The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (6 page)

In November 1914 the armies of Russia, a reactionary empire, and the
Ottoman, a decrepit one, lurched into gory battle near the Turkish fortress city of Erzurum. Long before then, however, the British had been considering how to weaken the Turkish foe and help their Russian ally. They recalled certain prewar talks with dissident Arabs. They recalled reports from their Middle Eastern agents and diplomats on the aspirations and activities of these people. Perhaps, mused the British, Arab discontent with Turkish rule could be turned to advantage.

In 1914 the Arab nationalist movement was not a major factor inside the Ottoman Empire; nor was it a negligible one. Its immediate progenitors were an assortment of mid- to late-nineteenth-century clerics and intellectuals from Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia. Virtually all of them longed for the empire to modernize and regain its former status as a great world power, able to protect the East, including Arabs, from the West. How this recovery would be accomplished remained a matter of contention. Some Arabs emphasized that Islam would confront the European threat; they became pan-Islamists. Others stressed that Arabs within pan-Islamism would not merely participate in the Ottoman revival but repossess the caliphate from Turkey. A few preached the unity of all Arabs within the empire regardless of religion. Historians group this bundle of approaches under a single term,
Ottomanism
, because they all envisioned revival of the Ottoman Empire.

Pan-Islamism and Ottomanism predate a third Middle Eastern ideology, Arabism, which emerged as a significant factor only during the six years before the outbreak of World War I. Advocates of Arabism looked forward to the revival of the empire and held views on religious and political questions as disparate as those of the champions of Ottomanism. But they went further than the Ottomanists in that they also wanted autonomy (home rule, as the British called it) for the various Arab groups inside the empire. They did not advocate complete separation and independence; full-fledged Arab nationalism
¹
envisioning separate sovereign Arab states did not appear as a noteworthy force until after 1914.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II probably helped delay the emergence of Arabism. A despot who reigned from 1876 to 1909, he was convinced of his divine right to rule but fearful of his people. At the outset he promised them liberal reforms and accepted a liberal constitution, but it was a pose designed to attract Western support. When the Western powers meddled and interfered with his modernizing projects instead of facilitating them, the sultan dropped it. He disavowed the constitution, imprisoned its author (a former grand vizier, or prime minister), and instituted personal rule that he never willingly relinquished. Paranoid, he employed ten thousand spies or
more. They came to constitute a powerful and dangerous oligarchy within his realm, crisscrossing the empire and seeking out—or intentionally fabricating—accounts of disaffected subjects whose only defense against such charges was bribery. The spies’ reports poured into the offices in Constantinople, stoking the sultan’s fears. He had a harem of nine hundred women; one would check under his bed every night before he went to sleep. His tasters tried every morsel of food before he would touch it. His vigilant censors attempted to allay his terrors by cutting paragraphs, or entire stories, out of newspapers and journals and books, or by shutting down the presses altogether; but judges invariably confirmed his apprehensions with guilty verdicts in his corrupted courts. The sultan was subject to melancholia and fainting spells as well as murderous fits of rage: He ordered that his brother-in-law be strangled; also the grand vizier who had written the constitution and been imprisoned for his pains; also a slave girl who flirted with one of his sons.

But the sultan understood the necessity of maintaining good relations with Arab notables. During his reign they received scholarships to his military academies, commissions in the army, sinecures at the court, imperial postings, and relatively generous treatment. Whether by policy or merely by chance, the sultan surrounded himself with Arab advisers; the point is that he did not discriminate against them. He also understood the importance of religion to his Arab subjects. In order to facilitate the hajj, the annual pilgrimage of the devout to Mecca, he ordered that a railway be constructed to connect Damascus with that city. By 1908 it reached as far as Medina. Nothing could disguise
²
the brutality of his rule, but then the brutality helped postpone the emergence of Arabism; moreover his generosity with the Arab notables, coupled with his religious policies, tempered criticism from that quarter.

Policies aimed at soothing Arabs did not necessarily appeal to Turks, however. The Turkish elite, army officers especially, increasingly despaired for their country and its empire, for the sultan was not merely cruel and brutal to his own people but ineffective in dealing with strangers. Where once Turkey had been a great power, now it was “the sick man of Europe.” Ravenous wolves—which is to say the powers that were not sick, and those that were less sick (Austria-Hungary), and the smaller, newer nations that felt themselves in the springtime of youth (Serbia and Romania)—gathered around the sickbed and licked their chops or considered snatching a morsel then and there. Two years into Abdul Hamid’s reign Russian soldiers marched to within ten miles of Constantinople; he gave in, but the Congress
of Berlin saved him from the worst consequences of defeat, stripping him of much territory but not allowing the Russians access to the Mediterranean. In 1881, however, Abdul Hamid had to accept Greek occupation of Thessaly and, much worse, foreign control over the Ottoman national debt. In 1882 he had to accept British occupation and financial control of Egypt. In 1903 he had to accept the German plan to construct a railway through his territories from Berlin to Baghdad. He was unable to pacify his increasingly restive subjects in those Balkan territories that remained to him; Bulgaria finally achieved independence in 1908. He pacified his subjects in Armenia, or rather terrorized those who survived the twentieth century’s first attempt at something approaching ethnic cleansing. (The entire world was outraged, or claimed to be.)

Organized resistance, when it came, originated in the army, which was warrened through and through by dissident Young Turk officers, members of secret societies, the most important of which was the Committee of Union and Progress. On July 3, 1908,
³
a CUP major in the Third Army Corps stationed in Resna, Macedonia, raised the standard of revolt. His soldiers enthusiastically supported him. Troops sent to suppress the rebellion went over to the rebels. The uprising continued—indeed, it spread like wildfire. Within weeks the sultan surrendered. He restored the constitution of 1876 and reconvened the very parliament he had dissolved thirty-two years before. It decreed new elections, from which the CUP emerged victorious. The CUP proclaimed the equality of all Ottoman citizens regardless of ethnicity or religion. It pledged to uphold the reinstated constitution and parliamentary institutions. It promised to intensify Abdul Hamid II’s modernizing efforts. Enthusiasm reigned among most Turks and non-Turks alike throughout the Ottoman Empire.

None of this pleased the sultan or his conservative supporters. Within months they were dabbling in counterrevolution, launching an attempt in April 1909. The army suppressed it; the CUP retained power. This meant the end for Abdul Hamid II and almost for the sultanate itself. The CUP deposed him
⁴
and placed upon the throne an unappealing but relatively tractable figure, his younger brother. This gentleman served as a CUP puppet until his death in 1918, whereupon a third member of the family, Turkey’s last sultan, took his place and served until 1923.

The empire’s position among the great and smaller European powers continued to be perilous; the grasp on her remaining European possessions grew ever more tenuous. During the hectic six-year period before 1914 she lost nearly all of them: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania—in fact, everything
except a slice of eastern Thrace. Meanwhile Italy had seized Libya and Rhodes in 1912 and Greece had annexed Crete. A hurricane raged outside the new regime’s main gates.

Inside too the CUP was sorely tried. A Liberal Union Party, envisioning an empire composed of federated districts, won some key by-elections. More important, some CUP members were incompetent, unable to stem the loss of Balkan and other territory. In January 1913 army officers burst into a cabinet meeting. One of them shot
⁵
and killed the minister of war then and there. The army officers authorized a new CUP government and outlawed the Liberals, but that hardly calmed things down. On June 11, 1913, the new grand vizier was murdered too.

For readers familiar with European history, the CUP may be usefully compared to the Jacobin Society led by Robespierre during the French Revolutionary era. It tamed a monarchy, as the Jacobins had done (or thought they had done). Like the Jacobin, the CUP held militantly secular views that sparked a conservative reaction. When the CUP replaced Islamic law with civil courts, when it opened schools for girls as well as boys, it offended devout Muslims. Like the Jacobins, the CUP was professedly democratic but, again like the Jacobins, it turned away from democratic practices in order to deal effectively with a national emergency. Finally, as the Jacobins had centralized power in eighteenth-century France, so did the CUP a little more than a hundred years later centralize the Ottoman Empire. This last policy caused the gravest difficulties of all.

Sultan Abdul Hamid II had conceived of Islam as the glue to which the vast majority of his subjects adhered; under his rule Muslims, whatever their ethnic background and wherever in the empire they might reside, had parity and deserved equal treatment by the state. But the Young Turks of the CUP exalted the Turkish element. They sought to strengthen its hold throughout the empire, among other things by making Turkish the official Ottoman language. They wished to extend Turkish rule wherever ethnic Turks lived, even outside the empire, even inside Russia. This Turkish nationalism, or pan-Turanianism, contradicted the CUP’s 1908 statements about the equality of all Ottoman citizens. Inevitably it provoked a reaction.

Now Arabs began to organize against the CUP. Some held to Ottomanist goals; they tended to support the opposition Liberal Union Party, which they hoped still might revive the empire. Many more championed Arabism, aiming at a revived empire that would provide autonomy for Arabs. Others lodged somewhere between the Ottomanist and Arabist positions.

A variety of organizations spoke for these diverse discontents. A short-lived
Ottoman-Arab Brotherhood hoped to strengthen ties between the two peoples; a Literary Club in Constantinople soon had branches in the major towns of Syria and Mesopotamia and thousands of members. Its quarters served as meeting grounds for the advocates of Ottomanism, Arabism, and dissident views in general. A Young Arab Society, founded in 1909 by Arabs in Paris, aimed “to awaken the Arab
⁶
nation and raise it to the level of energetic nations.” Reform societies appeared in Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Basra. They called for strengthening Syria and Mesopotamia (Iraq) in order to strengthen the empire and to facilitate resistance to the West. Most important was the Ottoman Decentralization Society, with headquarters in Egypt and branches throughout Syria. Its objectives with regard to the empire were apparent from its name. Meanwhile newspapers, journals, and Arab delegates to the CUP-dominated parliament in Constantinople maintained a steady stream of argument in favor of Ottomanist and Arabist ideals.

Secret societies emerged
⁷
as well. Al-Qahtaniya preached the creation of a dual monarchy for Arabs and Turks, on the model of Austria-Hungary. Betrayed by one of its members, al-Qahtaniya ceased to meet within a year. But the dissatisfaction with Ottoman rule that had prompted its establishment remained unassuaged. Soon enough it reappeared in a new guise, as al-Ahd (the Covenant). This group’s membership was limited largely to army officers. It advocated not only a dual monarchy but the establishment of autonomous entities for all ethnic groups within the empire; each group was to be permitted to use its native language, although Turkish would remain as a lingua franca. Al-Ahd maintained a central office in Damascus and its members paid a monthly subscription. By 1915 its treasury contained 100,000 Turkish lira. The members, who communicated by cipher, swore an oath on the Quran never to divulge the secrets of the society, “even if they are cut to pieces.”

A second secret organization, al-Fatat, grew from the Young Arab Society, which maintained an above-ground presence. Seven Arab students in Paris founded the subterranean counterpart. The security issue loomed as large for them as for the members of al-Ahd; like them, they swore an oath of secrecy and admitted newcomers only after a careful vetting process and long period of probation. When the students returned to the Middle East, they changed al-Fatat’s headquarters to Beirut in 1913 and to Damascus shortly thereafter. Al-Fatat was the civilian equivalent of the military-dominated al-Ahd. After the outbreak of war the two movements would merge and play an important role in the lead-up to the Arab Revolt of 1916.

The climax of prewar Arab nationalism occurred in Paris during June
1913, at a conference whose primary organizer was the Young Arab Society. This was the world’s first Arab congress. Elected delegates from the secret societies attended. Telegrams of support
⁸
arrived with 387 signatories: 79 Syrians, 101 Lebanese, 37 Iraqis, 139 Palestinians, 4 Egyptians, 16 Arabs resident in Europe, and 11 who were unidentifiable as to residence. On June 21 the congress
⁹
made public its resolutions: One called for decentralization and another for recognition of Arabic in the Ottoman Parliament and as the official language throughout the Arab lands under Ottoman rule.

The growth of Arab nationalism, limited though its aims may have been before the outbreak of war, did not go unnoticed by the Turks. Turkish spies kept
¹⁰
the regime in Constantinople well informed of Arab nationalist plans and actions.