On the eve of World War
I, the anticipated break-up of the enfeebled Ottoman
Empire raised hopes among both Zionists and Arab nationalists. The Zionists hoped to attain
support from one of the Great Powers for
increased Jewish immigration and eventual sovereignty in Palestine, whereas
the Arab nationalists wanted an independent
Arab state covering all the Ottoman Arab
domains. From a purely demographic standpoint,
the Zionist argument was not very strong
— in 1914 they comprised only 12 percent
of the total population of Palestine. The
nationalist ideal, however, was weak among
the Arabs, and even among articulate Arabs
competing visions of Arab nationalism — Islamic,
pan-Arab, and statism
— inhibited coordinated
efforts to achieve independence.
A major asset to Zionism was that its chief spokesman, Chaim Weizmann,
was an astute statesman and a scientist widely respected
in Britain and he was well versed in European diplomacy. Weizmann
understood better than the Arab leaders at the time
that the future map of the Middle East would be determined
less by the desires of its inhabitants than by Great
Power rivalries, European strategic thinking, and domestic
British politics. Britain, in possession of the Suez
Canal and playing a dominant role in India and Egypt,
attached great strategic importance to the region. British
Middle East policy, however, espoused conflicting objectives,
and as a result London became involved in three distinct
and contradictory negotiations concerning the fate of
the region.
The earliest British discussions of the Middle East
question revolved around Sharif Husayn ibn Ali, scion
of the Hashimite (also seen as Hashemite) family that
claimed descent from the Prophet and acted as the traditional
guardians of Islam's most holy sites of Mecca and Medina
in the Arabian province of Hijaz. In February 1914,
Amir Abdullah, son of Sharif Husayn, went to Cairo to visit Lord Kitchener, British agent and consul general
in Egypt, where he inquired about the possibility of
British support should his father stage a revolt against Turkey. Turkey
and Germany were not yet formally allied, and Germany and Britain
were not yet at war; Kitchener's reply was, therefore,
noncommittal.
Shortly after the outbreak
of World War I in August 1914, Kitchener
was recalled to London as secretary of state
for war. By 1915, as British military fortunes
in the Middle East deteriorated, Kitchener
saw the usefulness of transferring the Islamic caliphate — the
caliph, or successor to the Prophet
Muhammad, was the traditional leader
of the Islamic world — to an Arab candidate
indebted to Britain, and he energetically
sought Arab support for the war against
Turkey. In Cairo Sir Henry McMahon, the
first British high commissioner in Egypt,
conducted an extensive correspondence
from July 1915 to January 1916 with Husayn,
two of whose sons — Abdullah,
later king of Jordan,
and Faysal,
later king of Syria (ejected by the French in 1920) and of Iraq (1921-33) — were to figure prominently in
subsequent events.
In a letter to McMahon enclosed with a letter dated
July 14, 1915, from Abdullah, Husayn specified an area
for Arab independence under the "Sharifian Arab
Government" consisting of the Arabian Peninsula
(except Aden) and the Fertile Crescent of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria,
and Iraq. In his letter of October 24, 1915, to Husayn,
McMahon, on behalf of the British government, declared
British support for postwar Arab independence, subject
to certain reservations and exclusions of territory
not entirely Arab or concerning which Britain was not
free "to act without detriment to the interests
of her ally, France." The territories assessed
by the British as not purely Arab included: "The
districts of Mersin and Alexandretta, and portions of
Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus,
Homs, Hama, and Aleppo." As with the later Balfour
Declaration, the exact meaning was not clear, although
Arab spokesmen since then have usually maintained that
Palestine was within the pledged area of independence.
Although the Husayn-
McMahon correspondence was not legally binding on
either side, on June 5, 1916, Husayn launched the Arab
Revolt against Turkey and in October declared himself
"King of the Arabs."
While Husayn and McMahon corresponded over the fate
of the Middle East, the British were conducting negotiations
with the French over the same territory. Following the
British military defeat at the Dardanelles in 1915,
the Foreign Office sought a new offensive in the Middle
East, which it thought could only be carried out by
reassuring the French of Britain's intentions in the
region. In February 1916, the Sykes-Picot
Agreement (officially the "Asia Minor Agreement")
was signed, which, contrary to the contents of the Husayn-McMahon
correspondence, proposed to partition the Middle East
into French and British zones of control and interest.
Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Palestine was to be
administered by an international "condominium"
of the British, French, and Russians (also signatories to the agreement).
The final British pledge, and the one that formally
committed the British to the Zionist cause, was the
Balfour Declaration of November 1917. Before the emergence
of David Lloyd George as prime minister and Arthur James
Balfour as foreign secretary in December 1916, the Liberal
Herbert Asquith government had viewed a Jewish entity
in Palestine as detrimental to British strategic aims
in the Middle East. Lloyd George and his Tory supporters,
however, saw British control over Palestine as much
more attractive than the proposed British-French condominium.
Since the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Palestine had taken
on increased strategic importance because of its proximity
to the Suez Canal, where the British garrison had reached
300,000 men, and because of a planned British attack
on Ottoman Syria originating from Egypt. Lloyd George
was determined, as early as March 1917, that Palestine
should become British and that he would rely on its
conquest by British troops to obtain the abrogation
of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
In the new British strategic thinking, the Zionists
appeared as a potential ally capable of safeguarding
British imperial interests in the region. Furthermore,
as British war prospects dimmed throughout 1917, the
War Cabinet calculated that supporting a Jewish entity
in Palestine would mobilize America's influential Jewish
community to support United States intervention in the
war and sway the large number of Jewish Bolsheviks who
participated in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to keep
Russia in the war. Fears were also voiced in the Foreign
Office that if Britain did not come out in favor of
a Jewish entity in Palestine the Germans would preempt
them. Finally, both Lloyd George and Balfour were devout
churchgoers who attached great religious significance
to the proposed reinstatement of the Jews in their ancient
homeland.
The negotiations for a Jewish entity were carried out
by Weizmann, who greatly impressed Balfour and maintained
important links with the British media. In support of
the Zionist cause, his protracted and skillful negotiations
with the Foreign Office were climaxed on November 2,
1917, by the letter from the foreign secretary to Lord
Rothschild, which became known as the Balfour Declaration.
This document declared the British government's "sympathy
with Jewish Zionist aspirations," viewed with favor
"the establishment in Palestine of a National Home
for the Jewish People," and announced an intent
to facilitate the achievement of this objective. The
letter added the provision of "it being clearly
understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice
the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish
communities in Palestine or the rights and political
status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."
The Balfour Declaration radically changed the status
of the Zionist movement. It promised support from a
major world power and gave the Zionists international
recognition. Zionism was transformed by the British
pledge from a quixotic dream into a legitimate and achievable
undertaking. For these reasons, the Balfour Declaration
was widely criticized throughout the Arab world, and
especially in Palestine, as contrary to the spirit of
British pledges contained in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence.
The wording of the document itself, although painstakingly
devised, was interpreted differently by different people,
according to their interests. Ultimately, it was found
to contain two incompatible undertakings: establishment
in Palestine of a national home for the Jews and preservation
of the rights of existing non-Jewish communities, i.e.,
the Arabs. The incompatibility sharpened over the succeeding
years and became irreconcilable.
On December 9, 1917, five weeks after the Balfour Declaration,
British troops led by General Sir Edmund Allenby took
Jerusalem from the Turks; Turkish forces in Syria were
subsequently defeated; an armistice was concluded with
Turkey on October 31, 1918; and all of Palestine came
under British military rule. British policy in the Arab
lands of the now moribund Ottoman Empire was guided
by a need to reduce military commitments, hold down
expenditures, prevent a renewal of Turkish hegemony
in the region, and safeguard Britain's strategic interest
in the Suez Canal. The conflicting promises issued between
1915 and 1918 complicated the attainment of these objectives.
Between January 1919 and January 1920, the Allied Powers
met in Paris to negotiate peace treaties with the Central
Powers. At the conference, Amir Faysal, representing
the Arabs, and Weizmann, representing the Zionists,
presented their cases. Although Weizmann and Faysal
reached a separate agreement on January 3, 1919, pledging
the two parties to cordial cooperation, the latter wrote
a proviso on the document in Arabic that his signature
was tied to Allied war pledges regarding Arab independence.
Since these pledges were not fulfilled to Arab satisfaction
after the war, most Arab leaders and spokesmen have
not considered the Faysal-Weizmann agreement as binding.
The conferees faced the nearly impossible task of finding
a compromise between the generally accepted idea of
self- determination, wartime promises, and plans for
a division of the spoils. They ultimately decided upon
a mandate system whose details were laid out at the San Remo Conference of April 1920. The terms of the British Mandate were
approved by the League of Nations Council on July 24,
1922, although they were technically not official until
September 29, 1923. The United
States was not a member of the League of Nations,
but a joint resolution of the United States Congress
on June 30, 1922, endorsed the concept of the Jewish
national home.
The Mandate's terms recognized the "historical connection of
the Jewish people with Palestine," called upon
the mandatory power to "secure establishment of
the Jewish National Home," and recognized "an
appropriate Jewish agency" for advice and cooperation
to that end. The WZO,
which was specifically recognized as the appropriate
vehicle, formally established the Jewish Agency in 1929.
Jewish immigration was to be facilitated, while ensuring
that the "rights and position of other sections
of the population are not prejudiced." English,
Arabic, and Hebrew were all to be official languages.
At the San Remo Conference, the French also were assured
of a mandate over Syria. They drove Faysal out of Damascus
in the summer; the British provided him with a throne
in Iraq a year later. In March 1921, Winston
Churchill, then colonial secretary, established
Abdullah as ruler of Transjordan under a separate British
mandate.
To the WZO, which by 1921 had a worldwide membership
of about 770,000, the recognition in the Mandate was
seen as a welcome first step. Although not all Zionists
and not all Jews were committed at that time to conversion
of the Jewish national home into a separate political
state, this conversion became firm Zionist policy during
the next twenty-five years. The patterns developed during
these years strongly influenced the State of Israel proclaimed in 1948.
Arab spokesmen, such as Husayn and his sons, opposed
the Mandate's terms because the Covenant of the League
of Nations had endorsed popular determination and thereby,
they maintained, supported the cause of the Arab majority
in Palestine. Further, the covenant specifically declared
that all other obligations and understandings inconsistent
with it were abrogated. Therefore, Arab argument held
that both the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot
Agreement were null and void. Arab leaders particularly
objected to the Mandate's numerous references to the
"Jewish community," whereas the Arab people,
then constituting about 88 percent of the Palestinian
population, were acknowledged only as "the other
sections."
Prior to the Paris
Peace Conference, Palestinian Arab nationalists
had worked for a Greater Syria under Faysal. The British
military occupation authority in Palestine, fearing
an Arab rebellion, published an Anglo-French Joint Declaration,
issued after the armistice with Turkey in November 1918,
which called for self-determination for the indigenous
people of the region. By the end of 1919, the British
had withdrawn from Syria (exclusive of Palestine), but
the French had not yet entered (except in Lebanon) and
Faysal had not been explicitly repudiated by Britain.
In March 1920, a General Syrian Congress meeting in
Damascus elected Faysal king of a united Syria, which
included Palestine. This raised the hope of the Palestinian
Arab population that the Balfour Declaration would be
rescinded, setting off a feverish series of demonstrations
in Palestine in the spring of 1920. From April 4 to
8, Arab rioters attacked the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem.
Faysal's ouster by the French in the summer of 1920
led to further rioting in Jaffa (contemporary Yafo) as a large number of Palestinian
Arabs who had been with Faysal returned to Palestine
to fight against the establishment of a Jewish nation.
The end of Faysal's Greater Syria experiment and the
application of the mandate system, which artificially
carved up the Arab East into new nation-states, had
a profound effect on the history of the region in general
and Palestine in particular. The mandate system created
an identity crisis among Arab nationalists that led
to the growth of competing nationalisms: Arab versus
Islamic versus the more parochial nationalisms of the
newly created states. It also created a serious legitimacy
problem for the new Arab elites, whose authority ultimately
rested with their European benefactors. The combination
of narrowly based leadership and the emergence of competing
nationalisms stymied the Arab response to the Zionist
challenge in Palestine.
To British authorities, burdened with heavy responsibilities
and commitments after World War I, the objective of
the Mandate administration was peaceful accommodation
and development of Palestine by Arabs and Jews under
British control. Sir Herbert Samuels, the first high
commissioner of Palestine, was responsible for keeping
some semblance of order between the two antagonistic
communities. In pursuit of this goal, Samuels, a Jew,
was guided by two contradictory principles: liberalism
and Zionism. He called for open Jewish immigration and
land acquisition, which enabled thousands of highly
committed and well-trained socialist Zionists to enter
Palestine between 1919 and 1923. The Third Aliyah, as
it was called, made important contributions to the development
of Jewish agriculture, especially collective farming.
Samuels, however, also promised representative institutions,
which, if they had emerged in the 1920s, would have
had as their first objective the curtailment of Jewish
immigration. According to the census of 1922, the Jews
numbered only 84,000, or 11 percent of the population
of Palestine. The Zionists, moreover, could not openly
oppose the establishment of democratic structures, which
was clearly in accordance with the Covenant of the League
of Nations and the mandatory system.
The Arabs of Palestine, however, believing that participation
in Mandate-sanctioned institutions would signify their
acquiescence to the Mandate and thus to the Balfour
Declaration, refused to participate. As a result, Samuels's
proposals for a legislative council, an advisory council,
and an Arab agency envisioned as similar to the Jewish
Agency, were all rejected by the Arabs. After the collapse
of the bid for representative institutions, any possibility
of joint consultation between the two communities ended.