entity that was to become Jordan had been carved out of Palestine; and west of the Jordan river was a Palestine that was to contain a Jewish National Home. It was far from the restored Ottoman Empire Churchill had once espoused.

Churchill had, however, achieved the principal objectives that he had set for himself in the Middle East when he became Colonial Secretary. His overriding goal had been to cut costs, and he had done so drastically. Moreover, he believed that he had created a system that could be operated economically in the future. His line of air bases stretching from Egypt to Iraq allowed him to keep the Middle Eastern countries under control with a minimum of expense.

His other goal had been to demonstrate that Britain kept her pledges. He had not fully achieved this with respect to Zionism, but he had done so in regard to whatever might have been owing to the dynasty of King Hussein. T. E. Lawrence, formerly the government’s severest British critic on this score, judged that he had more than done so. At the end of 1922, referring back to the wartime correspondence between Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon, then British High Commissioner in Egypt, concerning the frontiers of Arab independence, Lawrence wrote that “He (Churchill) executed the whole McMahon undertaking (called a treaty by some who have not seen it) for Palestine, for Transjordania and for Arabia. In Mesopotamia he went far beyond its provisions…I do not wish to make long explanations, but must put on record my conviction that England is out of the Arab affair with clean hands.”
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But it was not the Arab affair that was Churchill’s principal concern in the Middle East, even though it was his principal responsibility. His main concern was for the Turkish-speaking remnant of the Ottoman Empire; Lloyd George’s policy in that area was—in Churchill’s view—dangerously wrong, and threatened to bring down in ruin the entire British position in the Middle East.

I

Churchill’s misgivings about Lloyd George’s Turkish policy went unheeded, for the Prime Minister, in the pride of his position, of his victories, of his record of having been proven right when all the experts around him had said he was wrong, did not pay due attention to the opinions of his colleagues. Lloyd George played a lone and lordly hand, without accommodating the diverse political groupings at home and abroad from whom his power stemmed.

For years Lloyd George had been the star of a solar system of coalitions. As head of a parliamentary coalition of Conservatives and his own group of Liberals, he continued to command the support of a majority in the House of Commons, which sustained him in office as leader of a coalition Cabinet. As Prime Minister of Britain he also exercised leadership of a diverse coalition that included the empire and the self-governing Dominions of Canada, Newfoundland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand—a coalition that had joined the continental European Allies to oppose the Central Powers in the First World War. As of 1921, Lloyd George was the sole leader of the wartime alliance who still remained in office. It was in the still unsubdued domains of the Ottoman Empire that this system of coalitions started to come apart.

Russia had been the first of the European Allies to withdraw from the wartime coalition—and then to fight against it. Even before the war ended the new Bolshevik regime had moved into conflict with Russia’s former Allies all along a southern tier in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Conversely, the Soviet government moved into a working alliance with a wartime enemy, Turkey, in the years immediately following the armistices, collaborating both with Enver Pasha and with Mustapha Kemal. It supplied arms and money that helped Kemal continue his struggle against the Allies. In 1921 the Soviet governments of Russia and its satellite regimes entered into comprehensive agreements with Kemal’s Turkish regime, establishing a frontier and a working relationship between them.

In 1921, too, Soviet Russia also moved into a working relationship with another of the former enemy states. Acting upon Enver Pasha’s suggestion, the leaders of the new German army entered into a secret partnership with the Soviet regime. The head of the army, Enver’s friend General von Seeckt, established “Special Branch R” in the War Ministry to administer the relationship, which encompassed war production, military training, and the development of new weaponry. German officers were permitted to study weapons forbidden to them by the victorious Allies—tanks and airplanes, in particular—on Russian soil.
¹
German industrial enterprises established factories in Russia to manufacture poison gas, explosive shells, and military aircraft. The German army established training academies for its tank commanders and fighter pilots on Soviet territory. At the same time, Soviet Russia sent officers to Germany to be schooled in the methods that had been developed by the feared and admired German General Staff. These clandestine arrangements were sanctioned by the German government in secret provisions of the Treaty of Rapallo
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in 1922. It was symbolic of the new state of affairs that General Hans von Seeckt, who served in Constantinople as chief of staff of the Ottoman army at the end of the war, and who had served as head of the German army since 1919, was reporting to the Russian General Staff on the military situation in the Dardanelles in 1922. It was a measure of how far Russia had traveled since her 1914 war against Germany and Turkey; all three nations were now ranged together against Britain.

II

Italy was the next to change sides. As soon as the armistice was signed, she began to show sympathy for the plight of the Ottoman Empire, influenced perhaps by the tradition of comradeship between nationalist movements that stemmed from the teachings of the nineteenth-century Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, as well as a desire to preserve and expand the prewar Italian economic presence in Turkey. Count Carlo Sforza, who was appointed Italian High Commissioner in Constantinople at the end of 1918, was a practical statesman of wide and humane principles who immediately took the initiative in establishing a working relationship with Mustapha Kemal and in encouraging the Turks to resist the more extreme demands of the Allies. The Italians made no secret of this opposition within Allied councils to the peace terms proposed by Britain and France. In 1920, when the Sultan, forced by Britain and France, was on the verge of signing the Treaty of Sèvres, a high-ranking official of the British War Office reported that Italy was moving to support Kemal, who rejected the treaty. A month before the Treaty of Sèvres was signed, Lord Curzon reproached Count Sforza with the “unloyal attitude” of Italy in the Middle East.
²

From the time of the armistice onward, the divergence between Italy’s goals in the Middle East and those of her Allies widened. As a practical matter there was little incentive for her to support their program, especially after they sent the Greek army into the Smyrna enclave to pre-empt the Italian claim. To successive Italian governments, Allied policy seemed designed chiefly to profit Greece—a purpose that Rome had no interest in serving. Especially after Count Sforza became Foreign Minister in 1920, Italy treated Greece as a rival whose gains had to be matched rather than an ally whose claims had to be supported. In asserting her own claims, Italy received no help from the Allies. A clash with Kemalist forces at Konya in central Anatolia left the Italian authorities with the feeling that in their sector of occupied Turkey they would be left to face a Kemalist advance by themselves—and that they might be beaten. Deteriorating economic, financial, and social conditions at home finally led Italy to abandon her claims to Turkish territory and evacuate her forces from Anatolia: her hope was that Kemal’s Angora regime would reward her for doing so by agreeing to economic concessions. Sforza entered into a secret accord with the Kemalists whereby Italy would supply them with substantial shipments of military equipment if such concessions were forthcoming.

As Foreign Minister, Count Sforza continued to press the British and French governments for revision of the Treaty of Sèvres and warned Lord Curzon that unless the Allies succeeded in coming to an understanding with Kemal, the Angora regime would be driven into alliance with Moscow—a possibility, he said, fraught with peril.
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For a number of reasons, then, the Italian government continued to dissent from the policy embodied in the Treaty of Sèvres, yet made no overt move to oppose it, not daring to risk an open confrontation with Britain.

Within Italy there were demands for a more forceful approach to the realization of the country’s ambitions. The rapt enthusiasm that had greeted Gabriele D’Annunzio’s seizure of the Dalmatian port of Fiume in 1919—the famous author and nationalist had led his supporters to take over the town—showed the wellsprings of sentiment that were there to be tapped. Benito Mussolini used his newspaper, the
Popolo d’Italia
, to exploit the bitterness of those who felt cheated out of the rewards of victory. An agitator who, in turn, had advocated the extreme positions of almost all sections of the left and the right—in his own words, “an adventurer for all roads”—he charged that Italy was being cheated out of the “booty” in the Middle East.
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Proclaiming a “great imperial destiny” for his country, he asserted that it had a right to become the dominant power in the Mediterranean.
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The Great Power that stood in the way, according to him, was Britain; Mussolini proposed to help insurgent forces in Egypt, India, and Ireland.

When Mussolini, supported by his political followers, known as
fascisti
, became Prime Minister of Italy in 1922, Italy’s local disagreements with Britain about territorial claims in Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean evolved into a more general and permanent estrangement. Mussolini’s political program called for Britain to be chased out of the Mediterranean altogether.
⁶
Under his leadership, Italy, like Russia, moved from ally to enemy of the British Empire.

III

The United States withdrew from the Allied coalition in 1919–20, when the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles and membership in the League of Nations and refused to accept a Mandate to govern Armenia. In reply to a note from the French ambassador, the Secretary of State, on behalf of President Wilson, set forth the new American position in a note of 24 March 1920: the United States would not send a representative to the Peace Conference and would not participate in or sign the peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire, but it expected the peace treaty to take account of American views. In addition to President Wilson’s views on specific Middle Eastern matters mentioned in the note, the United States insisted on an Open Door policy,
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on nondiscrimination against nonsignatories of the treaty, and on the maintenance of existing American rights in the area.

In 1919 the Department of State commenced a program of legally asserting American rights in the occupied Ottoman territories, including not only those deriving from the Capitulation agreements governing the rights and privileges of Americans in Turkey, but also freedom of navigation of the Dardanelles, protection of American missionary colleges and endeavors, and adequate opportunity to carry out archaeological activities and commercial activities. The most conspicuous interests asserted by the United States were those of American oil companies. It was these that brought the United States and Britain into collision.

The oil issue was raised for the first time on behalf of the Standard Oil Company of New York (“Socony”), which had been engaged in oil exploration in the Middle East before the war and held (from the Ottoman regime) concessions—that is to say, exclusive licenses to explore for oil in designated areas—in Palestine and Syria. It held no concessions in Iraq, however, and wanted to establish concessions there because it was the principal supplier of petroleum products in the area; the company’s marketing strategy called for it to obtain supplies for its marketing organization at or near the point of sales.

In September 1919 Socony sent two geologists to prospect for oil in Iraq. One of them incautiously sent a letter to his wife telling her “I am going to the biggest remaining oil possibilities in the world” and “the pie is so very big” that whatever had to be done should be done to “gain us the rights which properly belong to American Citizens.”
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The letter was intercepted in Allied-occupied Constantinople by British censors, who forwarded a copy of it to the British government in London. London immediately sent orders to Sir Arnold Wilson, High Commissioner in Iraq, to forbid the geologists to prospect. At Socony’s request the Department of State protested, but Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, put the Americans off with a plausible but not entirely true tale: wartime restrictions applicable to all nationalities forbade such activities until peace was concluded.

The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was the next to enter the picture. In 1910 its head geologist had concluded that there was oil potential in Iraq; but until after the war, New Jersey Standard did nothing about it. In February 1919 the company’s president suggested to the board of directors that an effort be made to look for oil in Iraq; and a month later the company’s head of foreign production was sent to Paris to take up the question with the American delegation to the Peace Conference.

Later the chairman of the board of New Jersey Standard, A. C. Bedford, went to Europe to deal with the matter personally. The various wartime arrangements negotiated between Britain and France to share the postwar oil wealth of the Middle East remained secret—the American government had been put off with false assurances that nothing had been decided upon that excluded the United States’ interests—and these were matters that he looked into. On 27 April 1920, at the Conference of San Remo, Britain and France finally concluded a secret oil bargain, agreeing in effect to monopolize the whole future output of Middle Eastern oil between them. Bedford obtained a copy of the agreement from a member of the French delegation, and turned it over to the American embassy.

In view of the magnitude of the proposed Anglo-French monopoly, the American government looked upon the San Remo agreement as harmful, not merely to one or more American companies, but to the United States’ interests as a nation. The war had focused attention for the first time on the vital military and naval importance of petroleum, and in the aftermath of the war the United States had undergone an oil-scarcity scare. The price of crude oil rose, and fears were expressed widely that domestic oil reserves were being depleted. The economic adviser to the Department of State wrote that “It is economically essential…to obtain assured foreign supplies of petroleum” in order to assure supplies of bunker oil to the merchant marine and the navy, and in order to perpetuate the United States’ position as the world’s leading oil and oil products supplier.
⁸

In the summer of 1920, the San Remo agreement was made public and the United States—able finally to acknowledge that it knew of the agreement—protested. Foreign Secretary Curzon replied that Britain controlled only 4.5 percent of world oil production while the United States controlled 80 percent—and that the United States excluded non-American interests from areas under its control.
⁹
Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby countered that the United States possessed only one-twelfth of the world’s known oil reserves, that demand for petroleum exceeded supply, and that only unhampered development of existing resources could meet the growing need for oil.
¹⁰

Conscious of having estranged the United States, British officials suspected that American oil interests were behind the anti-British insurrection in Iraq and the Kemalist movement in Turkey. Allegedly an insurrectionary leader arrested by British security officers in Iraq was found to have in his possession a letter from one of the Standard Oil companies showing that American funds were being dispensed by the American consul in Baghdad to the Shi’ite rebels centered in the holy city of Karbala.
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