The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (13 page)

A British dispatch boat brought McMahon and his wife to Alexandria, and a special train conveyed them to Cairo, where they were greeted with much pomp and circumstance. The newspapers reported that he had made a good impression. “His eye is kindly,” Sir Ronald Storrs remembered an Egyptian of the welcoming party remarking. Storrs himself wrote in his diary that McMahon seemed “quiet, friendly, agreeable,
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considerate and cautious,” estimates he would later considerably revise. Aubrey Herbert, then in Cairo, wrote of McMahon in his own diary: “He seems a stupid little man.”

In India, McMahon’s last posting, British officials strongly opposed Cairo’s plan for an Arab uprising led by Sharif Hussein. They especially opposed Kitchener’s suggestion that an Arab might repossess the caliphate from the Turks. That, they argued, would have disastrous repercussions among Muslims everywhere outside Arabia, not least in their own South Asia. Moreover they did not believe for a minute that the Arabs could organize or govern a great kingdom or empire. Specifically, they discounted the sharif’s personal influence and abilities. They already had relations with the principalities running along the Arabian coast of the Indian Ocean from Aden to the Gulf of Oman. Insofar as they favored any Arab leader for a larger role, it was Ibn Saud, who as chief of the sectarian Wahhabis could never become caliph. And they nursed annexationist dreams, which the establishment of a great Arabian state headed by Sharif Hussein would render nil. Having sent troops across the Indian Ocean into Mesopotamia, they intended to keep that territory after the war. They assumed that McMahon, so recently one of them, still supported their position. Having departed India, however, the new high commissioner of Egypt was not bound by Indian interests. Once he arrived in Cairo, Storrs, Clayton, Herbert, and other members of the British intelligence community went to work on him. He “understood our design
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at once and judged it good,” T. E. Lawrence recorded with satisfaction.

Despite McMahon’s ready acceptance of the plan, for six months it got no further. These were the months when Sharif Hussein was sounding the other Arab leaders and putting off the Ottoman demand that he endorse the jihad, and when Feisal was playing his dangerous double game in
Damascus and Constantinople. Of some of these activities, the British had gleanings: They were aware of Hussein’s inquiry to Ibn Saud about the Turkish call for jihad, and of Saud’s advice to ignore it. Otherwise they knew little of the sharif’s thinking or activities. They were impatient for decisive action on his part, none more so than the governor general and sirdar of Sudan, Sir Francis Reginald Wingate. Although cut off from Cairo by distance (his address was the grandest in the British Empire—“The Palace, Khartoum”), Wingate knew of Kitchener’s offer to Hussein from Gilbert Clayton, British director of military intelligence for the Middle East, who was also his protégé, former private secretary, and despite his other duties, still his agent in Egypt.

Once Wingate digested the correspondence between London/Cairo and Hussein, he too understood the design and judged it good. In fact, he had favored something along the same lines since the outbreak of war. Like the Cairo men, India men, and London men, he doubted that Hussein could lead a great independent Arab kingdom: Wingate judged Arabia to be “scarcely an embryo
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[of a state] and during the process of conception and being actually born and indeed through the boyhood stages some nation will have to mother them.” But he believed strongly that an Arab rebellion would aid the British war effort. Moreover he cherished a secret personal ambition: that Cairo would “mother” a great Arab empire, as Delhi had “mothered” Britain’s empire in India, and that he would be its viceroy. In one cable after another, therefore, he urged first Clayton, then McMahon, and then, through McMahon, both Grey and Kitchener in London, to make Hussein an offer he could not refuse.

And so the cables poured into London. In those from Khartoum and Cairo, Wingate, Clayton, and McMahon all urged the British government somehow to induce Sharif Hussein to act; in those from Delhi, its viceroy, Lord Hardinge, urged the opposite, that the sharif not be encouraged. Wingate and Hardinge sent each other conflicting cables setting out their positions as well. Debate raged in the Foreign Office, but in the end Cairo and Khartoum prevailed. “You should inform
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Wingate,” Grey instructed McMahon, “that I authorize him to let it be known if he thinks it desirable that His Majesty’s Government will make it an essential condition in any terms of peace that the Arabian Peninsula and its Moslem Holy Places should remain in the hands of an independent Sovereign Moslem state.” Wingate undertook to spread the news “far and wide,
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and as it is now authoritative it will be believed and credited.”

But still the grand sharif remained silent.

Feisal returned to Mecca on June 20, 1915, and delivered the Damascus
Protocol to his father. The family gathered in council yet again. This time it deliberated for an entire week, “one of the most difficult
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weeks of my life,” Feisal would later tell the Anglo-Arab historian George Antonius. Grand Sharif Hussein balanced on a knife’s edge: Depending on which way he jumped, the British would help or harm him, but so would the Turks, and it was not clear whose forces could help or harm him more. Even though Great Britain governed the mightiest empire in the world, Turkish forces were so far more than holding their own against it. Britain hardly seemed invincible. Nevertheless Feisal urged his father to jump in its direction and away from the Turks. The British Empire had great resources; it could sustain terrible losses and still win at the end; and the Syrian conspirators were well organized and powerful. Hussein should accept leadership of their movement and present the Damascus Protocol to the British. Abdullah agreed with his younger brother; even before the war began, he had been urging action against the Ottomans with British aid. But Hussein knew, perhaps better than his sons, how merciless would be the Young Turk response, especially during wartime. He hesitated.

In the end his religious beliefs proved decisive, or that is how he presented it afterward, in a typically convoluted justification: “God selected us
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to arouse our nation to restrain the unjust and to banish the insolent ones, the heretics, from the land and from among the true worshipers, requesting for them what we request for ourselves, namely to make us desire to follow what He [Muhammad] brought [Sharia, religious law as set forth in the Quran] and to drive the evil from our tribes and our Arab communities to whose race, language, customs, comforts and pleasures these heedless ones showed enmity.” Although he denied it, personal ambition cannot have been absent from his calculations. The British promised to guarantee his independence from foreign interference; their own role in the future Arabian state remained ambiguous, but surely that was better than the continual Ottoman scheming and plotting against him. Moreover the British seemed to be waving the caliphate before him as a further inducement to action. Whether Hussein truly hoped to become caliph at this stage, however, no one has established. Most historians think not.

Sometime in mid-July Hussein took the plunge, dispatching a trusted messenger
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to Cairo carrying two letters. The first was a brief note from Abdullah to Storrs, dated July 14, 1915, requesting that the British allow Egypt to send to Mecca stores of grain for the annual hajj; they had been held back for the past two years; their resumption “would be an important
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factor in laying the foundations of our mutual advantage. This should suffice for a person of your grasp.” The second letter, undated and unsigned but undoubtedly
composed by Hussein since it dealt with the crux of the matter, was longer and uncharacteristically clear. Essentially it repeated the Damascus Protocol and asked quite simply whether the British approved it and warned that if they did not, “we will consider ourselves
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free in word and deed from the bonds of our previous declaration which we made through Ali Effendi [X].” Thus recommenced the fatal McMahon-Hussein correspondence, whose conflicting interpretations have divided Jews, Arabs, and Britons for nearly a hundred years.

Even before the sharif’s letter arrived, the British knew of its existence and something of its contents from Wingate, who had established his own line of communication with Mecca. “I think,” Wingate crowed to Clayton, “you will find
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that he will be strongly in favour of obtaining our assistance.” True enough. And when the messenger appeared in Cairo on or about August 22, he supplemented the written documents with an oral statement: “On handing [me] the letter
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at Taif, which was in the presence of his four sons, Ali, Abdullah, Faisal and Zeid, the Sherif told me to tell Mr. Storrs—‘We are now ready and well prepared.’ His son Abdullah then said: ‘Tell Mr. Storrs that our word is a word of honour and we will carry it out even at the cost of our lives; we are not now under the orders of the Turks but the Turks are under our orders.’”

Cairo was delighted—until it read the proposed borders of the new Arab state. Hussein had copied them word for word from the Damascus Protocol, but they were too expansive from the British point of view. “The Sharif had opened
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his mouth … a good deal too wide,” Storrs would write afterward. McMahon cabled London: “His pretensions
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are in every way exaggerated, no doubt considerably beyond his hope of acceptance, but it seems very difficult to treat with them in detail without seriously discouraging him.” Eventually, after much consultation with London, he tried to square the circle. “We confirm to you
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the terms of Lord Kitchener’s message … in which was stated clearly our desire for the independence of Arabia and its inhabitants, together with our approval of the Arab Caliphate when it should be proclaimed,” he wrote to Hussein on August 29. But “with regard to the questions of limits, frontiers and boundaries, it would appear to be premature to consume our time in discussing such details in the heat of war.” This was the message carried back to Mecca.

Hussein received it coolly and responded quickly (on September 9), angrily, and at length. Now he spoke as leader of an organized revolutionary movement, he emphasized, not merely for himself; the borders he had indicated were essential to the well-being of any future Arab state. George Antonius, who first translated and published the McMahon-Hussein correspondence
in his classic account of the Arab Revolt and who knew and admired the grand sharif, described his writing style: “a tight network of parentheses,
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incidentals, allusions, saws and apophthegms, woven together by a process of literary orchestration into a sonorous rigmarole.” Which is why we quote very selectively here. “The coldness and hesitation which you have displayed in the question of the limits and boundaries … might be taken to infer an estrangement,” Hussein charged. And a little beneath: “It is not I personally who am demanding of these limits which include only our race, but that they are all proposals of the people who, in short, believe that they are necessary for economic life.” And finally, driving home the main point: “I cannot admit that you,
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as a man of sound opinion will deny to be necessary for our existence [the borders suggested in the Damascus Protocol]; nay, they are the essential essence of our life, material and moral.”

The two parties had arrived at a seeming impasse. The matter might have rested there, for if the British declined to accept the borders Hussein wanted, then he might decline to launch the rebellion they favored. Perhaps Hussein could have continued to prevaricate, waiting out the war, albeit on the edge of the knife, without committing to either side. He had waited most of his life for the sharifate, after all. But as is so often the case in wartime, new and unexpected developments altered everything.

“I am a descendant of Omar
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Ibn El Khattab, the second Khalifa of El Islam who had the title of El Farug, which means separator. He was so called for having separated the right from the wrong. The descendants of Omar El Farug were all living in Damascus, but some centuries ago a part of them emigrated to El Mosul. At present there are thirty families of them living in El Mosul and twenty families in Damascus. I was born in El Mosul in 1891 …”

So begins the statement of Sharif Muhammad al-Faruki, an Arab lieutenant in the Turkish army who deserted to the British at Gallipoli in August, to tell them of the Arab plot and to enlist their support. By October the British had brought him to Egypt to be debriefed by their chief intelligence officer in the Middle East, Gilbert Clayton. Faruki told him: “I entered as Member in a secret Society started by the Arab officers in the Turkish Army … I have done several services and carried out several missions for the Society in Aleppo and environs.” But the reach of the secret society extended beyond Aleppo, Faruki assured the Englishman. It stretched to “Damascus and Beirut provinces … a branch being started in every important town or station.”