The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (47 page)

Apparently, additional concessions were in order on the part of the Central Powers. Fuad claimed that to gain peace with England, Germany would give up the Baghdad Railway and even her fleet. Pilling, according to his report, pointed out that he was “the friend of Turkey, and would not do anything save for Turkey.” The minister replied: “If England wishes to be friends with Turkey again she will not object to Turkey being the intermediary for settlement of this terrible war on England’s own terms.” It having been put this way, Pilling reported breathlessly: “I cannot bear the responsibility of not communicating the whole of this statement to you for the immediate information of the Prime Minister.”

What are we to make of this fantastic message—that Talaat Pasha thought he could become the man who ended World War I? More probably, Fuad was interpreting vague intimations reaching him from interested parties in Constantinople to suit his own desire for an all-embracing peace; perhaps he was even inventing them whole cloth, or Pilling was. What is certain is that at this stage of the war Britain had no desire to engage in negotiations with Germany or Austria. When he assumed the premiership, Lloyd George stated categorically that Britain would continue the war until she had delivered a “knock-out blow” to Germany.

Pilling reported to London what, perhaps, Fuad had told him. Then he cooled his heels in Berne, waiting for the letter from Talaat Pasha. Later he would claim to have received it on June 9; he referred in later correspondence to messages to the War Office that he himself wrote that day and the day after, which does suggest that he may have received and been reporting on something. He refers as well to “my other many reports
²⁶
to our Prime Minister.” These reports too may have mentioned, or quoted, Talaat’s letter, if there was one, but unfortunately no reports have been found. What we do know is that on June 16, when Rumbold called Pilling into his office to tell him he must return permanently to London, Pilling cited no letter from Talaat. Pilling was “very crestfallen,” Rumbold reported.

Why would he have been crestfallen if he had received the letter from Talaat a week before? That would have meant that he had successfully completed his mission and that he no longer had any reason to stay in Switzerland. In fact, he should have headed for home already. It seems a fair inference, therefore, that no such letter had arrived.

This inference is strengthened by Pilling’s behavior back in London. On June 30, when MacDonagh of the War Office debriefed him, he did not produce the letter or apparently even mention it. On July 10 he wrote ambiguously to Fuad in Berne: “I hope to be in a position very soon to send to your Excellency the desired reply to the request of His Highness, the Grand Vizier [Talaat Pasha] as to the appointment of Peace Delegates.” Talaat’s request could have been contained in the letter of June 9, if it existed; or it could have been delivered verbally by Fuad at the May 12 meeting. Or Pilling could have made it up.

His failure to hand over the letter lowered his stock. The Foreign Office had already ignored him, but now the War Office turned a cold shoulder too. When Pilling requested that it repay his Swiss expenses, £830, it refused, on the grounds that his mission had emanated not from it but from 10 Downing Street. When he approached
²⁷
the prime minister, Lloyd George likewise declined to help him. Did Pilling fear not merely that he
was considerably out-of-pocket but that his chance of recouping his greater financial losses in Turkey might likewise be slipping away? Perhaps so, for apparently he now asked the Americans to sponsor him on another trip to Switzerland.
²⁸
Or was he genuinely determined to help his country? Possibly the greater good and the personal good combined in his mind, for he wrote to Balfour, “The interests of our Empire, equally with the charge against me on the part of Turkey of broken pledges rendering me liable to corresponding consequences, permit of no further delay in the completion of this agreed treaty of peace.”

What treaty of peace was that? Pilling
³⁰
maintained that one had been “agreed in June last,”
²⁹
presumably in the letter from Talaat. Now (on November 7, 1917), in a rambling message to the foreign secretary, and still without having shown Talaat’s letter to anyone, he enumerated the “treaty’s” provisions. “1. The cession by Turkey to England of the sovereignty of Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Yemen.” But on May 12, Pilling had written to Mrs. Evans that the Ottomans were willing to cede only Egypt and Mesopotamia. Nothing had happened between May 12 and “June last,” when the letter from Talaat allegedly had arrived, to make the Ottomans more generous with their Middle Eastern possessions. Pilling seems to have been listing new Ottoman concessions in order to take into account changed circumstances. “I have arranged for Syria (which includes Palestine) to be entirely ceded to England, leaving England an absolutely free hand as to the establishment of [a] Jewish State,” he wrote, two days before publication of the Balfour Declaration! So far as we can tell, he had never mentioned a Jewish state before. Certainly Talaat had not.

Most likely Pilling was simply spinning his own fantasies based on the terms outlined by Fuad Selim al-Hijari on May 12, terms that may or may not have originated with Talaat Pasha. “3,” wrote Pilling to Balfour: “Turkish Arabia outside Mesopotamia, Syria and Yemen, to be ceded to the King of the Hejaz by Turkey, or otherwise, as may be directed by England.” Nothing suggests that in June 1917 the Turks were willing to surrender the bulk of Arabia to King Hussein. But nearly six months later, with Hussein secure in Mecca and with Allenby’s and Feisal’s armies preparing to march north toward Damascus, they might have been willing to do so. Again, the only way to know for sure would be to refer to the letter supposedly written by Talaat, but “Pilling … has been unable to produce any letter or even a copy of any letter from Talaat,” reported the disillusioned MacDonagh. Furthermore, he added, “I have not seen a copy of any ‘Treaty’ and do not believe in the existence of any such document.”

On November 15 Pilling played what he may have considered his trump
card; in fact it was a desperate gesture. He wrote to the king of England: “It is impossible for me to remain silent, and to bear alone the grave responsibility which will arise by the neglect or refusal on England’s part, to receive and to meet this request of Turkey for peace.” Buckingham Palace forwarded his letter to the Foreign Office, which by now had had more than enough of this troublesome figure. “If Mr. Pilling is, as the letter rather foreshadows, about to make ‘sensational disclosures’ or play at blackmail,” warned one official, “the matter should I submit be considered by the Prime Minister.”

The mandarins of the Foreign Office were not the only ones needing to rid themselves of this disreputable Quixote. The Armenians and the Zionists, who had probably never heard of Marmaduke Pickthall’s attempt to bring Ottomans and Britons together, did hear about Pilling and moved purposefully to defeat him. Conceivably they learned about Pilling from Sir Mark Sykes, who had access to all the relevant Foreign Office files, opposed a separate peace with Turkey, cared not a fig for Foreign Office protocol except when it suited him, and so would not have hesitated to inform them of Pilling’s activities.

Early on the evening of November 19, in what was surely a coordinated approach, first James Malcolm and then Chaim Weizmann called upon Ronald Graham at the Foreign Office. They knew about Lloyd George’s unlikely emissary to the Turks and did not like what they knew. Graham recorded:

This was two weeks after publication of the Balfour Declaration and after various government statements had been made supporting an independent Armenia. Weizmann and Malcolm both realized that a separate peace with the Ottomans might render the government’s pledges null and void. So on the historical chessboard they made this move to remove Mr. J. R. Pilling, the pawn advanced by Lloyd George. He was slightly more important
than Marmaduke Pickthall, the pawn advanced by Fuad Selim al-Hijari and Dr. Valyi, whom Sir Mark Sykes had removed a year before. When Lord Hardinge read Graham’s report, he suggested immediately that Lloyd George “should, if possible, take steps to get Mr. Pilling to hold his tongue.” The prime minister evidently did so, for we do not hear from the Manchester businessman again.

Hammering the last nail in the coffin of Mr. Pilling proved relatively easy for Chaim Weizmann. But he was, by November 1917, quite accustomed to visiting the Foreign Office to argue against the advocates of a separate peace with Turkey. Only a few months previously in fact, he had apparently taken the lead in stymieing a much more important initiative in that direction. That exercise, a better-known episode in the history of Zionism, had required all his diplomatic skill.

AFTER APRIL 6, 1917
, a state of war existed between the United States and Germany, but not between the United States and Turkey. Germany wanted her Ottoman
¹
ally to join the war against America but could get her only to sever diplomatic relations, and the Turks begrudged having to do even that. President Wilson took this as a good sign. It might mean that the Ottomans were developing second thoughts about their participation in the war altogether. If so, then perhaps his country could serve as a bridge between the Turks and the Entente powers. In other words, President Wilson too hoped to forge a separate peace.

From late 1913 until February 1916, Henry Morgenthau served as Wilson’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. A member of the New York bar, Morgenthau had made a fortune speculating in real estate, which enabled him to make lavish contributions to the Democratic Party. During the 1912 presidential campaign, he served as chairman of the party’s finance committee. The ambassadorship followed. Morgenthau is famous for having tried, while he was ambassador, to persuade his masters in Washington to intervene against the Armenian massacres of 1915, and when that failed, for bravely taking his protests to the Ottomans themselves, notably to Talaat Pasha. Himself a Jew, he played an honorable role during these early war years as a watch guard and protector of Ottoman Jews, especially the
Jews of Palestine, who benefited from a massive relief effort much facilitated by him. But he was impulsive and boastful. In May 1916, for example, in a speech delivered in Cincinnati,
²
he claimed that before he left Constantinople, he had just about arranged for the Ottomans to sell Palestine to the Jews.

As his interest in the future of Palestine demonstrates, Morgenthau sympathized with Zionism. But he was not a Zionist strictly speaking. He said in that same Cincinnati speech: “It is utterly impossible to place several millions of people in Palestine. There would be grave danger from the Arabs … If Jews continue there as at present, at the end of the war there will be no friction.” This declaration, as much as his grandiloquent statement about purchasing the Jewish Promised Land, caught Mark Sykes’s attention. He immediately contacted Moses Gaster, the Zionist he knew best at that early date, and warned him, “Nothing could be
³
more unfortunate or dangerous.” Gaster agreed. By the spring of 1917, British Zionists knew something of Henry Morgenthau, and although they respected some of what he had done as ambassador, they did not approve of it all.

The origins of Morgenthau’s mission
⁴
to speak with Turks about a separate peace with the Allies are obscure, although historians of Zionism (including those who know little of Pickthall, Pilling, or other advocates of the policy) have gone over this particular episode with a fine-tooth comb. The idea may have
⁵
been his, or it may have been the State Department’s. At any rate, here is the scheme Morgenthau eventually put to the president: He would persuade Enver and Talaat, with whom he was on “peculiarly cordial and
⁶
intimate terms,” to allow Allied submarines to pass through the Dardanelles straits. The submarines would torpedo the
Goeben
and
Breslau
, the battleship and cruiser that Germany ostensibly had given to Turkey at the outset of the war but that remained under German command, their guns trained upon Constantinople. Once the two ships had been scuppered, the CUP government would be free to do what it really wanted, which was to conclude a separate peace. What Woodrow Wilson thought of this plan is not recorded. In the end, he gave Morgenthau authorization only to listen to and carry back to Washington whatever information or terms the Turks were prepared to offer. Whether Morgenthau understood or intended to abide by this limit is equally uncertain.