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Jordan WORLD WAR I: DIPLOMACY AND INTRIGUE
Jordan - Unavailable
Figure 3. Mandate Allocations at the San Remo Conference, April
1920
On the eve of World War I, the anticipated break-up of the
enfeebled Ottoman Empire raised hopes among Arab nationalists. The
Arab nationalists wanted an independent Arab state covering all the
Ottoman Arab domains. The nationalist ideal, however, was not very
unified; even among articulate Arabs, competing visions of Arab
nationalism--Islamic, pan-Arab, and statist--inhibited coordinated
efforts at independence.
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; as a result, London became involved in three distinct
and contradictory negotiations concerning the fate of the region.
In February 1914, Abdullah visited Cairo, where he held talks
with Lord Kitchener, the senior British official in Egypt. Abdullah
inquired about the possibility of British support should his father
raise a revolt against the Turks. Kitchener's reply was necessarily
noncommittal because Britain then considered the Ottoman Empire a
friendly power. War broke out in August, however, and by November
the Ottoman Empire had aligned with Germany against Britain and its
allies. Kitchener was by then British secretary of state for war
and, in the changed circumstances, sought Arab support against the
Turks. In Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, British high commissioner and
Kitchener's successor in Egypt, carried on an extensive
correspondence with Hussein.
In a letter to McMahon in July 1915, Hussein specified that the
area under his independent "Sharifian Arab Government" should
consist of the Arabian Peninsula (except Aden, a British colony),
Palestine, Lebanon, Syria (including present-day Jordan), and Iraq.
In October McMahon replied on behalf of the British government.
McMahon 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 of the
McMahon pledge was unclear, although Arab spokesmen have usually
maintained that Palestine was within the area guaranteed
independence as an Arab state. In June 1916, Hussein launched the
Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire and in October proclaimed
himself "king of the Arabs," although the Allies recognized him
only as king of the Hijaz, a title rejected by most peninsular
Arabs. Britain provided supplies and money for the Arab forces led
by Abdullah and Faisal. British military advisers also were
detailed from Cairo to assist the Arab army that the brothers were
organizing. Of these advisers, T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)
was to become the best known.
While Hussein and McMahon corresponded over the fate of the
Middle East, the British were conducting secret negotiations with
the French and the Russians 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 Hussein-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, whereas
Transjordan would come under British influence.
The final British pledge, and the one that formally committed
Britain to the Zionist cause, was the Balfour Declaration of
November 1917. The Balfour Declaration stated that Britain viewed
with favor "the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for
the Jewish People." After 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 the planned British attack from Egypt on Ottoman
Syria. As early as March 1917, Lloyd George was determined that
Palestine should become British and he thought that its conquest by
British troops would abrogate the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The new
British strategic thinking viewed the Zionists as a potential ally
capable of safeguarding British imperial interests in the region.
The British pledge transformed Zionism 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 British
pledges contained in the Hussein-MacMahon correspondence. The
wording of the document itself, although painstakingly devised, was
interpreted differently by different people. 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. The incompatibility of
these two goals sharpened over the succeeding years and became
irreconcilable.
In November 1917, the contents of the Sykes-Picot Agreement
were revealed by the Bolshevik government in Russia. Arab
consternation at the agreement was palliated by British and French
reassurances that their commitments to the Arabs would be honored
and by the fact that Allied military operations were progressing
favorably. Hussein had driven the Turkish garrison out of Mecca in
the opening weeks of the Arab Revolt. Faisal's forces captured Al
Aqabah in July 1917, and the British expeditionary force under
General Sir (later Field Marshal Viscount) Edmund Allenby entered
Jerusalem in December. Faisal accepted the military subordination
of his army to overall British command, but for him the fighting
was essentially a war of liberation in which Britain was actively
cooperating with the Arabs. The British command, however,
considered the Arab army an adjunct to the Allied offensive in
Palestine, intended primarily to draw Turkish attention to the East
Bank while Allenby mopped up resistance in Galilee and prepared for
a strike at Damascus. In September 1918, the British army
decisively defeated the Turks at Megiddo (in contemporary Israel),
and an Arab force under Lawrence captured Daraa, thus opening the
way for the advance into Syria. Faisal entered Damascus on October
2, and the Ottoman government consented to an armistice on October
31, bringing the war in that theater to a close.
Between January 1919 and January 1920, the Allied Powers met in
Paris to negotiate peace treaties with the Central Powers. At the
conference, Amir Faisal (representing the Arabs) and Chaim Weizmann
(representing the Zionists) set forth their cases. Weizmann and
Faisal reached a separate agreement on January 3, 1919, pledging
the two parties to cordial cooperation; however, Faisal wrote a
proviso on the document in Arabic that his signature depended upon
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 Faisal-Weizmann
agreement as binding.
President Woodrow Wilson appointed an American panel, the King-
Crane Commission, to investigate the disposition of Ottoman
territories and the assigning of mandates. After extensive surveys
in Palestine and Syria, the commission reported intense opposition
to the Balfour Declaration among the Arab majority in Palestine and
advised against permitting unlimited Jewish immigration or the
creation of a separate Jewish state. The commission's report in
August 1919 was not officially considered by the conference,
however, and was not made public until 1922.
Mandate allocations making Britain the mandatory power for
Palestine (including the East Bank and all of present-day Jordan)
and Iraq, and making France the mandatory power for the area of
Syria and Lebanon, were confirmed in April 1920 at a meeting of the
Supreme Allied Council at San Remo, Italy
(see Jordan -
fig. 3). The terms
of the Palestine Mandate reaffirmed the Balfour Declaration, called
on the mandatory power to "secure establishment of the Jewish
national home," and recognized "an appropriate Jewish agency" to
advise and cooperate with British authorities toward that end. The
Zionist Organization was specifically recognized as that agency.
Hussein and his sons opposed the mandate's terms on the ground that
Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant adopted at Versailles
had endorsed the Wilsonian principle of self-determination of
peoples and thereby, they maintained, logically and necessarily
supported the cause of the Arab majority in Palestine.
For the British government, pressed with heavy responsibilities
and commitments after World War I, the objective of mandate
administration was the peaceful development of Palestine by Arabs
and Jews under British control. To Hussein, cooperation with the
Zionists had meant no more than providing a refuge for Jews within
his intended Arab kingdom. To Zionist leaders, the recognition in
the mandate was simply a welcome step on the way to attainment of
a separate Jewish national state. A conflict of interests between
Arabs and Jews and between both sides and the British developed
early in Palestine and continued thereafter at a rising tempo
throughout the mandate period.
After the armistice, the Allies organized the Occupied Enemy
Territory Administration to provide an interim government for
Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. In July 1919, the General Syrian
Congress convened in Damascus and called for Allied recognition of
an independent Syria, including Palestine, with Faisal as its king.
When no action was taken on the proposal, the congress in March
1920 unilaterally proclaimed Syria independent and confirmed Faisal
as king. Iraqi representatives similarly announced their country's
independence as a monarchy under Abdullah. The League of Nations
Council rejected both pronouncements, and in April the San Remo
Conference decided on enforcing the Allied mandates in the Middle
East. French troops occupied Damascus in July, and Faisal was
served with a French ultimatum to withdraw from Syria. He went into
exile, but the next year was installed by the British as king of
Iraq.
At the same time, Abdullah was organizing resistance against
the French in Syria, arousing both French ire and British
consternation. Assembling a motley force of about 2,000 tribesmen,
he moved north from Mecca, halting in Amman in March 1920. In
October the British high commissioner for Palestine called a
meeting of East Bank shaykhs at As Salt to discuss the future of
the region, whose security was threatened by the incursion of
Wahhabi sectarians (adherents of a puritanical Muslim sect who
stressed the unity of God) from Najd in the Arabian Peninsula. It
became clear to the British that Abdullah, who remained in Amman,
could be accepted as a ruler by the beduin tribes and in that way
be dissuaded from involving himself in Syria.
In March 1921, Winston Churchill, then British colonial
secretary, convened a high-level conference in Cairo to consider
Middle East policy. As a result of these deliberations, Britain
subdivided the Palestine Mandate along the Jordan River-Gulf of
Aqaba line. The eastern portion--called Transjordan--was to have a
separate Arab administration operating under the general
supervision of the commissioner for Palestine, with Abdullah
appointed as amir. At a follow-up meeting in Jerusalem with
Churchill, High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, and Lawrence, Abdullah
agreed to abandon his Syrian project in return for the amirate and
a substantial British subsidy.
A British government memorandum in September 1922, approved by
the League of Nations Council, specifically excluded Jewish
settlement from the Transjordan area of the Palestine Mandate. The
whole process was aimed at satisfying wartime pledges made to the
Arabs and at carrying out British responsibilities under the
mandate.
Data as of December 1989
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