Policy of Deceit: Britain and Palestine, 1914-1939

1

West of the Line of the Four Towns

1915–1919

Palestine: A Brief Outline

A small region of Western Asia, Palestine owes it name – Filastīn in Arabic – to the Greeks and Romans, and before them to the biblical Philistines. Locally, Palestine was perceived for millennia as part of Bilad al-Sham (Greater Syria or la Syrie intégrale – roughly today’s Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Jordan). It is bordered in the north by today’s Lebanon, to the east by the River Jordan and the Dead Sea, in the west by the Mediterranean Sea, and in the south, after a British–Ottoman agreement in 1906, by a marked frontier with Egypt which separates today’s Israel from the Sinai Peninsula.

Although the Palestine region had been Arab in language, culture and collective historical memory since the Muslim Arabs seized it from Byzantium, the predecessor of the Ottomans, in 637 CE, its twentieth-century inhabitants were not merely the descendants of the seventh-century conquerors, but the cumulative populace that included all the races, including the Hebrews and pagan tribes, that had entered and settled in Palestine since the dawn of history. The region thus had a diverse and multicultural population and a multilayered identity deeply rooted in the ancient past.

The Ottoman Turks, who defeated the Byzantine Empire when they occupied Constantinople in 1453, took Palestine in 1516, and remained its masters until 1918. Politically, Palestine belonged, except for the interlude of the Crusades in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to whoever ruled in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus and Constantinople, but culturally it remained an integral part of an Arabic-Islamic civilisation for some thirteen centuries. The cradle of Judaism, and later of Christianity, Palestine was for the Islamic world the home of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock – the third most sacred site after Mecca and Medina – from where the Prophet Muhammad had ascended to heaven in 632 CE.

The Ottoman Empire was divided into distinct administrative units (in descending order): vilayets (provinces), sanjaqs and nahiyas. Palestine, however, had always been a geographical entity, never an officially defined administrative entity. In 1918, it roughly covered the Ottoman Sanjaqs of Acre, Nablus and the Independent Sanjaq of Jerusalem, which, in 1872, had been accorded this higher status, meaning its governor (mutasarref) enjoyed the prerogatives of a vali (provincial governor) so far as executive powers and direct reference to Constantinople went. (The Lebanon had been similarly elevated into an ‘independent sanjaq’ (Mutasarrifate) in 1861.1) Roughly one fifth the size of England, at 10,000 square miles, Palestine measures some 260 miles (north to south) and between 35 and 40 miles (east to west). It was only with the British Mandate that Palestine acquired defined political boundaries, for the first time in its history (Figure 2).

In 1914, Arabs constituted some 92 percent of the population, of whom 90 percent were Muslim and 8 percent Christian. The small Jewish population (some 7 percent of the total) was largely religious. They were not foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers; they were, saw themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the Muslim-majority society.2 At that time, Jewish land ownership in Palestine comprised some 2 percent. According to Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israeli historian and former Foreign Minister, when David Gruen (later David Ben-Gurion) arrived in Palestine in 1906 from the Polish town of Płońsk, ‘the country consisted of 700,000 inhabitants, 55,000 of whom were Jews, and only 550 could be defined as Zionist pioneers.’3 In 1918, British authorities estimated that out of a total population of 639,000, some 80 percent (512,000) were Muslim Arabs, 10 percent (61,000) Christian Arabs, and 10 percent (66,000) Jews, of whom some 15,000 were European (mostly Russian and Polish) Jewish settlers who had arrived since the 1880s. Many of the latter lived in forty-five rural colonies (moshavot) and were quite distinct from the indigenous, Arabic-speaking Jewish community (Yishuv), the majority of whom lived in four towns, namely Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron.4

Figure 1: The Ottoman Empire, 1914

Figure 2: Ottoman administrative divisions in the Levant, 1915

In common with other Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire, in 1914, Palestinian society was predominantly rural and pre-industrial, and led by a traditional and patrician urban elite. In principle, the governors, senior administrators and judges in the Ottoman Empire’s provinces were sent from Constantinople and appointed for one year only, to prevent them from putting down roots and identifying themselves with the local community. In practice, however, a large share of political power passed into the hands of the local elite of Sheikhs, ulama (religious hierarchy) and landowners, and the region had sent representatives to the Ottoman parliament since it was created in the late nineteenth century. People generally conversed in Arabic, while all official correspondence was conducted in Ottoman Turkish; the upper ‘notable’ classes were bilingual. In a few towns soap was manufactured, as well as pottery, glass, lace, embroidery and clothes. Wheat, barley, olive oil and citrus fruit had been exported to Europe since the second half of the nineteenth century.

Between 1914 and 1916, Syria, including Palestine and Lebanon, suffered severe famine. Food, livestock and fuel were in short supply due to the requisitions of the Turkish military. Villages were ravaged by military drafts, and devastated by cholera, typhus and recurrent fever. The Jewish population was depleted by emigration and the deportation of enemy nationals, especially Russians, whose loyalty was suspect: some ten thousand were shipped to Alexandria. In the spring of 1915, all fifty thousand civilian inhabitants of Jaffa were expelled, for fear they might assist the British in any advance. In Jerusalem, as in Beirut and Damascus, Arab nationalists had been hanged by the Turkish authorities, who ruthlessly enforced conscription.5

When the British occupied Palestine in 1918, conditions were undoubtedly dire: starvation, disease and privation prevailed. Nevertheless, nearly one third of Palestine was still cultivated (approximately 3,300 square miles), another third was urban and the rest a mixture of desert, small natural reservoirs and what had been flourishing forested areas before they were erased by the Turkish war machine. The region was both populated and cultivated, neither empty nor desolate. It could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be described as terra nullius, as some Zionists sought to characterise it. As Sir Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first High Commissioner to Palestine, told the Permanent Mandates Commission in 1924, under the Ottomans there had been a system of government where there were taxes, newspapers,6 schools, a system of land registration, political parties, a judicial system, hospitals and a railway.7

Cooperation, Rivalry and the Search for Allies

The purpose of this section is not to summarise in a few pages the complex course of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century international relations, but to direct attention to events and trends that illuminate the ‘broken promise’ story to follow. Britain’s policies during the First World War, including its pledges regarding the future of the Near East, can only be understood in the context of its relations with the other Great Powers in the preceding decades, when ‘trading’ territories and colonies, and dividing ‘buffer’ states into zones of influence was normal Great Power diplomacy.8

During the nineteenth century, a major industrial and technological expansion in Britain contributed to an accelerating growth of the economy and pressure to seek new overseas markets. This resulted in unrelenting competition with other Great Powers, principally France and Russia, for the monopolisation of markets, control over valuable raw materials and domination of the lines of communication. A Great Power capable of controlling trade routes could also control a rival’s access to the sources of raw materials and potential markets. But in forging ahead of France in Asia and the Pacific, and in crowning that achievement by conquering India, Britain stretched its lines of transport and communications so far that they could be cut at many points.

A major influence on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British foreign policy was suspicion of Russia’s designs on Constantinople, which was regarded as the ‘key to India’. This was partly because of its proximity to the overland routes to the east and partly because it was feared that if Russia occupied Constantinople, it would be able to dominate the Near East. Russia longed for warm-water ports with access to the world’s seas. Britain in turn bolstered an ailing Ottoman Empire to keep the Russians safely bottled up in the Black Sea. From 1830 onwards, Lord Palmerston and his successors feared that if Russia destroyed the Ottoman Empire, the scramble to pick up the pieces might lead to a major war between the European powers. Britain had little desire to control directly the Near East region during the nineteenth century, but did wish to keep any of its European rivals from doing so. The Crimean War of 1854–1856 was fought mainly to check Russian influence over Turkey; Queen Victoria put it clearly: it was, she said, ‘a question of Russian or British supremacy in the world’.9

In 1882, Britain occupied Egypt to safeguard the Suez Canal (which had been opened in 1869), restore Egypt’s political and financial stability, and prevent France from occupying it first. The country was not declared a colony but remained in theory an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire ruled by a hereditary khedive. In reality, it was a veiled protectorate presided over with absolute authority in the areas that mattered by a series of British Consul-Generals: Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer (1883–1907), Sir Eldon Gorst (1907–1911) and Lord Kitchener (1911–1914).

Meanwhile, to the west of Egypt, France had occupied Algeria in 1830, Tunisia in 1881 and most of Morocco by 1914. Further south, the partition of much of the rest of the continent by the Great Powers in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was accomplished in about twenty years, roughly between 1880 and 1900. Equally striking was the sheer scale of the share-out. By 1900, only about one tenth of Africa had not fallen under European rule, whereas twenty years earlier only one tenth had been colonised.10 To the existing colonial powers of Britain, France, Spain and Portugal were now added Germany, Italy and Belgium. Britain was involved in rivalry during this period with virtually all of these countries at one stage or another. This is not surprising since Britain had used its sea power to assert a sort of ‘paramountcy’ over most of Africa’s coasts in the mid nineteenth century.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, British governments perceived no necessity to contemplate changes that would give Egyptians or Indians a real measure of control over the defence and foreign policies pursued in their name. Indeed, across the whole span of imperial commitments, the absence of any serious colonial revolt (following the suppression of the Indian Mutiny in 1858) seemed to suggest to the policymakers in London that there was little if any need to envisage any substantial alteration in the methods by which British control was exerted. A not untypical example of a nineteenth-century imperial leader’s mindset is that of Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), a colonial administrator with several years’ service in India (before moving to Egypt) who was convinced of the innate superiority of Western civilisation and who believed that all ‘Orientals’, including Egyptians and Indians, would require many, many more decades of enlightened tutelage before they absorbed and mastered the ways of the West. ‘Let us,’ he wrote, ‘in Christian charity, make every possible allowance for the moral and intellectual shortcomings of the Egyptians, and do whatever can be done to rectify them.’11 Cromer’s distorted and self-serving model of Egyptian society would serve as a template for what the British chose to see in Palestine: a land composed of three religious communities, only one of which, the Jews, had national rights and status.

For such decision-makers – they were all men – either in London or in the colonies, India ‘belonged’ in the British Empire, the Ottoman Turks were not really Europeans and ‘Arab nationalism’ was not part of their diplomatic lexicon. In the context of our story, concerning the decision-makers’ mindsets, it is notable that almost all of Lloyd George’s last cabinet had lived their formative years in the nineteenth century. Balfour was born in 1848, Milner in 1854, Bonar Law in 1858. Curzon was, in Lord D’Abernon’s phrase, ‘born grandiloquent’ in 1859. All but Lloyd George (born 1863) and Churchill (born 1874) were in their forties when the twentieth century began.

In 1870, Prussia’s incorporation of the southern German states, including Bavaria and Württemberg, into the new German Empire transformed the political situation in Central Europe. The subsequent Franco-Prussian war of 1871 was a disaster for France, which was outnumbered, outgunned and outmanoeuvred. It marked the end of an era in which France had been regarded as the great military power on the continent, alongside Russia. The victors demanded the cession of Alsace and Lorraine, two provinces with rich iron ore deposits, textile industries and good agricultural land. They also insisted upon an indemnity of 5,000 million francs, and until it was paid German troops occupied parts of France. A final humiliation was a victory march through Paris, and the Kaiser being proclaimed German Emperor in the palace of Versailles in January 1871. Instead of a relatively weak collection of states with powerful neighbours on each side, ‘Germany’ was now a major power, the product of ‘blood and iron’, as Bismarck aptly expressed it.12

Between 1871 and 1914, Germany became the greatest industrial power on the continent. Unification, creating a single internal market, contributed to its rapid economic expansion. By 1900, it had outstripped Britain, previously the leading industrial nation in Europe, and was second in the world only to the United States. The figures speak for themselves: between 1870 and 1913, the British gross national product (GDP) grew by 124 percent, while that of Germany grew by 229 percent. In 1880, Britain’s share of world manufacturing production was 23 percent, Germany’s 8 percent; and in 1913, the figures were 14 and 15 percent, respectively.13 The growth of the German economy intensified the competition among all industrial states for markets and raw materials. This, combined with population growth, increased the pressure on Germany’s leaders to transform their country from a continental power into a global empire.

An agreement, commonly known as the Triple Alliance, was formed between the ‘Central Powers’ of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy in 1882, mostly at the behest of Germany, which perceived itself as surrounded, and under a rising threat from both an openly revengeful France, smarting under the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, and Russia, the Big Bear to its east. Socially conservative, France was, in spite of its intellectual vitality, deeply aware of its military inferiority. The events of 1870 had shown that the French could not on their own beat the German army. In an effort to guarantee its security against an increasingly powerful neighbour, France signed an agreement with Russia in 1894 that became the keystone of the former’s foreign policy for the next decade.

In 1897, Germany embarked on a policy of Weltpolitik that was, by intent, a rejection of the restrained ‘continental policy’ of the Bismarck era. The emphasis was now on expansion, especially overseas, and the creation of a large navy that would demonstrate Germany’s status as a world power. For its part, Britain’s reliance on imported food and raw materials, and the need for markets for its manufactured goods, meant that the nation’s lifeblood was dependent on the uninterrupted flow of seaborne trade. To ensure that the sea lanes remained open to merchant shipping, Britain considered that it had to maintain its global naval supremacy. Moreover, as the only European power that did not introduce conscription after 1871, Britain lacked the mass army of its continental rivals. Furthermore, much of the British Army was either deployed in the defence of India or was scattered throughout the rest of the Empire. By 1900, many British statesmen were becoming convinced that Britain’s resources were overstretched and that it needed allies if it were to maintain its role as a world power. Hence, the settlement (entente cordiale) of long outstanding disputes between Britain and France in 1904 – in essence an agreement about Africa, where France was to be given a free hand in Morocco in return for Great Britain having one in Egypt. In 1907, under pressure of mounting tension in Europe, a second alliance was formed when the British government, now a Liberal one under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, agreed with Russia to divide Persia into three zones: a Russian zone adjacent to its frontier; a British zone to the south-east covering the Indian border; and a neutral zone separating the two. Their agreements on Tibet and Afghanistan also contributed to the security of India, long the key issue in Anglo-Russian antagonism. In effect, both sides agreed not to meddle, to the disadvantage of the other, in the internal affairs of these two ‘buffer’ states.14

Thus it was that by 1907 Europe was divided into two increasingly rival sets of ‘power-alliances’: on one side, the Triple Entente (Great Britain, France and Russia) and on the other, the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy). Germany’s sense of insecurity was intensified by Britain’s agreements with France and Russia, creating what the Germans called ‘encirclement’ but which Britain and its partners regarded as ‘containment’ of an unpredictable Germany.

The years 1905 to 1909 saw a great increase in international tension, precipitated in large measure by the Anglo-German naval race. From 1906, this became focused on the construction of a new class of battleship developed in Britain – the dreadnought. Britain won the contest – by 1914, it had commissioned twenty to Germany’s fifteen – but the damage done to Anglo-German relations was immense. In German eyes, Britain’s naval supremacy did not belong to it as some kind of ‘divine right’, but from London’s perspective any threat to Britain’s naval supremacy was considered a threat to both the nation and the Empire. Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Edward Grey insisted in 1913 that ‘The Navy is our one and only means of defence and our life depends on it.’15

In 1907, the formation of the Triple Entente also raised the spectre of Great Power cooperation in dismembering the Ottoman Empire, whose leaders responded in two ways. They re-emphasised military reform in the hope that they, like the Japanese, could ward off Europe by developing more effective European-style armed forces, and they strengthened the Empire’s economic, military and diplomatic ties with Germany, a potential ally in any confrontation with the Triple Entente.

The Ottoman Empire thus became a major factor in Germany’s imperial planning, not least because its capital, Constantinople, straddles the Bosphorus. In the age of naval power this was one of the world’s strategic bottlenecks: it was through the Black Sea Straits that much of Russia’s trade was conducted. In time of war, a hostile Turkey could menace not only the flow of supplies to Russia but also, as previously mentioned, Britain’s imperial lines of communication with India. For these reasons, the Germans had worked hard to secure Turkey as an ally in the years before 1914. Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Constantinople twice, in 1889 and 1898. Since 1888, the Deutsche Bank had played a leading role in financing the so-called Berlin–Baghdad railway. From the early 1880s, German military officers helped to train and modernise the Ottoman Army; between 1883 and 1896, the German Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz was employed by the Sultan to overhaul his forces, while another German, Otto Liman von Sanders, was appointed the army’s Inspector General in 1913.16

Thus, by 1914, a European ‘balance of power’ which had kept the peace between great states for over forty years was distinctly fragile. Yet, on the eve of the conflict, many European statesmen were still finding it difficult to see why another conference of ambassadors or even a European congress (as in 1878) would not extricate them from their problems. Then came the assassination on 28 June 1914 of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. On 30 July, even before the Turks had finally committed themselves to fighting alongside Germany, the Kaiser was planning the next move:

Our consuls in Turkey, in India, agents … must fire the whole Mohammedan world to fierce rebellion against the hated, lying, conscienceless nation of shopkeepers, for if we are to bleed to death, England shall at least lose India.17

By the end of the following week, Europe was at war. The Ottoman Empire joined forces with Germany in November. None of the powers involved expected to get bogged down in a muddy, bloody stalemate, especially on the Western Front. In fact, the benign word ‘stalemate’ hardly does justice to the scale of carnage and suffering on all sides. In the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, French casualties amounted to some 17,000, and the Prussians’ to 10,000. In comparison, by the end of 1915, the French army had lost 300,000 dead, and in 1916 the battle before Verdun added another 315,000; the Germans lost 280,000. In 1916, the British suffered 420,000 casualties on the Somme and the Germans a similar number. The following year, some 400,000 died to gain five miles of mud at Passchendaele.18 As the stalemate developed, Britain’s search for allies became more acute.

This international relations background is the lens through which Britain’s wartime agreements (secret and public) and declarations concerning the Ottoman Empire, including its Arab provinces, need to be considered. Such agreements, forged in the heat of war, marked a continuation of a tradition stretching back at least two hundred years, as each power strove to defeat their enemies, neutralise potential enemies and win new allies. If the war had been won, or lost, by the spring of 1915, there would have been no negotiations with the Sharif of Mecca, and a declaration in 1917 in favour of a Jewish national home in Palestine distinctly uncertain.

Wartime Agreements: Dividing Up the Bear’s Skin

At the beginning of the war there was no unanimity among British policymakers concerning the future of Arabia or the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces. Secretary of State for War Herbert Kitchener’s plans for an Arabian Raj, essentially an Arabian Kingdom under the auspices of England,19 were completely unacceptable to Arthur Hirtzel (Secretary, Political Department, the India Office), who saw the Persian Gulf, Aden and the Mesopotamian provinces as no more than adjuncts to India. The third competing view emanated from the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith himself, who became increasingly reluctant (and Foreign Minister Edward Grey more so) for the Empire to take on any more territory, this for material rather than sentimental or moral reasons. Asquith wrote later that when the cabinet discussed the opportunities that lay in the Ottoman Empire, ‘their discussions had resembled that of a gang of buccaneers.’20 But he then added that ‘if we were to leave other nations to scramble for Turkey without taking anything ourselves, we should not be doing our duty.’21

As previously mentioned, it was standard eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Power policy for allies to negotiate which victorious power would take which region(s) of their defeated foes’ territories, and the First World War was no exception to this tradition. In spring 1915, the Triple Entente governments concluded the Constantinople Agreement: Russia would take Constantinople and the Straits; France would take Syria,22 Cilicia and Alexandretta; the British reserved their right to (any) Ottoman territory ‘in due course’. This was followed by the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, conducted between July 1915 and March 1916, in which the British promised the Arabs an independent Arab state if they rose against the Turks; the Sazonov–Sykes–Picot Agreement of May 1916, where the three Allies drew ‘lines on a map’, delineating their respective regions of postwar influence and control over the whole of the Middle East;23 the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, in which Britain promised to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine; and finally, the Anglo-French Declaration in November 1918, which affirmed the latter’s war aims as ‘the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turks, and the setting up of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations’.24

How complementary, or contradictory, these pledges – ‘expansionist bookings-in-advance’25 – were has been a matter of acrimonious debate for a hundred years. Although there are other unresolved issues surrounding all the aforementioned promises, ‘The Question of Palestine’ has been at the heart of this debate. Was Palestine a twice-promised land, pledged by McMahon to be part of an Arab state, and subsequently to the Zionist Organisation as an eventual Jewish state? Given the prevailing political and military constraints (five empires at war), the Constantinople Agreement, McMahon–Hussein Correspondence and the Sazonov–Sykes–Picot Agreement were all conducted in strict secrecy: only the Balfour Declaration and the Anglo-French Declaration were made public immediately. None of the aforementioned were discussed in either the French or the UK parliaments, but merely privately arranged among the Allies without any consultation with the populations of the Middle East, as was standard eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European imperial practice.

However, in the five years or so after the war, as well as numerous internal discussions in the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office, there were vigorous debates concerning these wartime pledges and agreements in both Houses of Parliament and in the press. From 1929 onwards, mostly in response to unrest or rebellion in Palestine, parliamentary debates on Middle Eastern policy almost invariably included some (usually brief) discussion of the wartime pledges, including the Correspondence, but successive governments’ refusals to publish the latter remained steadfast until 1939.

The Correspondence itself consisted of a series of ten letters, all written in Arabic, exchanged in the period from July 1915 to March 1916 between Sharif Hussein of Mecca and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, representing the British government. The letters can only be understood in the context of the Allies’ war against the Ottomans, otherwise their very existence just doesn’t make sense. The British, before the war and after it, had little, if any, desire whatever to promote Arab nationalism and, certainly before the war, had no particular desire to promote Jewish nationalism.

The strategic context to the genesis of the Correspondence in the historiography is uncontested. When the Ottomans declared war on the Allies in November 1914, the latter were confident the Turks, the ‘sick man of Europe’,26 would buckle rapidly under the combined onslaught of Britain, France and Russia. The Allies’ confidence was misplaced. In January 1915, Djemal Pasha, the Commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, led a force of eighty thousand men across the Sinai Peninsula for a quick strike against the Suez Canal, but the campaign was poorly coordinated, and the Ottomans were driven back before they could cross the Canal. Nevertheless, alarmed by the near success of the Pasha’s attack, the British began a massive build-up of troops in Egypt. At the same time, with stalemate on the Western Front, Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty) believed there was an opportunity to attack Germany ‘through the back door’. But the Gallipoli campaign to take Constantinople, well documented elsewhere, was a total defeat and provoked a political crisis in Britain. According to Sean McMeekin, had the Russians delivered the troops they had promised to Kitchener during the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns, the Ottoman war might have been over by spring 1915.27

Allied war planners’ fear of jihad among colonial Muslims now became even more acute: 100 million Muslims lived under British rule, mostly in India and Egypt, including 400,000 Muslim men serving in the Indian Army. Whitehall feared that war with the Ottomans, the only independent Muslim power, and the Caliph of Islam might overtax India’s loyalty; there was, of course, another major British fear – the military threat to the Suez Canal at a time of need for the quick passage of Indian troops to France. The throttling of the Canal would not just embarrass England, but cripple its Empire communications. Land attacks on the Canal could only be made across territories inhabited by Arabs, and one way of reducing or even successfully warding off that threat would be to win the Arabs over to the Allied side.

Whitehall hoped that an alliance with the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali, would neutralise the appeal of the Sultan-Caliph’s call to jihad, proclaimed in Constantinople in early November 1914, which had caused profound concern in Paris as well as London.28 Even a partially successful jihad might prove a serious threat to the Allies. The British wanted, to quote one writer, ‘to rob the call to Holy War of its principal thunderbolt’, by striking an agreement with Sharif Hussein themselves.29 Appointed by Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1908, the Sharif belonged to the Hashimite family and traced his lineage back forty-one generations to the Prophet Muhammad, who was born in Mecca and was himself a member of the house of Hāshim, a noble clan of the Quraysh tribe. The Sharif, cautious, single-minded, autocratic and ambitious, had devoted his first years in office to the construction of a network of tribal alliances that would enable him to obtain a greater degree of autonomy from Constantinople, whose centralising policies he opposed. He showed no desire to give up his quasi-independent status, his armed following, or his authority over the population of the Hijaz.

The distance between the imperial capital and the Hijaz, magnified by its primitive state of transportation and communications, had always lent it considerable autonomy. About 750 miles long and, at its widest, about 200 miles across, it precariously supported a population estimated at some 300,000, half Bedouin, half townsmen. Dates were the staple crop, but the main industry of the province was the annual pilgrimage: about seventy thousand pilgrims made the journey to Mecca each year. The imperial government, dominated as it was by the Committee of Union and Progress, was intent on extending the Hijaz railway from Medina to Mecca and to the port of Jedda, which would have threatened the camel-owning Hijazi Bedouin tribes and their lucrative control of the pilgrim routes to the Holy Places.

Although the British hoped that a counter-declaration of jihad by the Sharif would turn the fledgling Arab nationalist movement against the Ottomans, they had little confidence that the Arabs would or could develop an effective military machine that would seriously endanger Germany’s eastern ally. In fact, when the British first conceived the idea of encouraging an Arab revolt, they hardly expected it to break out much beyond the Hijaz. Moreover, as Ronald Storrs admitted years later, to encourage the transfer of the Caliphate from Constantinople to Hussein was attractive precisely because, in ‘uniting the strongest religious with the weakest material power, it would be greatly to our interest’.30

Contacts between Britain and the Hashimites began, in fact, six months before the war broke out. In February 1914, Emir Abdullah, the Sharif’s second son, travelled to Cairo to meet with Herbert Kitchener, the British Consul-General of Egypt. Abdullah then had two subsequent meetings with Ronald Storrs, the Oriental Secretary,31 at the residency. The Emir, who had no particular admiration for the British, nevertheless wished to sound out the latter’s attitude if there were to be a revolt in the Hijaz against the Turks. Since the Young Turk government’s rise to power in 1908, its policies of Turkification and centralisation had increasingly alienated the Arab communities throughout the Ottoman Empire. The new constitution gave no weight to the principle of equality. Turkish was to replace Arabic in schools and official forums. Enver Pasha, the Ottoman Minister of War, withdrew Arab officers from their posts and excluded Arabs from military schools. These policies led some Arabs throughout Syria – students, writers, military men and local politicians – to create a number of underground ‘Arab nationalist’ movements for increased Arab autonomy and local self-governance within the Empire. Abdullah knew the Ottoman government had secretly decided to depose his father, who secretly hoped to create an autonomous Hijaz, but Storrs was not encouraging – the British and Ottoman empires were publicly still on relatively friendly terms – and the conversations closed without issue. However, they did open the eyes of Kitchener and Storrs to the strength and depth of Turko-Arab animosity, and to the possibility of turning it to Britain’s advantage.

In the last week of September 1914 – that is, following the outbreak of war between Britain, France and the Central Powers, but before the Ottomans had entered the war – Kitchener (newly appointed Minister of War by Asquith), concerned as he was for the strategic defence of the Empire, including the Canal and the Persian Gulf, directed Storrs to enquire of Abdullah whether, in the event of Turkey joining the Central Powers, his father would loyally support the latter or join Great Britain. Eventually, the Sharif replied that he was potentially willing to come to an understanding with the British, and hinted that it might be possible to lead his immediate followers in the Hijaz to revolt, provided Britain promised effective support and guarantees. In fact, Hussein discovered in January 1915, through intercepted letters, written evidence that the Ottoman government were planning to depose him at the end of the war – and indeed had postponed doing so only because of the conflict.32 He was also acutely aware that the Arabs of the Hijaz, or indeed anywhere else in the Empire, were not sufficiently prepared – militarily, politically or economically – to rise up against the Ottomans. German officers had been training the Ottoman Army since the end of the nineteenth century and Hussein’s few rifles would be no match for Turkish machine guns and artillery. For their part, the British considered that any Arab revolt against Ottoman authority would be helpful, but they had no expectation that it would do much apart from keeping some extra Turkish troops holed up fighting in the Hijaz, and peppering the Turkish armies with desertions. As it turned out, when the revolt occurred, not a single Arab unit of the Ottoman Army defected intact. Like the Ottoman holy war, Hussein’s holy war failed to catalyse the Arabs to rebel en bloc, but nevertheless Hussein’s forces were to play a not insignificant role in the campaign against the Turks between 1916 and 1918.

On 31 October 1914, just a week before the Ottomans declared war on Britain and France, Kitchener’s second note promised the Sharif that if he and his followers were to side with the Entente powers, the British government would guarantee his retention of the dignity of Grand Sharif and defend the Hijaz against all external aggression. He held out a vague promise of support to the Arabs in general in their endeavours to secure freedom, on condition that they would ally themselves to Britain. The note, in Arabic, spoke of the ‘Arab nation’, the ‘emancipation of the Arabs’ and concluded with a hint that, in the event of the Sharif being proclaimed caliph, he could count on England’s recognition. Ten months later, McMahon, equally unwisely, stated in his first letter to the Sharif: ‘We now declare once more that the government of Great Britain would welcome the reversion of the caliphate to a true Arab born of the blessed stock of the Prophet.’33

On 16 November, Kitchener’s message reached Abdullah, who replied in early December on behalf of his father, committing the latter to a secret alliance with England; he asked for time to prepare, to complete his enquiries among other Arab leaders and to muster his forces. Given the need to preserve secrecy – the Sharif and his sons were undoubtedly contemplating treason – this procedure took some eight months. Eventually, on 14 July 1915, the Sharif wrote to Sir Henry McMahon, this first letter reaching Cairo on some unknown date in August. Meanwhile, the Turks continued to press for the Sharif’s endorsement of jihad and for his active support. Deluged as he was with letters and telegrams from Constantinople, his defence for not doing so publicly he put down to his fear of enemy reprisals: the British navy controlled the Red Sea, and the long seaboard of the Hijaz was entirely at its mercy.

In his letter the Sharif stated the Arab terms for intervention, and set out clearly the natural boundaries of the Arab countries for which he demanded independence:

On the north, by the line Mersin–Adana to parallel 37° N and thence along the line Birejik–Urfa–Mardin–Midiat–Jazirat (ibn ‘Umar)–Amadia to the Persian frontier; on the east, by the Persian frontier down to the Persian Gulf; on the south, by the Indian Ocean (with the exclusion of Aden whose status will remain as at present); on the west, by the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea back to Mersin.34

These borders were essentially those traced by the Damascus Protocol, a series of proposals for an independent Arab state stretching from Anatolia to the Gulf and Red Sea (Figure 3), which originated from a Greater Syria political project developed clandestinely by members of two Arab nationalist groups, al-Fatat (the Young Arab Society) and al-’Ahd (the Covenant Society).

Having originally approached Emir Feisal, the Sharif’s third son, in secret in January 1915, later the same year, on 23 May in Damascus, these two groups formally presented him with the proposals, requesting that he present them to his father for approval. Feisal, who became a member of al-Fatat sometime during that period, returned to Mecca in June, the Protocol, ‘written out in Lilliputian characters’, sewn inside the lining of one of his retainers’ boots.35 With Abdullah’s support, Feisal persuaded his father to support the document. According to Jonathan Schneer, the Protocol was ‘the foundation document and lodestar of the Arab Revolt’.36

The Sharif’s letter included other mutual stipulations: first, that Great Britain would agree to the proclamation of an Arab Caliphate for Islam; second, the Sharifian Arab government would grant Great Britain preference in all economic enterprises in the Arab countries; third, they would come to each other’s assistance in the event of any foreign state attacking either of them – peace would be concluded only when both parties concurred; and fourth, Great Britain would agree to the abolition of the capitulations.37 For prudence’s sake, the letter bore no date and no signature, and had been carried in the greatest secrecy by the Sharif’s trusted emissary Sheikh Muhammad ‘Aref ibn ‘Uraifan from Mecca to Cairo, a long and exceedingly dangerous journey of at least eight hundred miles, depending on the route taken. It was enclosed in a letter from Abdullah addressed personally to Storrs, and dated 14 July 1915.

Figure 3: The Damascus Protocol, 1915

History has not revealed to us exactly where the Sheikh hid the letter on his journey. Somewhere in the inner folds of his garments, or perhaps sewn into the lining of his footwear? Storrs himself, a decade before this Correspondence saga, had been an Assistant Inspector of Customs at Alexandria, and had considerable experience of smugglers’ talents. Hashish smugglers, for example, he wrote later, ‘introduced their drug in chair-legs, piano-pedals, false calves, olives, as well as in unbelievable fastnesses of the human frame’.38

What we do know is that all ten letters arrived safely, a remarkable achievement in wartime. As for the mysterious route that the trusted Sheikh took between Mecca and Cairo, two alternatives come to mind. From Mecca to the coastal port of Jedda is some 45 miles, at that time a two-day trip by camel, followed by a voyage across the British-controlled Red Sea to Port Sudan (some 180 miles) by sambuk, a light, lateen-rigged Arab sailing vessel. The Sheikh would then have had a choice: the faster, simpler and probably safer route, perhaps taking a further week, would be by steamer northwards for 770 miles to the town of Suez, from where there was a rail link (85 miles) westwards to Cairo. Otherwise, from Port Sudan, the train 300 miles north-west to Abu Hamad (Northern Sudan), then by camel track for over 300 miles northwards to Aswan, the southern-most terminal of the Egyptian railway system, before a 550-mile rail journey north from Aswan to Cairo. This second route would have taken more than three weeks to complete.

When this letter reached Sir Henry McMahon, who had replaced Kitchener as High Commissioner in Egypt at the beginning of 1915, the British were still confident of defeating the Ottomans in Gallipoli and were not impressed by what they considered to be Hussein’s pretentions. However, as the Allied position in the Dardanelles grew increasingly untenable, McMahon resumed negotiations with the Hashimites with a new sense of urgency: an agreement with Hussein became more of a priority for the British, particularly from the perspective of officials in Cairo.