The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (51 page)

The Egyptian status quo ante meant the fig leaf of Turkish control with Britain pulling the strings, as it had done in Egypt since Gladstone’s day. This would have satisfied Sacher and Simon, but it would have been anathema to Weizmann and his followers.

When the discussion ended, Herbert found his way back to the hotel by a circuitous route. He would have been pleased with what had taken place, but he was not yet finished. Next morning he consulted again with Parodi. They traveled together by train to Interlaken, “where we separated at the station. I went to the Kursaal [then a spa, today a casino] and in a short time P. came along and sat down with a couple of Turks, both Committee men, at a table near me. He introduced me, and we had an extremely curious conversation. They had come from a conversation at Zurich [the one reported on by Parodi to Rumbold and by Rumbold to the Foreign Office], and were anxious to have a revolution in Turkey.”

In a second memorandum Herbert gave further details. The Turks were Hakki Halid Bey, ex-director of the mint at Constantinople, now living in Geneva, and Dr. Noureddin Bey, an influential member of the CUP and director of a Constantinople hospital, who had arrived in Switzerland only two weeks before. He was the anti-Enver CUP member who had expressed the desire to meet an influential Englishman.

“We then went
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walking in the garden which was completely deserted,” Herbert continued. “Dr. Parodi at first talked to Noureddin Bey while I walked with Hakki Halid. The following is a précis of our conversations.”

The stroll in the garden ended. Talking it over a little later, Herbert and Parodi concluded that the suggestions had been made in good faith and that Noureddin probably had been sent to Switzerland by Talaat, because “directly he arrived here in Switzerland Hakki Halid Bey communicated to Dr. Parodi Noureddin’s desire to see him, and if possible, some influential Englishman.”

Herbert argued in his memorandum that Britain now had a golden opportunity to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war. “As long as the Turks believe that the outlying provinces such as Syria … are to be annexed by foreigners who will make these regions the instruments of further encroachment, there can be no prospect of peace. If, on the other hand, the Turks see a chance … that their country will be ringed round by a chain of semi-autonomous friendly Moslem States, half the reason that compelled them to continue fighting will have gone.” He wanted Britain to make its allies “surrender claims to territories which they cannot take themselves, and which it is doubtful they could hold even if we could take them for them.” An agreement with the Ottomans would follow.

Herbert thought his mission complete. He packed his bag and prepared to leave for Paris. Twenty minutes before his train arrived, perhaps even as he stood on the station platform, someone slipped a memorandum in French into his hands. It contained the dissident Turks’ proposals for a separate peace. “I do not think
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that it is acceptable,” Herbert wrote in his diary, “but I think that it would form a basis.”

He arrived in Paris on the morning of July 25, two days after Weizmann. Lloyd George and Balfour were in the city, as we know. The latter sent for him. Herbert records: “I told him what happened. He was interested and excited … In the evening I had an hour with L[loyd] G[eorge] and Hankey.
He sipped his tea and listened while we sat on a balcony and the crowd cheered in the Place de la Concorde … I read him my memorandum.” What he did not know, but what would have cheered him had he known, was that the day before the prime minister and the foreign secretary had received confirmation of his general message from another Military Intelligence officer stationed in Berne. The latter had held a secret meeting with Dr. Noureddin too. He reported: “Talaat now convinced
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that Russian revival, failure of submarine warfare, and American intervention have destroyed all hope of satisfactory settlement for Turkey and … wishes to … make terms with England.” Such information would not have cheered Dr. Weizmann, but they withheld it from him too.

In London three days later Herbert had an hour at the Foreign Office with Balfour again, accompanied this time by Lord Hardinge and Robert Cecil. On August 3 MacDonagh told him that the War Cabinet “had seen my memorandum and agreed to it.” At this stage Herbert might have been excused for thinking that a compromise peace between Britain and the Ottoman Empire was within reach. But he would have been mistaken. The same forces that had defeated Pickthall and Pilling and Morgenthau had already mobilized against him. Whether Aubrey Herbert’s attempt to facilitate a separate peace with Turkey would meet finally with his government’s approval remained an open question.

The Foreign Office received conflicting information on the readiness of the Turks to negotiate. While some, as we have seen, thought the Ottomans were prepared to talk, powerful forces in London argued with equal force that they were not. Among the most authoritative was Lord Nathaniel Curzon, the only member of the War Cabinet with personal experience of the Middle East. Early in May, as reports about Turkish readiness to negotiate were turning from a trickle to a stream, and as pressure to explore the option was building in the Foreign Office, he argued that the advocates of peace were pursuing a chimera. Turkey “now knows that she
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will retain Constantinople … Her Government is in the hands of a powerful triumvirate whose hold [on power] … has, on the whole, been strengthened by the War. The Entente has at present nothing in the way of inducement to offer.” British restoration to the Ottomans of Mesopotamia, including Baghdad, might open the door to negotiations, Curzon conceded, but such concessions “we are not prepared to consider.”

Other Middle East experts from within the Foreign Office reached similar
conclusions. On the eve of Herbert’s journey to Switzerland, Balfour asked two of them to assess his chances of success. The first did not
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think much of those chances. The German army dominated the Turkish government, he argued, and a coup remained unlikely so long as they did so. Moreover no Turkish government, not even one formed by the conspirators who so unrealistically wished to overthrow the present CUP regime, would accept dismemberment of their empire, which England and France still intended. The second expert, Sir Lewis Mallet, former ambassador in Constantinople, made similar points. The CUP still believed it could win the war. It had lost Baghdad, but it had beaten the British at Kut and Gallipoli and Gaza. That the new Russian government had renounced Constantinople only added to their confidence. “It is not impossible,”
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Mallet darkly hinted, “that there may be some connection between the Jewish wire-pullers at Constantinople and the Jewish element at Petrograd.” At any rate, the Turks would not be ready to make peace until their self-belief had been knocked out of them.

Into this debate like an avenging angel swept Sir Mark Sykes, just returned from the Middle East on June 14. He judged the opponents of the separate peace bloodless; he thought the first Foreign Office memo opposing the separate peace tepid and the second based upon “insufficient material.” He despised Lord Curzon, whom he had nicknamed “Alabaster.” If the faction within the government and Foreign Office who favored the peace were to be defeated, he would have to intervene. He wrote to Gilbert Clayton back in Cairo: “On my arrival I found
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that the Foreign Office had been carefully destroying everything I had done in the past 2 years.” It had been “stimulating anti-Entente feeling and pushing separate negotiations with Turkey ideas. Indeed I just arrived in the nick of time.” He consulted with Weizmann, who already had protested the Morgenthau and Herbert missions. “Luckily Zionism held good,” Sykes wrote to Clayton. He gathered himself. Weizmann went off to Gibraltar and Herbert to Switzerland. Each returned at the end of July thinking he had succeeded. Sykes knew better: Weizmann’s would be a Pyrrhic victory unless Herbert’s triumph could be turned into a defeat.

So he let loose, composing two powerful blasts against pursuing negotiations with an emissary from Talaat in Switzerland. His friend Herbert’s mission had been misconceived from the start. “The visit of a
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(to the Turks) notorious Turcophil M.P. to Turkish Agents in Switzerland will certainly be interpreted by the C.U.P. as a proof … that … the English and their Western Allies believe they cannot win the war.” Rather than bring peace
closer, Herbert had inadvertently delayed it. In any event, the men with whom Herbert proposed that Britain should parley did not carry sufficient weight. “Hakki Bey, the ex-master of the Turkish mint, is a well intentioned Liberal who had to flee Turkey for participation in an anti-C.U.P. combination. To negotiate with him or such members of the so-called ‘opposition’ is futile or worse. They are not of the caliber to cope with Talaat Pasha and his Jacobin clique.”

Others in the Foreign Office either did not think, or did not care, about how the colonized peoples of the Ottoman Empire would react to Britain making a compromise peace with their colonial masters. The new, anti-imperialist Sykes cared very much. “Before entering on
pourparlers
,” he warned in the same scorching memorandum, “it would seem imperative to consult not only France, Italy, America &c, but also the King of Hejaz, representative Armenians and nationalist (i.e.) Zionist Jews, to whom we and the other Entente Powers have obligations and whose fate is bound up with the principle of nationality, the antidote to Prussian military domination.” This intriguing man’s political evolution was nearly complete. In early 1916 he had put his name to one of the most infamous imperialist deals of the twentieth century; by mid-1917 he had become the advocate of subject peoples whom he wanted his country to champion, albeit with profit for itself.

In a second equally coruscating composition, Sykes shifted ground, arguing that the anti-CUP Liberals with whom Aubrey Herbert had met were actually CUP cats’ paws. Perhaps the Ottoman government did desire a separate peace: How else explain why its puppets in Britain, “pacifists … financiers … Indian and Egyptian Moslem seditionists and their sympathizers such as Pickthall … [as well as] Semitic anti-Zionists who are undisguised pro-Turco-Germans,” were pushing for one? The government that pulled their strings believed the peoples of Europe were exhausted by the war, that a peace conference would soon end it, and that “it will be useful to get Turkey’s situation fixed and settled as advantageously as possible before the conference begins.”

How did the CUP want to fix things? It desired “to come out of this war with an assured political and strategic position from which it can henceforth pursue its world policy,” the main lines of which were:

1. Pan-Turanianism, reinforced by
   

2. Political control over the Muslim world.
   

3. A firm grip on the control levers of international finance.
   

4. Close cooperation with the various revolutionary movements
   in Europe and the United States, such as syndicalism, Leninism, and cognate forces.
   

If Britain must negotiate with the Ottomans, she should do so only with the knowledge of her wartime allies and without employing any trickery. More important, she “should stand out for Arab independence [and] … a real guarantee of Armenian liberation,” his new diplomatic raison d’être. Oddly, he did not refer to Palestine in this paper. Perhaps he assumed that “Arab independence” meant Palestinian independence too, and that the Zionists would benefit from that.

After reading Sykes’s second memorandum, two more Foreign Office mandarins weighed in. One wrote: “I find myself in
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close agreement with what Sir Mark Sykes says.” The other, Sir Ronald Graham, Herbert’s cousin, backtracked on his support for the separate peace: “If the present Turkish overtures are genuine—as to which I have grave doubts—we must encourage them to the extent (but no further) of hearing what the Turks have to offer … It must throughout be borne in mind that any terms under which Turkey would emerge with a semblance of having proved victorious—in Moslem eyes—must lay up endless trouble for us in the future.” With Sykes at full throttle, the tide at the Foreign Office seemed to be turning. A few days later, when Herbert had an audience with General Jan Smuts, this most recent addition to the War Cabinet told him that his memoranda “were not sufficient,
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that an entire restatement of the case was required.” Herbert demurred. He could read the tea leaves.