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Israel
World War I: Diplomacy and Intrigue
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 (see Glossary)
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 (see Glossary) 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.
Data as of December 1988
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