The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (43 page)

“They have the proclamation,”
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Sykes replied, referring to the statement, written by himself, and delivered by General Maude upon capturing Baghdad from the Turks. The proclamation is deservedly famous: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators,” it reads. “I [General Maude] am commanded to invite you, through your nobles and elders and representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain who accompany the British Army.”

Sykes asked Fuad if he had read the proclamation, and Fuad replied that he had. The matter dropped.

Wilson “said nothing for a few minutes as I was an onlooker, but later remarked that the Proclamation said nothing more than asking Arabs to cooperate in the Government.” In other words, it employed the same ambiguous language that Sykes and Picot were using that day with Hussein. Wilson remained deeply troubled.

Feisal was troubled too. After the meeting he went to his father. “Supposing Great Britain does not carry out the agreement in Iraq or that they have one idea of it and you another?”

Hussein lost his temper. He had the letter from McMahon, he said. “Don’t you know the British? I trust them absolutely.”

Later that evening Fuad too developed second thoughts. He and Feisal contrived a meeting with George Lloyd and Colonel Newcombe, whom Feisal knew and trusted from the desert campaign against the Turks. The two Arabs aired their worries: that the king relied too heavily upon Mark
Sykes; that he had conceded too much in accepting the Tripartite Agreement and French occupation of Syria; that conceivably he misunderstood what Britain intended for Baghdad and therefore could have no true understanding of what the French would do in Syria. “Certainly,”
³⁸
argued Feisal, “the large number of persons hanged in Syria and the Lebanon had not died to liberate their country from the Turks to give it to the French.” “Let it be agreed,” he said to the two Englishmen, “that France would be offered concessions first, applied to for loans and advisers, but unless the people wished otherwise, let the Government be Arab.”

Newcombe and Lloyd appear to have been troubled too by what Feisal and Fuad told them. Lloyd advised Fuad to go to Cairo right away to explain his worries to Clayton and to Wingate. Newcombe composed an extraordinary note for the Cairo contingent to ponder. Basically he condemned the way in which Sykes and Picot had conducted their meetings. Hussein had been told of the Tripartite Agreement “and asked to give a final decision upon [it] at a moment’s notice: while French and English governments have had months to consider their point of view.” Implicitly he suggested that the two Europeans had acted dishonestly. The king had “agreed to the Syrian coast being governed by the French on the same terms as Baghdad by the British, having no idea what the latter are: It was not pointed out to him either that the two countries and the conditions differ fundamentally.” Newcombe hoped that no irreparable damage to British honor had been done. Nothing had yet been signed. “Further and
very much wider
[emphasis in the original] discussion is possible and very desirable.”

Newcombe then went directly to Colonel Wilson. Their discussion only heightened Wilson’s existing unease. Afterward he put together a twelve-page document, repetitive, poorly organized, but moving—in fact, extraordinary. The essence of his message was:

Several lines later he put the whole thing in a nutshell. He feared that “we have not played a straight forward game with a courteous old man who is, as Sykes agrees, one of Great Britain’s most sincere and loyal admirers.” And finally he issued a warning: “If we are not going to see the Sharif through, and we let him down badly after all his trust in us, the very ‘enviable’ post of Pilgrimage Officer at Jeddah will be vacant because I certainly could not remain.”

So did the Zionists and the Arabs learn about Anglo-French plans for the Middle East; and so did British officials in Jeddah learn how their superiors treated an Arab potentate. They all could have been forgiven for thinking that Allied statements about the rights of small nations were so much hot air. King Hussein managed to convince himself that all would be well (later he would claim that he learned the details of the Sykes-Picot Agreement only when the Russian Bolsheviks published details of Allied “secret treaties” in December 1917); other leading Jews and Arabs feared that they had been betrayed or tricked. Hussein’s credulity and Feisal’s disquiet deeply troubled Colonels Wilson and Newcombe, which is much to their credit. As for Mark Sykes, at this crucial moment he appears to have thought he could manage the Zionists, the Arabs, the French, and the British Foreign Office all at once, and perhaps he could, but to what end? Whether in May 1917 he meant for the Anglo-French agreement to be revised, reinterpreted, or implemented without alteration remains an open question. He wrote and said different things about it.

What he most certainly did not yet do was inform the Arabs about his plans for Zionism in Palestine.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE
had entered World War I on the side of Germany at the end of October 1914. Three men dominated the empire’s CUP government: Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, and Djemal Pasha. (The last we have already met, hanging Arab nationalists in Damascus, and bidding Feisal to feast in the intervals.) Of the ruling triumvirate, only Enver Pasha, the minister of war, unambiguously favored the alliance with Germany. Daring, underhanded, and ruthless, convinced that the German war machine would prove invincible, he had secretly maneuvered his country into the conflict on Germany’s side. His two partners, and the rest of his government, and indeed his country as a whole, could not but accept the fait accompli.

Nevertheless, doubts about the wisdom of this choice would not disappear. The political strength of those who harbored them, and their willingness to act upon them, waxed and waned depending largely upon Ottoman success in battle. The doubters were strongest and most likely to call for an end to combat when their country seemed liable to defeat; they were weakest when it seemed most likely to win. Still, the possibility that Turkey would negotiate a separate peace with the Entente powers, whether under Djemal, or Talaat, or Enver, or perhaps someone else entirely, hovered always in the air. It was part of the atmosphere.

As we have also seen, Zionists in Britain at first thought Turkish entry into the war presaged disaster for Jews in Palestine. They feared that the Ottoman government would take advantage of the crisis by attacking a traditional scapegoat. They never completely lost this fear, which Djemal Pasha stoked more than once by threatening to employ “Armenian methods” against the Palestinian Jewish population. Nevertheless very quickly a hope surged to overshadow all else among British Zionists. “The Ottoman Government has drawn
¹
the sword … [It] will perish by the sword,” Prime Minister Asquith intoned prophetically on November 9, 1914. “They … have rung the death-knell of Ottoman Dominion not only in Europe but in Asia.” With the Ottoman Empire gone, so would be gone one of the greatest obstacles to Zionist progress. What would replace it? British Zionists concluded almost immediately that the best solution for Zionism would be a British protectorate in Palestine. Allied victory in the war would make that possible. It followed that they must oppose any compromise peace with Turkey that left her grip on Palestine intact.

As for the British: Asquith might swear that Britain would fight the war against Turkey to the end, but the easterners who sought in Turkey or the Balkans a back door to central Europe might conclude that they could more easily open it by negotiation than by force. When Lloyd George replaced Asquith as prime minister, the easterners took 10 Downing Street. But not only easterners believed that removing the Ottoman Empire from their list of enemies would benefit the Triple Entente. Westerners could think that too. So just as in Turkey where the possibility of a negotiated settlement with the Allies floated always in the minds of some, so in Britain too the possibility of a compromise peace with Turkey never quite disappeared.

Here then are three pieces on a historic chessboard: namely a never-absent, if never-realized, desire on the part of some Turks for a compromise peace with the Allies; an occasional willingness on the part of some among the Allies to consider such an arrangement with Turkey; and an adamant opposition to any such thing on the part of most British Zionists. The maneuvering of these three parties during the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration is a significant aspect of our story.

Turkey and Britain had no sooner declared war upon each other than they opened secret negotiations to try to end it. British agents had been telling the Foreign Office for years that the CUP governments were not popular; now they added that neither had been the CUP decision to enter the war. On January 28, 1915, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, British
envoy in Berne, was approached by Rechid Bey, a former Liberal Turkish minister of the interior now living in Geneva. An “Old Turk” whom the CUP had chased from his country, Rechid Bey informed the Briton that if certain assurances were forthcoming from the Entente, “the present regime
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[in Turkey] could be swept away.” On that very day, however, the War Council in London was agreeing to a British naval attempt on the Straits of the Dardanelles. Rechid Bey’s proposal appears to have been lost in the shuffle.

Nevertheless Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, whom Grant Duff informed about the visit, hoped to achieve by negotiation what would otherwise require the spilling of much blood. He told the cabinet, “What we really relied on
³
to open the Straits was a coup d’état in Constantinople.” He had been in touch with director of naval intelligence, Admiral “Blinker” Hall, who just had enlisted into his service the erstwhile chief British dragoman of Constantinople, Gerald Fitzmaurice. Grey, with Hall’s knowledge and approval, sent Fitzmaurice on a delicate mission to Sofia, Bulgaria. Grey wrote to the British ambassador there: “When operations against the Dardanelles begin to be successful he may be able … to get into touch with the Turkish party at Constantinople who are anti-German and well-known to him.”

Fitzmaurice and a couple of subordinates made contact with Turkish dissidents in Greece. Fitzmaurice offered £4 million if they would open the straits to the British navy. The Turks were willing but demanded guarantees, most particularly that no harm should come to Constantinople. They knew well the long-standing Russian desire for this warm-water port, and they would not risk their lives in a dangerous enterprise against Enver and his backers if it meant losing the chief city of the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, however, possession of Constantinople was a Russian war aim to which the British government had acceded. Fitzmaurice could not make the guarantee. Instead he warned that every day the Turks delayed, he would reduce the bribe by £100,000. It might have worked if not for Turkish success in battle. The Ottoman forces withstood everything the British and French navies could throw at them and inflicted terrible damage in return. Whatever dismay Turkish negotiators may have experienced as the value of their bribe diminished was balanced, therefore, by increasing confidence in the ability of their countrymen to resist the enemy. Conversely British assurance began to wane. By March 18, with the Turkish forts still holding out and passage along the straits too dangerous to yet attempt, the British cabinet instructed Hall “to spare no expense to win over the Turks.” It was too late. Now Britain would commit the army as well as the navy to
what soon became another charnel house, the infamous, dreadful battle of Gallipoli. Fitzmaurice, having failed to bribe the Turks to get out of the war, returned to Sofia. There he would soon engage in an equally futile attempt to bribe the Bulgarians to get into it on the Allied side.