The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (33 page)

Malcolm claims in his manuscript to have known Sykes before the war and to have introduced him to Zionists late in the autumn of 1916—an obvious misstatement, for Sykes knew about Zionism as early as March of that year and not as the result of Malcolm’s efforts. But the Armenian probably did play a role in introducing Sykes to Chaim Weizmann. By autumn 1916 Sykes was searching for an alternative to Moses Gaster; he had met and been impressed by Aaron Aaronsohn. One day, feeling low about his failure to work Zionism effectively, he bumped into Malcolm in Whitehall Gardens and asked whether he had any Zionist connections. As it happened,
the previous year Malcolm had recruited Leopold Greenberg of
The Jewish Chronicle
to the Russia Society, founded to spread knowledge in Britain of the country that Armenians hoped would liberate their homeland from the Turks. On Sykes’s suggestion, Malcolm called at Greenberg’s offices and explained that his friend wished to meet the true leaders of Zionism in Britain. Greenberg immediately mentioned Weizmann and Sokolow, a self-effacing and generous gesture, given the nature of his relationship with the former at any rate. He promised to introduce Malcolm to them. Shortly afterward the introduction occurred at Weizmann’s newly acquired London home in Addison Road. Other Zionist leaders were present as well. “I recounted the gist
¹⁸
of my several conversations with Sir Mark,” Malcolm recalled. “Dr. Weizmann was most interested and asked his colleagues for their views. All of them, and notably Mr. Sokolow, were skeptical and hesitant. But Dr. Weizmann … asked when he could meet Sir Mark Sykes. I said if I could telephone to Sir Mark I might be able to fix it there and then. Accordingly I rang him up, said I was speaking from Dr. Weizmann’s house and asked when I could bring him along. Sir Mark fixed the appointment for the very next day, which was a Sunday.”

For what it is worth, the Leonard Stein Papers at the New Bodleian Library in Oxford contain a clipping entitled “James Malcolm—the Gentile Zionist,”
¹⁹
unidentifiable as to author, date, or even publication, that confirms this version of events. But other accounts suggest
²⁰
that Weizmann himself initiated the contact with Sykes, although only after meeting Malcolm, because only then did he understand the crucial role Sykes played in advising the government about Palestine. At any rate we know from Gaster’s diary that Weizmann, Greenberg, and Malcolm met with Sykes on Sunday, January 28, 1917. Weizmann called Gaster that evening. “He had met Sir Mark
²¹
Sykes and found out that he was an old friend of mine,” Gaster recorded. “He realized that the whole problem rested now in Sir M’s hands and that he was the man on whom our Zionist hopes hang.”

The
haham
understood immediately that Weizmann’s intrusion threatened his own role. He penned a letter to Sykes the next morning: “Can I see you anywhere
²²
just for a few moments? One of my co-workers told me last night of the interview which he had with you … it is of some importance that I should put matters and persons in the proper light before you. Caveant Consules.” Perhaps in response to this letter, Sykes called him back, but the ensuing conversation only can have confirmed Gaster’s fears. Weizmann had made a good impression. “He was earnest in his plea for Zion,” Gaster recorded Sykes telling him. Worse still, Sykes had urged Weizmann “to formulate proposals, to prepare for some machinery.”
Gaster felt it keenly that Sykes had said this first to Weizmann and not to him—“As I understood him when he now spoke to me!” And unkindest cut of all: “I then learned that W.
²³
had another appointment with him that evening.”

Sykes clearly recognized in Weizmann the Zionist he had been seeking, while Weizmann immediately recognized in Sykes the highly placed government official with whom Zionists could most effectively work. Gaster had been obstructing the relationship, to the cost of the movement as a whole. Weizmann would deal with the
haham;
meanwhile he and Sykes planned yet another meeting, this time to include a representative group of responsible Zionist leaders. Gaster could take part, but his role would be diminished. This was, in fact, the breakthrough moment for Weizmann and for Zionism. A crucial connection was about to be forged.

LIKE TWO SHIPS
headed for a collision in the dark of night—or rather, given that part of the world, like two desert caravans separated by trackless wastes but following intersecting routes—the Arab and Jewish nationalist movements pushed relentlessly forward, oblivious to each other, fated nonetheless to coincide eventually. During 1916 the Zionists in London gained strength. Early in 1917 Weizmann and his allies made the crucial connection with Sir Mark Sykes, a giant step toward gaining the support of British policy makers for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. During this same period Sharif Hussein and his sons had won British backing for the establishment of an Arab kingdom, part of which, they appear to have expected, would include Palestine. With British encouragement, they launched their rebellion against the Ottoman Empire in early June 1916. Then, during the following months, as the Zionists in London moved toward their ultimate objective, Sharif Hussein and his sons fought their way toward theirs, with this difference: They had to employ the skills not only of diplomacy but of the battlefield as well; and they placed their own lives in the balance.

“What befits a person who has been heaped with the goodwill of the Caliph and who has been elevated to the highest honors, when that person betrays the Caliph by joining the latter’s enemy?” asked the leading ulema, or holy men, of Damascus. They had been convened by order of the Ottoman
authorities shortly after the sharif proclaimed his revolt. And the ulema answered: “Deposition and death.”
¹
Hence the fatwa directed against Hussein and his family: It would be, as they always had known it must be, war to the knife.

At the outset of the revolt,
²
Sharif Hussein and his sons had mobilized no more than twenty thousand fighting men, mainly from desert and hill tribes, rarely from towns. The hill tribesmen were “hard and fit, very active, independent, cheerful snipers,” but they knew little of military discipline and resisted any attempt to impose it. They consented to serve as soldiers only under their own sheikhs and only for limited periods. If they wished to go home to see their wives and children while on service, no one would stop them so long as they provided someone to take their place. Moreover the various tribes nourished grievances against each other, which could be settled only by blood. As a result, “no man quite trusts his neighbor, though each is usually quite wholehearted in his opposition to the Turks. This would not prevent him working off a family grudge by letting down his private enemy.” Weighing them up, T. E. Lawrence concluded that Sharif Hussein’s entire army would not be able to defeat a single company of Turks, properly entrenched. Rather, a single company of Turks could defeat the sharif’s entire army. Consequently, “the value of the tribes
³
is defensive only, and their real sphere is guerilla warfare.”

This realization dawned earlier in some quarters than others. Most British military men, less imaginative than Lawrence, saw the tribesmen merely as picturesque mounted rabble, “a horde of Arabs,” as one described them. When confronted by a hostile force, such men on their camels and horses would “spread in a fanlike movement
⁴
over the whole horizon … eternally sweeping about for no apparent reason, unless it be bravado or the instinct of the kite. Drop a shell in front of them and they will swerve like a flight of teal, make a wide detour at full gallop, and appear on the other flank.” Orthodox British soldiers did not understand, let alone appreciate, such men and certainly did not know how to make good use of them.

Neither, apparently, did the sharif or his sons, at least to begin with, for all their intimate knowledge of the people of the Hejaz, and for all their prewar military campaigns. Their initial strategy was to mobilize the tribesmen and to hurl them against the cities and towns where Ottoman forces and officials were stationed in numbers—Mecca, Taif, and Medina, most prominently, but also, and crucially in this first stage of rebellion, the Red Sea port of Jeddah. Once those places had been captured, they intended to press the remaining Ottomans gradually from their country. It nearly didn’t happen.

In Mecca, as we have seen, the sharif’s forces captured the acting Ottoman governor and commandant at his headquarters in the holy city. The fighting had been fierce but relatively brief. An Ottoman detachment held out in a well-defended fortress on the outskirts of the town, however, and the Arabs required big guns transported from Jeddah to bombard and subdue them. Even so they persisted in their defiance for a month—the last Ottoman detachments did not surrender until July 10. The Turkish deserter Muhammad al-Faruki, who had been summoned by Sharif Hussein from Cairo, crowed to Gilbert Clayton, the Cairo intelligence officer who had debriefed him and believed his lies and had thereby helped to set the entire rebellion on its course: “I have drunk the cup
⁵
of happiness for being able to hit the mean Turks actually. Praise be to GOD … Sir, each gun I fired had echoed in my heart with pleasure and gladness … No better life than it is now.” His celebration was premature.

Consider the circumstances that enabled those guns to be transported from Jeddah to Mecca. They had been removed from Jeddah when its Ottoman defenders surrendered to the emir of the Harb tribe and four thousand of his men, followers of Sharif Hussein. In fact, however, the Harb tribe had not defeated the Ottomans. A Turkish newspaper explained: “Our small force
⁶
of a few hundred at Jeddah had to cope with brigands by land and the British by sea; [but] they only surrendered when water and ammunition were exhausted.” David Hogarth, now chief of the Arab Bureau in Cairo and editor of its
Arab Bulletin
, agreed. At the outset, he wrote, two British patrol boats and a seaplane had softened up the Turkish defenders with bombs and cannonades; when, on Friday, June 16, the town finally gave in, however, it did so “probably more through
⁷
lack of water and ammunition than Arab attack.” A specialist newspaper published in London,
Great Britain and the Near East
, put even a more pacific gloss upon the affair: “At Jeddah, the Shereef’s
⁸
men merely camped outside the walls, until the mayor, delegated by the Commandant and the Mutessarif, came out to parley.”

Meanwhile neither the siege of Medina (led by Feisal and Ali) nor the siege of Taif (led by Abdullah) was prospering. At Taif, Abdullah chose to waste time rather than lives, as the British snidely commented, and did not hurry to attack the town, realizing, no doubt, that it was not self-supporting and that therefore time was his ally. Every morning his batteries hammered the town walls; every afternoon his cavalry demonstrated their skills on horseback while harmlessly firing their rifles into the air, within view of the Turks but just out of range of their artillery; and every evening the Turks repaired their walls. So the weeks passed. “The people at Mecca
⁹
are getting restless at the long resistance at Taif, and the Sherif has asked for an aeroplane to fly over it. He thinks that it would persuade the garrison to surrender at once,” reported a British officer in Cairo. The sharif was mistaken, however, for the Turks did not surrender until September 23, three and a half months after the siege had begun. Again, lack of food and ammunition, not Arab military prowess, proved decisive.

Medina turned out to be a much tougher nut to crack than Taif. In fact, it did not crack at all during World War I and only surrendered in January 1919.

Ali and Feisal, it will be recalled, had proclaimed the Arab Revolt outside Medina on June 5, 1916. First they tore up stretches of the railway connecting the city with Damascus; then they stormed in. A fierce and desperate battle ensued. The Turks threw back the Arabs and advanced upon suburban areas in their turn, bringing sword and fire, pillage and rape—indeed, Armenian methods—but no decisive victory. Only then did the siege of Medina commence. The city grew enough food on its own, so it could not be starved as Taif had been, although it could be made to suffer. It boasted walls as sturdy as Taif’s, and it contained four forts jammed with well-armed Ottoman soldiers. Worst of all, from the Arab point of view, it still possessed the railway. The Arabs had torn up the track, but Turkish soldiers quickly repaired it. The railway was the Ottoman’s lifeline to Damascus; so long as they controlled it, Damascus could send men, guns, ammunition, and other supplies down the line and keep Medina going.

The Ottoman general Fakhri Pasha felt sufficiently confident in Medina’s ability to resist the siege that he established a defensive perimeter outside the city walls. Opposing them,
¹⁰
Feisal’s and Ali’s besieging tribesmen formed a loosely maintained circle. They carried a variety of ancient, inaccurate, and oft-mended shooters, as well as British-supplied Japanese rifles that had a disconcerting tendency to explode when fired; the ammunition was of the wrong caliber altogether. To remedy these material deficiencies, the British sent guns and ammunition to Rabegh, a port town on the Red Sea, roughly halfway between Mecca and Medina but to their west. A duplicitous chief in Rabegh, who thought the Turks would win, simply took what the British offloaded and kept it in his own stores. Eventually this man was sent packing and the British equipment was successfully transported inland, but it proved insufficient. As a result, “at Medina the Arab
¹¹
forces appear rather depressed. The Turkish superiority in guns and machine-guns makes them [Arabs] unable to do anything serious.” The Arabs and the British worried that when Fakhri Pasha realized the weakness of the forces arrayed against him, he would break through the ring of
encircling Arabs and march the hundred miles south to Mecca. If he did so, he could take that city and end the rebellion then and there.