Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect (4 page)

France, like Britain and the United States, wanted its own oil company, unsullied by foreign ownership. At the behest of the French government, in 1924 French capitalists formed the Compagnie Française des Pétroles (French Petroleum Company), CFP, the antecedent to today's Total. The privately owned company initially joined the British in developing the oil fields in Iraq. It later developed oil fields in France and Algeria. But CFP never achieved the international dominance of British or US oil companies.

France also wanted control of Syria as a gateway to Europe. “The region controls Mideast access to Europe,” government advisor Mudar Barakat told me in Damascus. “Now as then, it's all about location.”
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France had direct economic interests as well, including connections with the valuable silk trade in Syria and access to the Mediterranean port of Beirut. France justified its claims with a selective reading of history. In 1536 the Ottoman Sultan made France the “protector” of Christians living in the Holy Land. The French consolidated ties with Maronite Christians in Lebanon. The Maronites are a Christian sect who have lived in Syria and Lebanon since before the Arab conquest and have their own patriarch living near Beirut.

French became the most widely spoken language in the Ottoman Empire after Turkish and Arabic. The French built Syria's railway
system, as well as the gas and electricity companies in Beirut. The French even argued they had a right to the colony because they built crusader castles there hundreds of years earlier. From the outset of World War I, the British and French competed for control of the postwar Middle East. But during the war years, they kept secret their plans to divvy up the spoils.

In
Lawrence of Arabia
, Peter O'Toole found out very late in the film about the secret British-French Middle East deal. In a classic scene, Claude Rains, portraying a British official, explained that a “British civil servant” named Sykes and a “French civil servant” named Picot sat down and drew a line on a map to determine the borders of the new colonies. In real life they were a lot more than civil servants, and the division of territory they influenced was to cause violent conflict in the region down to the present day.

Sir Mark Sykes had a great mustache. It was thick and bushy, with hair drooping ever so slightly over the upper lip, the epitome of the British military officer of that era. Sykes not only looked the part, he walked the walk. He had attended Cambridge, joined the British Army in 1897, and briefly fought in the Boer War in South Africa. Sykes was posted as honorary consul to Constantinople from 1905 to 1907. Sykes wrote two books on the Middle East, including
The Caliphs' Last Heritage: A Short History of the Turkish Empire
. He was heir to a baronial estate in East Yorkshire and won election to Parliament from that area in 1911.

When war broke out, Sykes helped form the Arab Bureau under Lord Horatio Kitchener, then secretary of state for war. Kitchener had an even more famous mustache, with its thick middle tapering to points on each end. His mustache and grim visage graced the famous World War I British recruitment posters. With his finger pointed outward, the poster beseeched, “Britons: Your Country Needs You.”

Sykes quickly impressed colleagues with his supposed comprehensive knowledge of the region. He couldn't speak Turkish or Arabic, although he wanted his superiors to think he did. Nevertheless, he became known in government circles as an expert on the Ottoman
Empire. Working under Kitchener, Sykes did make some oblique historical contributions. He designed the black, green, red, and white “Arab Revolt Flag.” The flag had three horizontal stripes with a triangle on the right with the point facing inward. Variations of that flag were later adopted by governments in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan.

In December 1915, Sykes met secretly with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and his war cabinet to propose a deal with the French for dividing up the Ottoman Empire after the war. Sykes stated the British position succinctly. Referring to the Palestinian city of Acre along the Mediterranean and the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, Sykes said, “I should like to draw a line from the
E
in
Acre
to the last
K
in
Kirkuk
.”
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That would give Britain control of oil-rich Iraq, along with Palestine and Jordan. The French would get Lebanon and Syria and a strip of southern Turkey called Hatay Province. Neither power cared about how their division would impact the local populations. The cabinet authorized Sykes to hold secret talks with the French government, and they ended up negotiating for ten months before reaching agreement. Sykes was to meet his match in a dapper Frenchman, another diplomat far more important than a mere civil servant.

An early sketch of François Georges-Picot shows a thin young diplomat with a stylish upturned collar and silk cravat. Picot was as serious about his diplomacy as his couture. He was a member of the Comite de L'Asie Française, a group that pushed for expansion of French rule in Syria and the Middle East. Picot served as a French diplomat in Beirut prior to the outbreak of the war. He had arranged to supply Lebanese Christians with fifteen thousand modern rifles to spark an uprising against the Ottomans. The uprising failed, at least in part, because Picot might have left files identifying Lebanese rebel leaders' names when he fled for France at the beginning of the war. The Ottomans rounded them up, put them in jail, and executed many.

In August 1915, Picot took a secret boat ride across the English Channel for what would be a series of fateful meetings with Sykes. They argued bitterly over a number of issues. Who would control
oil-rich northern Iraq? Would Jerusalem be ruled directly by Britain or brought under international administration? The final agreement, signed on May 16, 1916, reflected a compromise among the imperialist powers. Sykes's line on the map prevailed, with some exceptions. France got Lebanon, Syria, southern Turkey, and parts of northern Iraq. Britain got the rest of Iraq, Jordan, and full control of Palestine, including Jerusalem.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement rhetorically supported the creation of independent Arab states. But clause 2 makes clear its real intention: “France and…Great Britain shall be allowed to establish such direct or indirect administration or control as they desire and as they may think fit to arrange with the Arab State or Confederation of Arab States.”
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Sykes-Picot remained secret for a time because of its imperialist audacity, even by the standards of the time. Both sides also sought to expand their region of control while supposedly sticking to the agreement. Britain and France wanted Arabs to revolt against the Ottomans but knew they would never fight just to become colonies of another power.

Lawrence of Arabia
accurately reflected that Arab sentiment in scenes where Omar Sharif and Anthony Quinn, playing Arab leaders, first learned of betrayal by the British. In the film, Lawrence hears about Sykes-Picot very late in the war. In reality, he knew about the skullduggery very early and made false promises to his Arab allies nonetheless.

After the war, Lawrence admitted, “[N]ot being a perfect fool, I could see that if we won the war, the promises to the Arabs were dead paper. Had I been an honourable Adviser, I would have sent my men home and not let them risk their lives for such stuff. Yet the Arab inspiration was our main tool in winning the Eastern war. So I assured them that England kept her word in letter and spirit…but, of course…I was continually bitter and ashamed.”
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Picot also understood that the British were making promises they would never keep. He justified colonialism because of the so-called backwardness of the Arabs. “To promise the Arabs a large state is to throw dust in their eyes,” wrote Picot. “Such a state will never materialize.
You cannot transform a myriad of tribes into a viable whole.”
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Picot admitted that the French were also lying. “What the French want is only to deceive the Arabs. They hope to accomplish this by offering them a lot while admitting that the building they are constructing will probably not last beyond the war.”
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After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks published various secret European treaties, including Sykes-Picot. The release caused international outrage, but no change in colonial policy. In postwar peace treaties, the Ottomans were forced to give up all their Arab land. The British and French proceeded to set up “mandates,” as the colonies were called, and deny self-determination to the Arabs.

Sykes did play another significant role. He facilitated meetings between Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann and important British leaders. The growing, mutual support of British colonialism and the Zionist movement were to have earthshaking consequences for Syria and the entire Middle East.

Chaim Weizmann was born in 1876 in a small village in Belarus, Russia. He escaped small village life and received a PhD in Switzerland. He moved to Manchester, England, to become a chemistry professor in 1906. Weizmann had already committed to Zionism, a secular nationalist movement calling for Jews to leave their countries of birth and immigrate to a Jewish homeland. In those years, the Zionist movement had little popular support. Most Jews either stayed in their homelands or immigrated to countries with greater political and economic opportunities. Many joined unions and leftist movements.

That lack of support was reflected in Weizmann's correspondence lamenting the reception he received from working-class Jews in Manchester. “You are dealing with the dregs of Russian Jewry, a dull ignorant crowd that knows nothing of issues such as Zionism,” he wrote to a friend. “You cannot imagine what it means for an intellectual to live in the English provinces and work with the local Jews. It's hellish torture!”
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While alienated from working-class Jews, Weizmann did become friends with local businessmen, including Simon Marks and Israel
Sieff, who later built Marks and Spencer into a national retail chain. And from the beginning, Zionist leaders worked with colonial powers to sponsor a Jewish state. Britain was the most responsive. But the path toward supporting the Zionist endeavor was a winding one.

In 1903, the British foreign office suggested a Zionist settlement in the British colony of East Africa, in what became known as the Uganda Plan. The World Zionist Organization (WZO), the main Zionist group, sent a small delegation to what is modern-day Kenya to check out the proposed homeland. Some Zionists argued that Kenya “overlooked” the promised land of Palestine and thus should be accepted as a Jewish homeland.

The British clearly wanted to deposit yet another oppressed group in the middle of one of their colonies as part of a divide-and-rule strategy. The British had successfully used that ploy by sending East Indians to the Caribbean and whites and Indians to South Africa. Ultimately, the WZO rejected the Uganda Plan, but a group supporting the effort split off to form a new Zionist organization. The Zionists had to wait another twelve years before seeing their efforts bear fruit.

Meanwhile, small numbers of European Jews settled in Ottoman-controlled Palestine. In 1907, Weizmann visited there and helped start the Palestine Land Development Company, which bought land for Jewish settlement.

Many in the British ruling elite were anti-Jewish bigots on both institutional and personal levels. They allowed only a limited number of Jews to attend elite universities and prohibited them from joining their private clubs. A British aristocrat certainly wouldn't want his daughter marrying a Jew. So why would they even consider supporting Zionism? The answer is simple: geopolitics. The issue came to a head with the outbreak of World War I.

Creating a dependent Jewish settler minority in Palestine had several advantages. It would help in the defense of the British-controlled Suez Canal. The British also hoped that supporting Zionism would gain them kudos from American Jews, who would then help pressure President Woodrow Wilson into joining the war. The British wanted
to establish a pro-British settler colony as a buffer against the French. Herbert Samuel, a Zionist and British high commissioner for Palestine, wrote, “We cannot proceed on the supposition that our present happy relations with France will continue always.”
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For many years, Weizmann had befriended Arthur Balfour, an ambitious member of Parliament from the Manchester area. Balfour was part of a coterie of Christian leaders who came to accept Zionists as legitimate, if unequal, allies of the British Empire. Balfour was a deeply religious Christian. He and future prime minister David Lloyd George were some of the first Christian Zionists, a right-wing trend that exists to the present day.

Christian Zionists believe that Jews returning to the biblical land of Israel will precede the second coming of Christ. They support populating Palestine with Jewish settlers to hasten that process. However, if the Jews and every other religious group don't convert to Christianity, they will perish in the fires of hell. Zionist leaders embraced these Christian allies, despite the blatantly anti-Jewish theology that requires Jews to give up their faith.

One morning in 1915, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George had breakfast with Chaim Weizmann to discuss British support for the Zionist cause. While Lloyd George was partially motivated by Christian Zionism, geopolitics played the decisive role. He later presciently wrote that the Jews “might be able to render us more assistance than the Arabs.”
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Weizmann later met with Arthur Balfour, who in 1917 asked the World Zionist Organization to draft a declaration of British support for Jewish settlement in Palestine.

I first learned about the famous Balfour Declaration while studying for my Bar Mitzvah at age thirteen. I learned it was a major breakthrough for Jews everywhere, the first step on a long road of establishing a Jewish state. I was surprised years later to see that the Balfour Declaration consists of three paragraphs, with only the one paragraph containing any substance. Issued on November 2, 1917, the message declared: