The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (16 page)

Possibly the grand sharif interpreted the money as an earnest of Britain’s intention to pay for what he hoped would be the temporary occupation of Baghdad. At any rate, he too was willing to postpone settling the border issue. Why? Because while his relations with the Turks had continued to deteriorate, his relations with the plotters had strengthened; increasingly rebellion seemed to him the most likely and most hopeful course (see
Chapter 7
). He wanted the British on board as much as they wanted him.

He replied to McMahon in a letter dated January 1, 1916. With regard to “the matter of compensation for the period of occupation [of Mesopotamia:] We … leave the determination of the amount to the perception of her [Britain’s] wisdom and justice.” With regard to “the Northern Parts and their coasts,” as he confusingly termed them this time, he was conciliatory too, albeit exceedingly careful. He accepted McMahon’s suggestion that their future be decided at a later date in order “to avoid what may possibly injure the alliance of Great Britain and France and the agreement made between them during the present wars and calamities.” But he would not yield the point altogether. McMahon “should be sure that at the first opportunity after this war is finished we shall ask (what we avert our eyes from today) for what we now leave to France in Beyrout and its coasts.” And as if to underline his determination, he brought the matter up again a few lines below. After the war, he declared, it would be “impossible to allow any derogation that gives France or any other Power a span of land in those regions.”

Much as McMahon had ended his letter with a sweetener (of £20,000), so Sharif Hussein ended his with a promise he knew the British would value: “We still remain firm
²⁴
to our resolution which Storrs learnt from us two years ago, for which we await the opportunity suitable to our situation, especially that action the time of which has now come near and which destiny drives towards us with great haste and clearness.” Thus the two sides edged closer together, each for its own reason, and each with private reservations.

In his last letter McMahon had assured Hussein that once he launched the rebellion, Britain would prove a staunch and faithful ally; she would not negotiate a peace “of which the freedom of the Arab peoples and their liberation from German and Turkish domination do not form an essential condition.” Only one final matter remained. Hussein reminded his potential ally that “we shall have to let you
²⁵
know in due course our requirements in the way of arms, ammunition and so forth.” McMahon replied in the
fourth and final note of this famous series (they would continue to correspond, but not over essential points, until McMahon returned to London later in 1916): “You will doubtless inform us by the bearer of this letter of any manner in which we can assist you, and your requests will always receive our immediate consideration.” This would have to do, and it was good enough. Now the spring was wound up and the plot would move forward. But the deferred question of Syrian, Lebanese, and especially Palestinian borders, and of Britain’s role in Mesopotamia, remained a stumbling block to future understanding and good relations.

EVEN AS THE HIGH COMMISSIONER
of Egypt and the grand sharif of Mecca were conducting their protracted and ultimately unsatisfactory correspondence, British and French representatives closeted in London were also discussing the future of the Middle East. The Foreign Office kept Sir Henry McMahon apprised of these conversations; it told Sharif Hussein nothing about them; nor did McMahon. It was a sin of omission rather than commission, but once again British officials were sowing dragon’s teeth. The Anglo-French discussions culminated in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. This document, although never implemented, created nearly as much ill will and distrust among the principals and their followers, and subsequent disagreement among historians, as the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1914–15.

When Aubrey Herbert arrived in Cairo early in 1915, he wrote to Mark Sykes in London, “Our policy has been
¹
clear and high in this war. We have not gone out for loot but to protect small people.” It was a romantic interpretation and, at this early stage, a common one. Most Britons believed their country was defending little Belgium from mighty Germany; that it would protect tiny Serbia from the bullying military clique in Vienna; that
it would lift the onerous yoke that the Turks had fastened upon various minorities within the Ottoman Empire. Later on a certain amount of disillusionment would set in; even Aubrey Herbert would rethink his early optimism.

At the outset, however, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and others articulated what might be called a liberal imperialist viewpoint. They upheld the notion of the “white man’s burden,” doubting the capacity of dark-skinned peoples, including Arabs, to govern themselves. But they thought that further extending the empire would be economically expensive and strategically problematic; in their view, Britain held sufficient territory already. Although he was a Conservative member of Parliament, Aubrey Herbert shared this liberal imperialist view.

The recipient of his letter, Mark Sykes, who was also a Conservative MP, took a very different position. He wanted to enlarge the empire for political, economic, and strategic reasons. At this stage he belonged to a group of aggressively imperialist diplomats, Foreign Office officials, and politicians. To the dismay of Liberals like Grey, the more sweeping imperialist outlook increasingly dominated discussion and determined policy in British governing circles.

Early in 1915 Russian diplomats informed their Western allies that they intended to take and to keep Constantinople, thereby finally satisfying their country’s centuries-old aspiration for a warm-water port and access to the Mediterranean Sea. They invited Britain and France to claim the parts of the Ottoman Empire that they would require as compensation. France was willing. Her cultural influence and financial interest in the Middle East were strong, especially in Syria, which she defined as extending from Anatolia right down to the Egyptian border, thus including Palestine. Britain too had important interests in the region, as even the liberal imperialists acknowledged. First and foremost she wished to protect Egypt and the Suez Canal. Some believed she must guarantee the land route from Egypt to Persia and Mesopotamia and, in the distance, to South Asia by further accretions of territory and influence. The British government in India and its sympathizers in the Foreign Office coveted parts of Mesopotamia as well. But Britain also wanted Grand Sharif Hussein of Mecca to rebel against Turkey and, as we know, had offered him inducements to do so.

Britain may or may not have dealt fairly with Sharif Hussein; in any case, she must deal also with her ally France. The goal was to persuade her to support the sharif’s rebellion. “Unless this is done,”
²
warned Grey, “Egypt and India may be endangered and the Turk will control the whole of North Africa.” Since France held most of the latter region, this was a warning to
her too. For her own part, Britain was willing to pay a price for the sharif’s support. She would “give back Basra &c., if the Arabs came in,” Grey promised (although in the event she did not). France must be persuaded to make a sacrifice as well: “The French Government should be asked to resign their immediate hopes of Damascus etc.”

It was not that simple. A stated willingness to renounce Basra notwithstanding, if the British kept any part of Mesopotamia after the war, then its northern border might abut the southern boundary of territory in Anatolia occupied by Russia during her march toward Constantinople. Better to create a buffer zone between them, British strategists argued, a shield against possible future Russian aggression. France, with her long-standing interests in the region, immediately came to mind.

As is so often the case with imperial aggrandizement, acquisition of one territory necessitated acquisition of another. In this case, the acquisition of Mesopotamia by Britain would necessitate her acquisition of a port on the Mediterranean Sea, either Haifa or Alexandretta, for strategic and economic reasons. But this meant Britain must persuade France not merely to support the sharif and renounce territorial claims in Syria, as Grey had indicated, but to renounce as well whichever of the two Syrian ports Britain chose to annex, and to take territory between British Mesopotamia and Russian Anatolia as Britain wanted her to do, perhaps instead of taking territory elsewhere.

Grey kept the French informed in a general sense about British contacts with Sharif Hussein in Mecca. By November 1915 it was clear that Britain must bring France more fully into the picture, if only to gain her support for the sharif’s planned rebellion. It was time, too, that the two powers hammered out their agreement regarding the future of Ottoman territory in the Middle East, as Russia had suggested. The Foreign Office proposed that Anglo-French discussions take place in London. The French government agreed the time was ripe and it chose François Georges-Picot to represent its interests there.

Picot, at present the first secretary of the French embassy in the British capital, was the consul general who had fled Lebanon at the outbreak of war with Turkey, leaving incriminating documents in the embassy safe. When the French dragoman led the Ottomans to these documents, they used them to identify local nationalists and eventually to arrest, torture, and execute many of them. Picot, however, gave no outward sign that his disastrous oversight troubled him. Tall and elegant, Catholic and conservative, with a long face, thinning gray hair, and a neat mustache, he was a practiced diplomat and tough bargainer with expert knowledge of the Middle
East. He boasted strong imperialist convictions and familial links. (His father was founder of the Comité de l’Afrique Française, and his brother was treasurer of the Comité de l’Asie Française.) Picot was an obvious choice to defend France’s Middle East ambitions in discussions with the British.

Meanwhile the war had forced the French to modify their designs on Ottoman territory. Before the war French imperialists had favored maintaining a weak Ottoman presence in the Middle East, which the European powers would divide into spheres of influence. France would have scope to advance her interests in the region without the bother of governing or administering any part of it. With the advent of war, however, French imperialists shifted position. Now they favored terminating Ottoman rule in the Middle East altogether. They wanted direct French control of the eastern Mediterranean coastline, including an enlarged Lebanon. They wanted, too, indirect control through puppet rulers of the Syrian interior, all the way to Mosul in present-day Iraq. These were Picot’s goals
³
when he arrived in London in late 1915.

He took part in two
⁴
extended sessions with representatives of the British Foreign Office, India Office, and War Office in Whitehall, the first of which occurred on November 23. By this date most of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence had been written. The British acquainted him with its particulars and with the sharif’s planned rebellion, in effect asking him to accept a fait accompli. Picot refused to be stampeded. He ridiculed the sharif’s pretensions and Britain’s willingness to accept them. Picot “did not believe in any but
⁵
a few Arab tribes joining us no matter what we promised,” a Foreign Office official reported glumly. Moreover, although (as we now know) he was prepared to concede much Syrian territory to Britain, he absolutely refused to sacrifice any during this first meeting, warning that “No French government would stand for a day which made any surrender of French claims in Syria.” Nor would he accept Grey’s contention that the Allies must detach the Arabs from Turkey, by supporting the sharif’s rebellion, in order to protect their position along the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean: “Though an Arab union with Turkey and Germany might be very awkward for us in Egypt and India,” the same official recorded Picot as pointing out, “the French were quite happy about Algeria and Tunis.”

In short, Picot and the British representatives could not agree on anything. The Frenchman returned to Paris for consultations. When he reappeared in London a few weeks later, he seemed a changed man, willing to make significant concessions. At this point Lord Kitchener directed Mark
Sykes, recently returned from Cairo and fresh from his interview with the War Council, to hammer out an agreement with the Frenchman.

It did not take long. Sykes was a human dynamo, bubbling with enthusiasm, teeming with ideas, easy to like. Picot was urbane and reserved. Perhaps in this case opposites attracted. The two men developed a working relationship that they preserved for the duration of the war. Perhaps their mutual Catholicism provided a basis for trust beneath the feints and gestures of misdirection that each felt obliged to perform. But in fact each man was prepared already to cede most of the territory that the other wished his country to possess. Sykes pretended to be yielding
⁶
ground when he offered Mosul and land above the Lesser Zab, a tributary of the Tigris River that runs from east to west a little bit north of Kirkuk. He hoped this area would become the French buffer zone, or shield, between British territory in Arabia and Russian Anatolia. But it was the same land that France had wanted all along. Picot pretended to accept it grudgingly. In return he offered British control of land south of the Lesser Zab. This was part of the Mesopotamian territory that the British government in India had its eye on and that France had long been willing to forfeit. Sykes was happy to accept, though we may guess that he too appeared grudging when he did so.