The New Penguin History of the World (175 page)

Finally, although it did not present an immediate danger, the latest converts to the culture of territorial nationalism were the Jews. Their history had taken a new turn when, in 1897, there appeared a Zionist Congress whose aim was the securing of a national home. Thus, in the long history of Jewry, assimilation, still barely achieved in many European countries after the liberating age of the French Revolution, was now replaced as an ideal by nationalism. The desirable location had not at once been clear; Argentina and Uganda were suggested at different times, but by the end of the century Zionist opinion had come to rest finally on Palestine. Jewish immigration there had begun, though still on a small scale. The unrolling of the war was to change its significance.

Curious parallels existed between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires in 1914. Both sought war, seeing it, in part, as a solution to their problems. Yet both were bound to suffer from it, because too many people inside and outside their borders saw in war an opportunity to score at their expense. In the end, both empires were to be destroyed by it. Even at the outset, Russia, the historic enemy, seemed likely to benefit since Turkey’s entry to the war evaporated the last of the tradition of resistance of the British and French to the establishment of Tsarist power at Constantinople. For their part, the French had their own fish to fry in the Middle Eastern pan. Though their irritation over a British presence in Egypt had subsided somewhat with the making of the
entente
and a free hand for France in Morocco, there was a tradition of a special French role in the Levant. The evocations of St Louis and the crusaders, with which some enthusiasts made play, did not have to be taken seriously, but, undeniably, French governments had for a hundred years claimed to exercise a special protection of Catholicism in the Ottoman empire, especially in Syria, to which Napoleon III had sent a French army in the 1860s. There was also the
cultural predominance evinced by the wide use of the French language among the educated in the Levant, and much French capital was invested there. These were not forces which could be overlooked.

Nevertheless, in 1914 Turkey’s main military antagonists outside Europe were likely to be Russia in the Caucasus, and Great Britain at Suez. The defence of the Canal was the foundation of British strategic thinking in the area, but it soon became clear that no great danger threatened it. Then events occurred revealing new factors which would in the end turn the Middle and Near East upside-down. At the end of 1914 an Indian-British army landed at Basra to safeguard oil supplies from Persia. This was the beginning of the interplay of oil and politics in the historical destiny of this area, though it was not to show itself fully until well after the Ottoman empire had ceased to exist. On the other hand, an approach which the British governor of Egypt made to Hussein in October 1914 bore fruit very quickly. This was the first attempt to use the weapon of Arab nationalism.

The attraction of striking a blow against Germany’s ally became all the greater as fighting went on bloodily but indecisively in Europe. An attempt in 1915 to force the Dardanelles by combined naval and land operations, in the hope of taking Constantinople, became bogged down. By then Europe’s civil war had already set in train forces one day to be turned against her. But there was a limit to what could be offered to Arab allies. Terms were not agreed with Hussein until the beginning of 1916. He had demanded independence for all the Arab lands south of a line running along the 37th degree of latitude – this was about eighty miles north of a line from Aleppo to Mosul and included, in effect, the whole of the Ottoman empire outside Turkey and Kurdistan. It was much more than the British could take at the gallop. The French had to be consulted, too, because of their special interest in Syria. When an agreement was made between the British and French on spheres of influence in a partitioned Ottoman empire it left many questions still unsettled for the future, including the status of Iraq, but an Arab nationalist political programme looked like becoming a reality.

The future of such undertakings was soon in doubt. The Arab revolt began in June 1916 with an attack on the Turkish garrison of Medina. The rising was never to be more than a distraction from the main theatres of war, but it prospered and became a legend. Soon the British felt they must take the Arabs more seriously; Hussein was recognized as king of the Hejaz. Their own troops pressed forwards in 1917 into Palestine, taking Jerusalem. In 1918 they were to enter Damascus together with the Arabs. Before this, though, two other events had further complicated the situation. One was the American entry into the war; in a statement of war
aims President Wilson said he favoured ‘an absolute unmolested opportunity of development’ for the non-Turks of the Ottoman empire. The other was the Bolshevik publication of their predecessors’ secret diplomacy; this revealed Anglo-French proposals for spheres of influence in the Middle East. One part of this agreement had been that Palestine should be administered internationally. Another irritant was added when it was announced that British policy favoured the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people. The ‘Balfour Declaration’ can be accounted the greatest success of Zionism down to this time. It was not strictly incompatible with what had been said to the Arabs, and President Wilson had joined in the good work by introducing to it qualifications to protect Palestinians who were not Jews, but it is almost inconceivable that it could ever have operated unchallenged, especially when further British and French expressions of goodwill towards Arab aspirations followed in 1918. On the morrow of Turkish defeat, the outlook was thoroughly confused.

Hussein was at that moment recognized as King of the Arab peoples by Great Britain, but this did little for him. It was not Arab nationalists but the British and French, with the help of the League of Nations, who were to lay out the map of the modern Arab world. During a confused decade the British and French then became embroiled with the Arabs whom they had themselves conjured on to the stage of world politics, while the Arab leaders quarrelled among themselves. The mirage of Islamic unity once more faded away but, mercifully, so did the Russian threat (even if only briefly), and only two great powers were left engaged in the Middle East. They distrusted one another, but could agree, roughly, on the basis that if the British had their way in Iraq the French could have theirs in Syria. This was legitimized by the League of Nations awarding mandates for Arab lands to them. Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq went to the British and Syria to the French, who governed high-handedly from the start, having to install themselves by force after a national congress had asked for independence or a British or American mandate. They evicted the king the Arabs had chosen, Hussein’s son, and subsequently had to face a full-scale insurrection. The French were still holding their own by force in the 1930s, though there were by then signs that they would concede some power to the nationalists. Unfortunately, the Syrian situation soon also showed the disintegrating power of nationalism when the Kurdish people of north Syria revolted against the prospect of submergence in an Arab state, so introducing to western diplomats another Middle Eastern problem with a long life before it.

The Arabian peninsula was meanwhile racked by a struggle between Hussein and yet another king with whom the British had negotiated a
treaty (his followers, to make things more difficult still, were members of a particularly puritanical Islamic sect who added religious to dynastic and tribal conflict). Hussein was displaced, and in 1932 the new kingdom of Saudi Arabia emerged in the place of the Hejaz. From this flowed other problems, for sons of Hussein were by this time kings of Iraq and Transjordan. After heavy fighting had shown the difficulties ahead, the British had moved as fast as they dared towards the ending of the mandate over Iraq, seeking only to secure British strategic interests by preserving a military and air force presence. In 1932, accordingly, Iraq entered the League as an independent and fully sovereign state. Earlier, Transjordan had been recognized as independent by the British in 1928, again with some retention of military and financial powers.

Palestine was much more difficult. From 1921, when there were anti-Jewish riots by Arabs alarmed over Jewish immigration and Jewish acquisition of Arab land, that unhappy country was never to be long at peace. More was at stake than merely religious or national feeling. Jewish immigration meant the irruption of a new westernizing and modernizing force, its operation changing economic relationships and imposing new demands on a traditional society. The British mandatory power was caught between the outcry of the Arabs if it did not restrict Jewish immigration, and the outcry of the Jews if it did. Arab governments now had to be taken into account too, and they occupied lands which were economically and strategically important to British security. World opinion was becoming involved. The question became more inflamed than ever when in 1933 there came to power in Germany a regime which persecuted Jews and began to take away the legal and social gains they had been making since the French Revolution. By 1937 there were pitched battles between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. Soon a British army was trying to hold down an Arab insurrection.

The collapse of the paramount power in the Arab lands had often in the past been followed by a period of disorder. What was unclear this time was whether disorder would be followed – as earlier periods of anarchy had eventually been – by the establishment of a new imperial hegemony. The British did not want that role; after a brief spell of imperial intoxication in the aftermath of victory, they desired only to secure their own fundamental interests in the area, the protection of the Suez Canal and the swelling flow of oil from Iraq and Iran. Between 1918 and 1934 a great pipeline had been built from northern Iraq across Transjordan and Palestine to Haifa, thus giving yet another new twist to the future of these territories. The consumption of oil in Europe was not yet so large that there was any general dependence on it, nor had the great discoveries been made which
would again change the political position in the 1950s. But a new factor was making itself felt; the Royal Navy had turned over to oil for its ships.

The British believed Suez to be best secured by keeping forces in Egypt, but this caused increasing trouble. The war had intensified Egyptian feeling. Armies of occupation are never popular; when the war sent up prices the foreigner was blamed. Egyptian nationalist leaders attempted in 1919 to put their case to the Paris Peace Conference but were prevented from doing so; there followed a rising against the British which was quickly put down. But the British were in retreat. The protectorate was ended in 1922 in the hope of getting ahead of nationalist feeling. Yet the new kingdom of Egypt had an electoral system which returned nationalist majority after nationalist majority, thus making it impossible for an Egyptian government to come to terms for safeguarding British interests which any British government would find acceptable. The result was a prolonged constitutional crisis and intermittent disorder until in 1936 the British finally agreed to be content with a right to garrison the Canal Zone for a limited number of years. An end was also announced to the jurisdictional privileges of foreigners.

This was part of a British retreat from empire which can be detected elsewhere after 1918; it was in part a reflection of an overstretching of power and resources, as British foreign policy began to be preoccupied by other challenges. Changes in world relationships far from the Middle East thus helped to shape post-Ottoman developments in Islamic lands. Another novel factor was Marxist communism. During the whole of the years between the wars, Russian radio broadcasting to the Arab countries supported the first Arab communists. But for all the worry they caused, communism showed no sign of being able to displace the strongest revolutionary influence of the area, still that of Arab nationalism, whose focus had come by 1938 to be Palestine. In that year a congress was held in Syria to support the Palestinian Arab cause. Arab resentment of the brutality of the French in Syria was beginning to be evident, too, as well as an Arab response to the outcry of the Egyptian nationalists against the British. In pan-Arab feeling lay a force which some thought might in the end override the divisions of the Hashemite Kingdoms.

Allied agreements during the war also complicated the history of the Ottoman homeland, Turkey (as it was soon to be renamed) itself. The British, French, Greeks and Italians had all agreed on their shares of the booty; the only simplification brought by the war had been the elimination of the Russian claim to Constantinople and the Straits. Faced with French, Greek and Italian invasion, the sultan signed a humiliating peace. Greece was given large concessions, Armenia was to be an independent state, while
what was left of Turkey was divided into British, French and Italian spheres of influence. This was the most blatant imperialism and a far harsher settlement than that imposed on Germany at Versailles. To drive home the point, European financial control was re-established.

There followed the first successful revision of any part of the peace settlement. It was largely the work of one man, a former Young Turk and the Ottomans’ only victorious general, Mustafa Kemal, who drove out the French and Greeks in turn after frightening away the Italians. With Bolshevik help he crushed the Armenians. The British decided to negotiate and so a second treaty was made with Turkey in 1923. It was a triumph of nationalism over the decisions at Paris, and it was the only part of the peace settlement which was negotiated between equals and not imposed on the defeated. It was also the only one in which Russian negotiators took part and it lasted better than any of the other peace treaties. The capitulations and financial controls disappeared. Turkey gave up her claims to the Arab lands and the islands of the Aegean, Cyprus, Rhodes and the Dodecanese. A big exchange of Greek and Turkish populations followed (380,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey and 1.3 million Orthodox Christians left Turkey for Greece) and thus the hatred of these peoples for one another was reinforced. Yet in the light of subsequent events this outcome could be reckoned one of the more fruitful exercises in ethnic cleansing in the region, leaving a less dangerous situation behind it than it found. So the Ottoman empire outside Turkey was wound up after six centuries. A new republic then came into existence in 1923 as a national state. Appropriately, the caliphate followed the empire into history in 1924. This was the end of the Ottoman era; of Turkish history, it was a new beginning. The Anatolian Turks were now for the first time in five or six centuries the majority people of their state. Symbolically, the capital was moved from Istanbul to Ankara.