Arabs (43 page)

British mistrust of Egyptian prime minister Ali Mahir’s fascist leanings led them to demand his resignation in June 1940. This sort of intervention revealed Britain’s disregard for Egypt’s sovereignty and independence and further soured Anglo-Egyptian relations. As German and Italian forces gained the upper hand in the battlefields of North Africa, the British sought to crush support for the Axis within Egypt’s political circles. Ironically, the only Egyptian political party with reliable antifascist credentials was the nationalist Wafd party. On February 4, 1942, the British high commissioner Sir Miles Lampson presented King Faruq with an ultimatum either to name Mustafa Nahhas to form an entirely Wafdist government or to abdicate his throne. To back up his ultimatum, Lampson deployed British tanks around Faruq’s Abdin Palace in central Cairo.

The Abdin Palace ultimatum shattered twenty years of Anglo-Egyptian politics by compromising the three pillars of the system: the monarchy, the Wafd, and the British themselves. King Faruq had betrayed his country by succumbing to British threats and allowing a foreign power to impose a government upon him. Many nationalists believe their king should have stood up to the British, even at the risk of death. As for the Wafd, the party that had won the support of the Egyptian people to struggle against imperialism had agreed to come to power by the bayonets of the British. Yet it was the hysteria behind the ultimatum that revealed how weak and threatened the British were in the face of Axis advances in the Western Desert. The British were on the defensive against the Axis and Egyptian nationalism alike, and had shown their fallibility. The three-way power struggle between the British, the palace, and the Wafd collapsed in February 1942. All three parties would be swept away a decade later in the revolutionary ferment of the 1950s.

 

The British entered the Middle East with the intention of integrating the Arab world into an empire they thought would last forever. They encountered stiff opposition from the outset—in Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine in particular. As nationalist opposition mounted and the cost of formal empire escalated, Britain tried to modify the terms of empire by conceding nominal independence and securing its strategic interests by treaty. Yet even this concession to their nationalist opponents failed to reconcile the Arabs to Britain’s position in the Middle East. By the Second World War, internal opposition left Britain highly vulnerable in its Arab possessions. Italy and Germany were quick to exploit Britain’s weakness and played on Arab national aspirations to the Axis powers’ advantage. As the Arab world slipped from Britain’s control, the British Empire in the Middle East proved more of a liability than an asset.

The only possible consolation for the British was that their imperial rival France had proven no more successful in its Arab possessions.

CHAPTER 8

F
rance long had coveted Greater Syria—that land mass embracing the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan—for its empire in the Arab world. Napoleon had invaded Syria from Egypt in 1799, though his progress was checked by stubborn resistance from the Ottoman defenders in Acre, and he was forced to withdraw. France gave its support to Muhammad ’Ali in his invasion of Syria in the 1830s, hoping to extend French influence over the region through their Egyptian ally. When Egypt withdrew from Syria in 1840, the French deepened their ties to the indigenous Catholic communities of Syria, particularly the Maronites of Mount Lebanon. When the Druzes massacred the Maronites of Mount Lebanon in 1860, France dispatched a campaign force of 6,000 men in a transparent bid to stake its claim to the Syrian coast. Again the French were frustrated, as the Ottoman government managed to reassert control over its Arab provinces for the next half century.

The First World War finally offered France the opportunity to secure its claim to Syria. At war with the Ottoman Empire, France and its Entente allies could openly discuss the division of Ottoman territories in the event of victory. The French government won Britain’s support for its ambitions through intense negotiations between Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot over the years 1915–1916, culminating in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Having already colonized Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco, France was confident it had the knowledge and experience to rule Arabs successfully. What worked in Morocco, the French maintained, would work in Syria. Moreover, France had earned the loyalty and support of the Maronite Christian community of Mount Lebanon over the decades. Indeed, by the end of the First World War, Lebanon was probably the only country in the world with a significant constituency actively lobbying for a French mandate.

Late-Ottoman Lebanon was a strangely truncated land. In the aftermath of the Christian massacres of 1860, the Ottomans and the European powers conferred to establish a special province of Mount Lebanon in the highlands overlooking the Mediterranean to the west, and the Bekaa Valley to the east. The Ottomans had kept the strategic coastline, with its port cities of Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Tripoli, under their own direct administration. In 1888 the Syrian littoral was redesignated as the Province of Beirut. Mount Lebanon was for the most part cut off from the sea, and the Province of Beirut was at many points no more than a few miles wide.

One of the chief shortcomings of the autonomous province of Mount Lebanon was its geographic constraints. The territory was too small and infertile to support a large population, and many Lebanese were driven from their homeland in search of better economic opportunities in the last years of Ottoman rule. Between 1900 and 1914 an estimated 100,000 Lebanese—perhaps one-quarter the total population—left Mount Lebanon for Egypt, West Africa, and the Americas.
¹
This was a cause of growing concern to the twelve-member Administrative Council that ruled Mount Lebanon, whose members were drawn proportionately from the territory’s diverse communities. As the First World War came to an end, the members of the Administrative Council aspired to a larger country and looked to their long-time patron France to help achieve their ambitions.

The Administrative Council of Mount Lebanon met on December 9, 1918, and agreed on the terms it wished to present to the Paris Peace Conference. The council sought Lebanon’s complete independence, within its “natural boundaries,” under French tutelage. By “natural boundaries,” the council members envisaged the expansion of Mount Lebanon to include the coastal cities of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre as well as the eastern Bekaa Valley up to the western slopes of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains. A Lebanon within its “natural boundaries” would be framed between rivers to the north and south, mountains to the east and the Mediterranean to the west.

The people of Mount Lebanon knew that France had advocated such a “Greater Lebanon” since the 1860s, and they hoped to achieve this critical land mass through a French mandate. Consequently, the Administrative Council of Mount Lebanon was formally invited by the French government to present its case to the Paris Peace Conference—unlike such inconvenient Arab states as Egypt or Syria, which were snubbed or excluded because their nationalist aspirations conflicted with imperial ambitions at the conference.

The Administrative Council dispatched a five-man delegation to Paris headed by Daoud Ammoun, a leading Maronite politician.
²
Ammoun set out Mount Lebanon’s aspirations in his address to the Paris Peace Conference’s Council of Ten on February 15, 1919:

The Lebanese delegation was not seeking French colonialism in Lebanon but French assistance toward their ultimate goal of independence. However, the French seemed only to hear what they wanted to hear, and they were glad to use the Lebanese delegation to legitimate their own claims over Lebanon.

The Administrative Council, however, did not speak for all Lebanese. Over 100,000 Lebanese emigrants lived abroad—in Africa, Europe, and the Americas—and took a passionate interest in the political future of their homeland. Many of the Lebanese expatriate community had come to see themselves as members of a broader Syrian people that embraced émigrés from Palestine, inland Syria, and Transjordan. These “Syrians” included some of Lebanon’s most celebrated men of letters, including Khalil Gibran, author of the mystical masterpiece
The Prophet
. They saw Lebanon as an integral if distinct part of Greater Syria and lobbied for the independence of Syria as a whole, under French tutelage. Given their support for French rule, the Lebanese advocates of Greater Syria were also invited to present their case at the Paris Peace Conference.

One of the most prominent of the Lebanese expatriates was Shukri Ghanim. President of the Syrian Central Committee, a nationalist network with branches in Brazil, the United States, and Egypt, Ghanim appeared before the Council of Ten in February 1919, calling for a federation of Syrian states under French mandatory rule. “Syria must be divided into three parts,” he argued, “or four, if Palestine is not excluded. Greater Lebanon or Phoenicia, the region of Damascus, and that of Aleppo, [should be] constituted in independent, democratic states.” Yet Ghanim did not believe all Syrians were created equal, concluding ominously, “France is there to guide, advise and balance all things, and—we should not fear to say this to our compatriots, who are reasonable men—will dose our liberties according to our different states of moral health.”
⁴
While we can only guess what Ghanim meant by “moral health,” it is clear he believed Lebanon was far more advanced than the other parts of Syria and better prepared to enjoy full political liberties under French protection than Damascus, Aleppo, and the like. In many ways, Ghanim’s appeal was more in line with French
thought than Daoud Ammoun’s presentation on behalf of the Administrative Council of Mount Lebanon.

There was, however, a third trend in Lebanese politics that was overtly hostile to France’s position in the Levant. The Sunni Muslims and Greek Orthodox Christians of coastal cities like Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, and Tyre had no wish to be isolated from the mainstream of Syrian political society and find themselves reduced to a minority in a Christian-dominated Lebanese state. It was a clear divide between the French-oriented politics of Mount Lebanon and the Arabism of the coastal province of Beirut. Coming out of centuries of Ottoman rule, the nationalists in Beirut wished to be part of a larger Arab empire and threw their support behind Amir Faysal’s government in Damascus. Faysal, who had led the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule from the Hijaz to Damascus between 1916 and 1918, spoke on behalf of the political aspirations of the Lebanese of the coastal plain when he addressed the Council of Ten in Paris in February 1919. Lebanon, he argued, was an integral part of the Arab kingdom promised to his father, Sharif Husayn, by British High Commissioner Sir Henry McMahon and should come under Faysal’s Arab government in Damascus, without any mandate at all.

Amir Faysal’s plea to the great powers in Paris met with widespread support among Arab nationalists in Beirut. Muhammad Jamil Bayhum was a young intellectual who became one of Faysal’s ardent supporters. In July 1919, Bayhum was elected to represent Beirut in the Syrian Congress convened in Damascus in advance of the King-Crane Commission. “The French authorities tried everything to prevent the election from taking place, applying pressure on both the electors and the candidates,” Bayhum recalled. “However, their attempts to persuade and coerce were in vain.”
⁵
Lebanon was well-represented in the Syrian Congress, with twenty-two delegates from all parts of the country.

Bayhum joined the Syrian Congress, which opened on June 6, 1919, in a state of heightened excitement. The delegates firmly believed they had assembled to communicate the political wishes of the Syrian people, through the King-Crane Commission, to the great powers at the Paris Peace Conference. They aspired to an Arab state in all of Greater Syria under Faysal’s rule in Damascus, with little or no foreign interference. Bayhum described the political atmosphere in Damascus as charged with optimism and high ideals, comparing the city to the revolutionary Paris of 1789. “We participated in the Congress, with the representatives of Palestine, Jordan, Antioch, Alexandretta, and Damascus, all of us hoping that the allied states would hear our appeals, and deliver the freedom and independence that had been promised to us.”
⁶

Bayhum remained in Damascus to attend all of the sessions of the Syrian Congress, well after the King-Crane Commission had come and gone in July 1919. He watched in dismay as Britain withdrew its troops from Syria in October 1919 and French forces began to take their place. Over the winter of 1919–1920, France began to impose
increasingly stringent terms on the isolated Amir Faysal that fragmented Greater Syria and stripped Faysal’s government of its independence. In March 1920 the Congress declared the independence of Greater Syria, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent the imposition of mandates by presenting the European powers with a
fait accompli
. The Syrian Congress staked its claim to Lebanon as an integral part of Syria, asserting in its declaration of independence: “We will take into consideration all patriotic wishes of the Lebanese with respect to the administration of their country, within its prewar limits, on condition that Lebanon distances itself from all foreign influences.”