The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (9 page)

But if the Middle East was far from the main battlefield, nevertheless war of another kind had begun there. The Ottomans could not immediately bring military force to bear upon British troops, but as the seat of the caliphate, Turkey was revered by Muslims across the world. Already the Ottomans were calling upon believers to wage jihad, holy war, upon the enemies of Turkey. If Britain’s Muslim subjects on the Indian subcontinent and in Egypt and Sudan heeded this call, then her position would be more parlous than it was already. The steps taken by British imperialists in India to protect against a Muslim jihad do not concern us. In the Middle East, however, they are of the essence. The Suez Canal was Britain’s windpipe. Without that crucial line of trade and communication, she would suffocate.

Having taken charge of Egyptian finances in 1882, Britain now discarded the pretense that the Turks exercised ultimate authority over this Ottoman province and declared her own protectorate. She deposed the Egyptian khedive, Abbas Hilmi, who was inconveniently pro-Ottoman, but conveniently absent in Constantinople, and proclaimed his Anglophile uncle, Hussein Kamel, to be the country’s sultan, Hussein I (a new title for the leader of Egypt). Through him Britain decreed martial law. Through him she curtailed civil liberties and imposed censorship.

An imperial power typically fears the people subject to its rule and keeps tabs on individuals and groups who oppose it; an imperial power at war is even more vigilant. The new sultan’s puppet government went so far as to outlaw the singing of certain songs, like one that went:

British intelligence agents
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identified potential troublemakers in Egypt and collected seditious circulars, pamphlets, and wall posters. “Now the One Powerful God has come forth to take vengeance,” threatened a fatwa issued by a cleric in Constantinople and brought to the attention of Sir Ronald Storrs. “Behold the sun of the Glory of Islam and his grandeur rise up over you. Watch it arise out of the horizon which is dyed with crimson gore and lit up with blazing fires.” The unflappable oriental secretary placed this document, along with similar messages, in an in-tray on his desk between
four telephones presided over by an ivory figure of the Buddha. A warning arrived, issued by the commandant of the Fourth Turkish Army, that the Turkish force would soon be ready to invade Egypt: “The Ottoman Army is
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coming to embrace you. Shortly by the will of God you will see its sharp swords and glittering bayonets thrust into the hearts of its enemies, tearing their entrails up.” Storrs slipped it into the tray.

Storrs was the Englishman to whom Abdullah had appealed for machine guns in April 1914, after the consul general, Lord Kitchener, turned him down. Portraits reveal a squarely built and fine-featured youngish man sporting a dandy’s mustache, perhaps to compensate for a receding hairline. He had studied Eastern literature and Arabic at Pembroke College, Cambridge, gaining a first-class degree. But he was not completely at ease with the language, a fact that would have significant repercussions later. Within a year of graduating in 1903, he had gone out to Cairo to work in the Egyptian civil service. He gained the appointment as oriental secretary in 1909. Storrs was urbane, knowledgeable, arrogant, and catty, “too clever by
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three-quarters,” according to one expert, but his boss, Lord Kitchener, regarded him highly.

Even before Turkey entered the war on the German side, Sir Ronald thought it might, and picked up the marker so fortuitously laid down by Abdullah during his visit to Cairo the previous spring. Perhaps Britain could supply machine guns to Abdullah’s father after all, and much else besides. Storrs could think of no better figure to undermine a Turkish call for jihad than a descendant of the Prophet himself who was also the grand sharif of Mecca. And no one in Britain could think of a better bridge to the Middle Eastern Muslim world either. The Imam Yahya was pro-Turk or at best neutral in the war and would not oppose the Turkish call for jihad; Ibn Saud had British backers, especially in the British government of India, but the leader of the Wahhabi sect could not speak for a broad Muslim movement. Hussein seemed the obvious choice then, but Storrs, a civilian, lacked authority to send him military aid; nor was he senior enough to set policy. A higher-ranking official, with military connections, must be enlisted.

Storrs consulted Sir Gilbert Clayton. Before the outbreak of war, Clayton had been director of intelligence and Sudan agent in Cairo; with the onset of war, he assumed the additional position of director of military intelligence. (Soon he would become unofficial father figure of a newly established agency, the fabled Arab Bureau, in which swashbucklers like T. E. Lawrence were to cut such a dashing figure.) Clayton sat at the nexus of Egyptian and Sudanese politics and military intelligence. He too had no
doubt that Britain should pick up Abdullah’s marker. He directed Storrs to put the matter to Lord Kitchener in writing.

Kitchener, however, was no longer in Cairo. When war broke out, he had been in England intending to return to Egypt to resume his duties as consul general. While standing upon the deck of the ferry at Dover, he received the summons from Prime Minister Asquith to become Britain’s secretary of state for war.

He was a remarkable character, Kitchener: private, complex, contradictory, powerful. Alone among senior figures in the British establishment, he understood from the outset that victory over Germany would not be quick; it would take at least three years, he thought. Britain’s small professional force, he knew, would be insufficient to fight it. Britain would need a vast army. Since she did not (yet) practice conscription, the army must be raised from volunteers. Soon Kitchener’s fierce chiseled features, piercing blue eyes, and silvery-gold mustache adorned posters on walls throughout the land, over the following declaration in capital letters: “YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!” Volunteers practically stampeded to join the colors, testimony to the awe in which so many held the newly appointed secretary of state for war.

A man of few words, he yet had a commanding presence. Many revered him as the victor of Omdurman and thus the avenger of General Gordon, slain by the forces of the Mahdi at Khartoum in 1885. He was known too as the general who had faced down the French at Fashoda thirteen years later, thereby maintaining British supremacy in the Sudan; also as conqueror of the Boer rebels in South Africa two years after that. He had been governor general of eastern Sudan, commander in chief of the armed forces in India, inspector general of the Egyptian police, sirdar (military commander) of Egypt, governor general of Sudan, and finally consul general in Egypt. His great ambition was to become viceroy of India. Had the war not intervened, perhaps he would have realized this dream. He was close to the Cecil family, a fountainhead of Conservative leaders including Prime Ministers Salisbury and Balfour. The former had advanced his career at critical junctures. Among some of his subordinates he inspired great devotion and admiration.

But he had critics too. They drew attention, sotto voce, to defects in the imperial hero’s character: an inability to delegate authority or to organize paperwork (they called him “Lord Kitchener of Chaos” behind his back); a predilection for brutality in his dealings with colonized peoples; and very strangely, a kind of kleptomania. When he saw something he wanted (he
had a particular fondness for objets d’art, antiques, and silver), he took it—even from the homes of his hosts. One of the doubters, Margot Asquith, the prime minister’s wife, said of him: “He may not be
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a great man—but he
is
a great poster.”

Still, Kitchener knew the Middle East very well and grasped Britain’s strategic position and needs there. He was a close student of the fledgling Arab nationalist movement, such as it was, and of the intrigues at the Ottoman sultan’s court. Despising both Old and Young Turk methods of government, he had long hoped Britain would replace their rule with hers throughout the Middle East, not incidentally guaranteeing the British position at Suez and creating a new swath of imperial territory to complement India. The best way to win the war, he believed, was to concentrate on defeating Germany on the Western Front, but unlike other “westerners” in the British cabinet, he remained attuned to developments in the east. When Storrs’s letter reached him, he acted at once. The situation now, he recognized, was potentially more dangerous for the grand sharif than it had been six months earlier. If Hussein displeased the regime in Constantinople, it could call upon Germany to help deal with him. The first step, therefore, must be to ensure that Hussein was still interested in British assistance.

“Tell Storrs,”
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Kitchener directed Sir Milne Cheetham, who was acting in his place in Cairo until a longer-term replacement could be appointed, “to send secret and carefully chosen messenger from me to Sherif Abdullah to ascertain whether ‘should present armed German influence at Constantinople coerce Calif against his will and Sublime Porte to acts of aggression and war against Great Britain, he and his father and Arabs of Hejaz would be with us or against us.’”

This directive reached Storrs on September 24, 1914. He acted immediately, choosing as messenger to Abdullah X, “the father-in-law of my little Persian agent Ruhi.” Travel to Mecca with all speed, Storrs directed X. But it took X four days to reach his destination, traveling the last fifteen hours by donkey overnight. Then he waited five days more for the grand sharif and his family to return from the summer palace in Taif.

When X finally did enter the palace in Mecca, he dined sumptuously with the grand sharif and his sons. Afterward he gave Abdullah the message Storrs had composed according to Kitchener’s instructions. Presumably Abdullah gave it to his father, who quickly read it, for soon a servant appeared: Grand Sharif Hussein would receive X in another room. X climbed stairs to the top of the palace and entered a very fine, large chamber. There the emir, pacing back and forth, informed him that he no longer
felt obliged to honor his duties to the Ottomans because they had “made war upon our rights.” Throwing back the sleeve of his garment in a dramatic gesture, he declared: “My heart is open to Storrs, even as this. Stretch forth to us a helping hand and we shall never at all help these oppressors. On the contrary we shall help those who do good.” As always with Hussein, religious conviction spurred activity: “This is the Commandment
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of God upon us: Do good to Islam and Moslems—Nor do we fear or respect any save God.”

The emir had taken a first step toward rebellion. He thereby risked his life and those of his sons, as Kitchener and the other Britons well knew. But we have no record of the meeting except for Storrs’s translation of X’s subsequent oral report. When it came to putting his sentiments down on paper, the grand sharif was exceedingly cautious. Since Kitchener had addressed himself to Abdullah, Hussein had his son write and sign the reply and place it in an unaddressed sealed envelope inside a larger one that was addressed to a third party; then he had Feisal convey it to the sharif’s agent at Jeddah. The latter finally gave it over to X, but only when he was safely aboard the Japanese freighter that would take him back to Suez.

The written message was carefully conceived, yet is vague in a crucial respect. The first part was plain enough: According to a résumé of the letter that Cheetham sent to Kitchener, Abdullah had replied (for his father of course) that the grand sharif looked forward to “closer union”
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with England but awaited “written promise that Great Britain will … guarantee Emir against Foreign and Ottoman aggression.” In short, Hussein would not risk putting his neck into a Turkish noose without receiving written pledges of protection from Britain. But this was not his only caveat: Hussein and his sons also refused to put themselves in jeopardy, only to discover that Britain had replaced Turkey as their foreign overlord. And here in retrospect two ambiguities are apparent.

First, even in this initial letter Hussein appears to have been looking beyond his own kingdom of Hejaz and claiming to speak for Arabs throughout the Middle East. Before he took any sort of action, he warned Kitchener and Storrs, he must receive Britain’s promise to “abstain from internal intervention in Arabia.” The indeterminate term was crucial: By “Arabia,” did he mean not merely the Hejaz but the entire Arabian Peninsula? Did he even perhaps mean Mesopotamia and Syria too, including Palestine? He did not specify.

Let us pursue this ambiguity. On the one hand, Hussein’s letter was just what the British had been hoping for. Only a great leader of “Arabia” could
successfully countermand the caliph’s appeal for jihad against Turkey’s enemies. On the other hand, this first wartime exchange between the two parties sowed the seeds of future conflict and misunderstanding. Cheetham appears to have discerned the looming difficulty and tried to protect against it. As he cabled to the Foreign Office, Abdullah’s letter was very promising. “Reply is being prepared subject to your approval disclaiming all intention of internal intervention and guaranteeing against external aggression
only independence of Sherifate”
(emphasis added). In other words, the British wanted the grand sharif to speak for all Arabia, of undefined boundaries, but they would guarantee to protect his authority only in the territory he governed already.

“Does Kitchener agree?”
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Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary back in London, queried in his spiky handwriting at the bottom of Cheetham’s cable. “If so I will approve.” But Kitchener did not accept Cheetham’s qualification. Instead he directed that the sharif be informed: “If the Arab nation assist England in this war … England will guarantee that no internal intervention takes place in Arabia and will give the Arabs every assistance against external foreign aggression.” He had accepted the emir’s original broad formulation of “Arabia,” although whether this meant to him the Hejaz, or the peninsula, or the peninsula plus Syria and Mesopotamia, remains unclear. And since Grey signed off on it too, he presumably also accepted the broad but vague understanding of “Arabia.”