Israel, A Promised Land

Concerning the validity of the Jewish Homeland

The Sharif Of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali (image from Jordan Times)

By

James Pew

It’s been two and a half months since I published The Case For Israel, the first essay in my series examining the founding, legitimacy, and exigency of the Jewish state. While both essays are just over 11,000 words each, the new one, Israel, A Promised Land, took at least twice as long to put together. Even though the first essay has double the footnotes, many of them were of articles and essays. The majority of the sources used in the following essay were books. It took a considerable amount of time to work through all the material. During the process, obviously I did a lot of writing, but there was also an insanely massive amount of reading, which explains the two and a half month delay.

I have a strange sort of bitter sweet feeling as I’m about to hit the publish button on this one. I honestly could have spent another two and half months delving even deeper into the historical material, and I could have included more details and more examples of the muddle that ensued at the British Cairo Office during the Great War (events that preceded the League of Nations and the assignment of Palestine as a British protectorate). But alas, all good things must come to an end, and if I awake in the middle of the night this week with a sudden terrible realization that some important datum was inadvertently left out, I can always take solace in the fact that its inclusion in a subsequent essay will correct the injustice. So, I can think of no more excuses to delay.

A final request before we begin. If you find value in my work, please consider upgrading to a paid membership, or making a donation here. I am a citizen funded researcher and journalist - all of the financial fuel that powers my efforts come from my readership. Thank you to all my illustrious contributors and supporters. Now, lets begin…

Introduction

The Indian Summer of an Empire

“The notion that during World War I the British government made conflicting commitments to Arabs, to the French, and to the Jews has become almost a cliche.”¹ - Isaiah Friedman

This essay and subsequent installments in my series on Israel, aims to examine the various myths and factually vacant historiographies which, at various times, have pervaded the discourse concerning the founding of Israel, and cast doubt on its legitimacy. Many untruths refuse to die. There are reliable academic sources which have debunked many false narratives regarding the creation of the Jewish Homeland in Palestine. However, as years go by, important scholarly works full of facts, evidence, and logical arguments which previously set the record straight, become overlooked and in some cases forgotten. In their place appear biased and false historical remembrance, flawed analysis, and unsound argument, perpetuated by anti-colonial Social Justice activists who seek to undermine the validity and moral standing of Israel, and the West in general.

That the Arab’s initially supported a Zionist return to Palestine (where the Jews could reconstitute their homeland) but then later changed their minds, is forgotten by many. Others have been taught that from the beginning Arabs in the Levant had always opposed Zionism, and that Zionism itself was an illegitimate colonial era theft and occupation of Arab land by the Jews with the backing of the evil British Empire.

Adjacent to the above myth is the false claim that Palestine was promised by the British during WWI to both the Jews and the Arabs. And further, that additional double dealing with their French allies concerning French interests in Syria (which included Palestine) underscores a general deviousness and immorality of British Imperial strategy. The point seems to be to enshroud the founding history of Israel in a cloak of controversy which undermines its national cogency. However, while mistakes and errors in judgment were made on the part of many influential British Officers, no such general condition of devious immorality existed.  Admittedly, at times the British maneuvered clumsily in order to satisfy the interests of their allies, the Arabs, and the Jews, as well as squaring their own legitimate interests and aspirations.  And while many promises concerning the general area of Arabia, Syria and Mesopotamia were made between Britain and the other interested groups mentioned, none of the arrangements were contradictory. The British did not Promise Palestine twice, as they are so often accused. 

The controversial 1999 book by historians Efraim and Inari Karsh, called Empires of the Sand: the struggle for mastery in the middle east 1789–1923, offers a revisionist history derived from an examination of source documents. This re-examination of the events that preceded the founding of Israel is consistent with previous dissident historians, like Isaiah Friedman and Elie Kourdie, who found that the standard narrative, as detailed by the Karsh’s in the following quote, was incommensurate with the facts:

According to conventional wisdom, “having made the declining Ottoman Empire ‘a field for [their] economic, political and military activities,’ the European powers—Britain, France, Russia, and Italy— used the Turks’ entry into the First World War ‘to fall upon the carcass’ and carve the defunct Muslim Empire into artificial entities, in accordance with their imperial interests and in complete disregard of the indigenous peoples’ yearning for political unity. By way of doing so they duped the naive and well-intentioned Arab nationalist movement into a revolt against its Ottoman suzerain, only to cheat it of the fruits of its struggle and to break the historical unity of this predominantly Arab area, thus sowing the seeds of the endemic malaise plaguing the Middle East to date.”²

An entire cannon of historical works have for decades upheld this standard historical narrative leading to its wide acceptance. Barely scratching the surface, some examples include, Arnold Toynbee’s 1931 The Present Situation in Palestine, George Antonius’ 1938 The Arab Awakening, George Kirk’s 1961 A Short History of the Middle East: From the Rise of Islam to Modern Times, Barbara Tuchman’s 1962 The Guns of August, George Lenczowski’s 1980 The Middle East in World Affairs, David Fromkin’s 1990  A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, Roger Owen’s 1992 State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East,  Edward W. Said’s 1995 Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Bernard Lewis’ 1995 The Middle East: 2000 Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day, and  L. Carl Brown’s, Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East. The trend continues into the 2000s stretching to the present day.

The conventional telling of Middle Eastern history exonerates the Ottomans of any responsibility for the fall of their empire. However, the truth is that the Ottomans had no real reason, other than imperial aggrandizement, to enter the war on the side of the Germans. The British had not up to that point been “sowing the seeds of the endemic malaise” in the Middle East. On the contrary they had propped up the failing Ottoman Empire on several occasions thereby extending its life long past the point where its “sickness” had become terminal.

In the 1830s the great European powers intervened and saved the Ottoman Empire “from certain destruction at the hands of one of its imperialist subjects, Egypt’s Governor Muhammad Ali.” In the 1850s, Britain and France saved the Ottomans from the Russians after an ill-fated Ottoman jihad. The great powers also stepped in, in the 1870s when an uprising occurred in the Ottoman Empire’s Balkan provinces, and again in 1913 when they prevented a war coalition of the Balkan states from attacking Istanbul.³

According to the Karsh’s, the “malaise” had more to do with the fact that “twentieth-century Middle Eastern history”  was “essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate,”⁴ and whatever influence or interference from the great powers was a secondary factor at best.

For some additional context, it's worth noting that during this period, the Arab-Muslims were in an unhappy arrangement as subjects to the Turkish-Muslims who, along with political authority, held the Islamic Caliphate (the highest command in the Islamic world), since the conquest of Mamluk Egypt in 1517. In the months leading up to WWI, when it was suspected the Ottomans might side with the Germans, there was confusion and disagreement as to the best way for the Triple Entente Powers (allied powers of Britain, France, and Russia) to steer through the ensuing chaos. 

This consequential period involves the fall of the Ottoman Empire.  And not long after, the British Empire would meet a similar fate. However, the years 1817 to 1914 (the first year of WWI), known as New Imperialism, was marked by aggressive expansion of empire on the part of European states. During and after the war, the British, French, and Russians were locked in a diplomatic struggle to divide up the Ottoman Empire into spheres of influence. But just as this period represents a final stage of a somewhat hyper-imperialism, an “Indian summer” for the British Empire, it also represents the rise of nationalism in the Middle East.

The Monistic Nature of Enlightenment Rationality

“In a world where values collide, rational solutions to all political questions are not available. Hence the rule of experts and specialists is in principle impossible, and tragic clashes and agonising choices, far from being a pathological anomaly, are an ineradicable part of the human condition.”⁵ - Roger Hausheer

Perhaps the most elusive dimension of the story examined herein - which features a contingent of British Officers who served in the Cairo Office in Egypt during WWI - still remains generally invisible to many academics and historians alike. The British Officers involved inserted moral judgment when clinical dispassionate appreciation of facts was needed. They made consequential decisions based on biased interpretations of events. Against what a logical examination of the scenario would have determined, they convinced themselves of a narrative and then ceased to exercise objectivity as the situation unfolded. They projected and moralized, and, as revealed by a minority of historians who were able to determine decades after the historiographical damage was done, they vastly misunderstood the substance of their own documents and communications.

How did this happen?

In order to find an answer to this question, let us first turn to the work of Isaiah Berlin. Specifically, his work on the history of ideas where he examined an unsung contribution of the counter-enlightenment. In detailing a tendency towards monism which pervaded the thinking of enlightenment intellectuals, Berlin offers “objective pluralism” as a means of relieving the tension between universalism and relativism. 

Berlin’s problem with enlightenment thinkers like Condorcet, Holbach, Helvétius and Rousseau, was their habit of taking universalism and the oneness of mankind too far. He also criticized the general enlightenment desire for finding single solutions to complex problems, whether moral or otherwise, referring to it as monism. This meant the imposition of scientific and mathematical processes, where neat and tidy solutions (correct answers) are the norm and expectation, onto the social/political affairs of humanity. This monistic urge, the desire for universal principles, as Berlin points out, was a driving force of totalitarianism.

In Berlin’s assessment, counter-enlightenment intellectuals, like Vico and Herder, understood that certain habits of enlightenment thought pushed it towards monism. It was recognized that an artificial oversimplification was the result of enlightenment tendencies to over-rationalize and over-reason. This hyper-objectivity triggered a reaction of subjectivity from the Romantics in the form of moral and cultural relativism, which in turn inspired what Berlin referred to as “objective pluralism”: multiple plausibly correct solutions to problems (including moral dilemmas) that do not fit into the reductive simplicity of monistic frameworks. 

As Berlin would see it, the former British officers under examination acted entirely as virtuous hedgehog’s, when the analytical framework of the Fox was needed. From Berlin’s essay The Hedgehog and the Fox: 

“... there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision ... and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory ... The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes ....”⁶ 

Objective Pluralism doesn’t provide a unidimensional answer, but a multidimensional explanation, which may require paragraphs of exposition in order to draw distinctions between contradictions. Pluralism, in the sense that Berlin used it, was a midway point between the objectivity of monism and the subjectivity of relativism. It meant the holding of multiple valid explanations to a single problem, without the taint of subjectivism. According to Berlin, that objective pluralism generally did not catch on to the same degree both monistic and relativistic thought did, was a huge missed opportunity for humanity. In the author's view, the lack of pluralistic capacity for analysis on the part of the British Officers discussed below, along with their tendencies to inject personal bias and moral judgment, greatly influenced the flawed conclusions regarding the consequential events covered. Conclusions which poisoned the historiography of the period.

It is in part this tendency towards the simple answer, towards the monistic explanation, that is the most interesting of the dimensions to be examined here. Affecting historiographical processes to this day, it remains perhaps the most difficult tangle to sort out.

It is worth under-lining that romanticism, which brought us such vapid but sticky ideas as those who hold power are always morally deficient compared with those who do not, was a reaction to the reason and rationality of the enlightenment. It follows, under this naive romantic conception, that all dealings the more powerful have with the less powerful are oppressive. And, regardless of any incapacity the less powerful may have in regards to developing the natural resources in their immediate areas, when the more powerful offer partnership in development, any return of profit the powerful obtain, is considered exploitation.

The moral hand-wringing and self-doubt, caused in part by an excess of enlightenment rationality, and the relativism it inspired, was in many ways responsible for the demise of the British Empire. As was seen in the various WWI correspondence of the British Officers in question, and in public remarks they made after the war, a lack of confidence in, and belief in the civilizing and development mission of British imperialism was apparent, as was a tendency to reach neatly wrapped monistic moral conclusions, which seemed always to reflect poorly on the powerful, while romanticizing the less powerful as moral puritans and hapless victims.

A tendency for high-minded equivocation, biases, misinterpretation of intelligence, and misapplication of moral concerns, on the part of these influential British Officers led to grave errors in judgment leading to a number of unfortunate and consequential missteps. Ultimately, enlightened habits of mind led to second-guessing, the misguided application of virtue, and the loss of confidence on behalf of the British. This lamentable state of mind was perhaps most responsible for both the fall of the British Empire and the mess created in the Middle East after the Great War.

Israel, the Jewish Homeland

Turning to Israel, a product of this turbulent period. The fate of the Jewish Homeland was in the hands of the British and allied powers who made various Zionist pledges through a number of official documents, declarations and agreements. However, the final decisions regarding the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, as well as the partitioning of the remaining areas of the former Ottoman Empire, were made after the war with the establishment of the League of Nations, who then divided the area into protectorates administered by Britain and France according to their respective interests.

“To be sure, the attribution of spheres of privileged economic treatment within the Arab State to the two great powers reflected their paternalistic perception of independence; but this notion of independence was fully in line with the spirit and custom of the day.”⁷ - Efraim & Inari Karash

Britain was ultimately assigned the mandate for Palestine. Although it was not a straight line to get there. Much politics, including secret meetings and regrettable correspondences, took place before the former Ottoman Empire was re-assembled along terms laid out by the League of Nations. However, because confusion over pledges made by the British to the Arabs during negotiations aimed at securing Arab support in the war have been used to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Israel, as have the related conclusions drawn by many historians concerning British “double dealing,” it is important to examine the facts and evidence and get to the bottom of what actually happened. Even if the answers turn out to be complex, untidy, objectively pluralistic and morally unsatisfying, which in most realms of reality, is exactly the case. Either way, I will do my best to lay it all out in as organized and concise a manner as possible.

Middle East Historiography

The Stories We Tell; The Things We Believe

One of the key British historians who is among the most responsible for disseminating a flawed interpretation of the events discussed herein, is Arnold Toynbee. His influence cannot be overstated. Even in recent decades the echo of his misformulations still resonate. Examples include a group of Palestinians who requested that the British apologize for the Balfour Declaration in 2003. And in 2016, an Israeli Jewish woman published a book called A Land Twice Promised. 

Toynbee was personally involved in the object of our examination, he was an intelligence officer in the British Foreign Office in 1915, and later, a delegate at the Paris Peace Conference. Because of this, his historical work was given extra weight. However, modern historians, with the benefit of new access to war archives (declassified in the 1960s), were able to re-examine the communications and documents that formed the basis of Toynbee’s analysis. Their findings were that Toynbee misread the situation. Having all of the records from 1915-1920 from all of the relevant departments, and the time to analyze them thoroughly, is not a luxury Toynbee had. However, even so, over time he seems to have flip-flopped his position. 

Historian Isaiah Friedman asks why, in 1918, did Toynbee recommend “Britain assume the role of trustee of the Jewish National Home, rather than hand Palestine to the Arabs, if he thought that it was included in the boundaries of Arab independence?” 

The Arab Awakening: Arab Nationalism

Historians debate over the nature and origins of Arab Nationalism.  A foundational text in this area is George Antonius’ 1938 book The Arab Awakening. While accepted in many scholarly circles as part of the standard historiography, other academics view Antonius’ book as containing an Arab victim narrative that can be refuted with careful examination of relevant historical documents.  However, in some ways The Arab Awakening was a deeply researched examination into the culture of the Arab World in the first decades of the 20th century.

Antonius imparts the conventional view that a national Arab identity began to take shape among Arab speaking people in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century, then expanded into a political movement during WWI. However, political scientist Adeed Dawisha argues in his 2003 volume, Arab Nationalism: In the Twentieth Century, that Antonius’s account fails to distinguish between Islamic identity, regional loyalties and Arab nationalism, and fails to recognize that the famous Arab Revolt of WWI was proclaimed in the name of Islam, not Arabism. According to revisionist historian Avi Shlaim, “the Arab Revolt therefore ought to be excised from the chronicles of Arab nationalism.”⁸  

From The Arab Awakening:

 “The attribute of disunion, as between one tribe and another, was inherent in the structure of the Arabian society with its clannish organisation and numerous divisions and fractions. Within each clan, there reigned the very opposite of disunity: a strong sense of solidarity and a passionate, unquestioning devotion to the interests of the clan and its good name, beside which the conventional notion of patriotism seems a cold, mental affair. But no such bond united one tribe to the other…”⁹ 

The contradictions are apparent. Described in the above excerpt is a people who do not sound even remotely capable of pulling off a coordinated uprising adequate to overthrow the Turkish Empire. Yet exaggerations and factual inaccuracies concerning the contribution the Arabs made to the war effort, central to the claims of Arab leaders after the war, are found throughout The Arab Awakening (which contributed greatly to the proliferation of controversy around commitments Britain allegedly made to the Arabs). 

Did the British renege on a pledge they made to the Arabs? It is clear there exists a widespread desire to believe so. But what the facts, documents, and logic show is that not all conclusions and judgments by historians concerning the actions and behaviour of Britain and her officers during the Great War hold up to the scrutiny evidentiary processes of objective inquiry demand.

The Chatham House Version 

Founded in 1920, the British think tank, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, known as Chatham House, was, through its various publications, largely responsible for the wide acceptance of the standard narrative of Middle Eastern historiography concerning the period examined in this work. It should come as no surprise that the Director for Studies from 1925 to 1955 was Arnold Toynbee.

In 1970, British historian Elie Kourdie remarked that Chatham House publications, which “for some three decades, came out under the auspices of the Institute, are seen on examination to have in common not only a publisher's imprint, but also assumptions, attitudes, and a whole intellectual style which make it possible to speak of the Chatham House Version.”¹⁰

That style in many ways was influenced by Toynbee, who’s unorthodox approach considers “all political activity as a homogeneous whole in which accident, circumstance, intuition and character are quite unimportant, and to look upon every political act as, by definition, morally equivalent to every other political act, equally heinous and equally pernicious.” To this Kourdie remarks, “to distinguish and to specify is required not only of the historian, but also of the judge…But eagerness to deliver a moral verdict has resulted here in a failure to distinguish and to specify, to the detriment both of moral and of historical judgment.¹¹

From the 1950s through the 1990s, Kourdie was a dissenting voice who departed from the standard “Chatham House Version” of history in which the West was cast as perpetrator in the drawn out Arab victim narrative that became the accepted historiography of the Middle East. Far from towing that line, Kourdie instead criticized left-wing scholars whom he accused of having a “romantic view of Islam.”¹²

Born in Baghdad, Kourdie’s background was Iraqi-Jewish. His doctoral thesis (published in 1956) admonished the British for their encouragement of Arab nationalism, and painted a negative picture of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), “who has done more than anybody else to glorify Sharif Hussein’s revolt.”¹³ He asserted that the British imposed “a militantly Arab nationalist regime upon a diverse society,”¹⁴ through their 1921 creation of the Kingdom of Iraq (out of the ashes of the former Ottoman Empire).

Iraq had a flourishing Jewish population predating the Arab conquest of the seventh century, but this came to an end in the twentieth century with the rise of Arabo-Islamic nationalism. During this period most Jews fled Iraq to escape persecution. Kourdie saw so-called heroic figures like Lawrence of Arabia as irresponsible adventurers who advocated for a movement that meant Kourdie no longer belonged in his place of birth.

Kourdie did not see the “Arab Awakening” of Antonius’ imagination. Instead he viewed nationalism in the Middle East as “a retrogression to the region's worst autocratic tendencies.” In the 1970 essay The Chatham House Version, Kourdie attacked Arnold Toynbee and held him “partly responsible for the British abdication of responsibility for the state of the Middle East.” He balked at Toynbee’s criticism of the British Empire, arguing instead that the British “had been a positive institution whose decline had brought disaster to its former colonies, most notably in the Middle East.”¹⁵

With that little bit of historiographical house keeping out of the way, the following sections will now focus on the historical events I have so far only poked at. To begin, one of the key characters of our story was Hussein bin Ali, King of Hejaz, and Sharif and Emir of Mecca.

World War I (1914 -1918)

Hussein bin Ali: The Grand Sharif of Mecca

The extent to which the interests of the camel-owning-population of Arabia at the turn of the twentieth century influenced the consequential course of events which resulted in a world order that for the most part still pervades to this day, is not well understood. The Ottomans had plans to extend the Hejaz railway into Mecca which was thought to be damaging to camel-owning Arabs who rented their camels to annual travelers making the pilgrimage. This was a big industry and a big deal for the Arabs in the Hejaz. 

When a new vali from the Turkish government, Wahib Bey, arrived in Mecca in order to tighten and consolidate Ottoman plans and authority, the Arabs were desperate to counter this encroachment and threat to their way of life. It was on this premise that the Arabs, with seditious intent, first approached the British looking for support to oppose Turkish oppression. As the Turks had not yet entered the war, these early propositions from the Arabs were met with disinterest by the British who were not about to threaten what they viewed as friendly relations with the Ottoman Empire. However, everything changed once the Turks sided with the Central Powers.

Indeed, what resulted, considered by historians as the first organized movement of Arab nationalism, is known as the Arab Revolt. Not surprisingly, the key figure of this ill-fated Arab nationalist movement was an Islamic religious leader: the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali. 

Sharif Hussein was born in Constantinople in the Ottoman Empire, in 1854. As the eldest son of Sharif Ali bin Muhammad of the Hashemite dynasty, Sharif Hussein was a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. His ancestors were the last of four branches of Hashemite sharifs who had ruled the sharifate of Mecca since the 11th century.  Hussein became Sharif in 1908.

When, after much reluctance and preparations, Sharif Hussein finally ordered the Arab Revolt, marking the beginning of the Anglo-Arab partnership, his first public proclamation “took his stand on the two platforms of religion and nationalism,”  but he “spoke as one who was primarily concerned with the welfare of Islam.”¹⁶ Hussein called on Muslims throughout the world to join the revolt against Turkey in the name of Islamic solidarity. 

British Intelligence and Strategy

“The ambiguities of Anglo-Sharifian diplomacy were to be the occasion, in later years, of much controversy, but at the time the British officials in Cairo, made aware by the Foreign Office of possible French claims and of the need for caution, framed their proposals to the sharif in such a manner that they could be consistent with any possible Anglo-French agreement - which at the time still remained to be negotiated.”¹⁷ - Elie Kedourie

In 1914, before the Turkish Ottoman Empire entered the war, relations with Britain were stable. During this period, British military strategists were faced with a complex situation with many variables. One being, what to do if the Turks sided with the Germans. In this scenario (which turned out to be true), the British could possibly align with the Arabs in the region (who were subjects of the Ottoman Empire). It was thought that Arabs under Ottoman authority would be able to rise up in sufficient numbers.  However, in many cases, in dealing with the Arabs, intelligence and its analysis turned out to be wrong, and consequential decisions based on flawed information were common.

As mentioned previously, an important factor which influenced events: the Ottoman Turks not only held political power throughout their empire, which stretched from parts of Southeast Europe, to West Asia, and North Africa, but the Ottoman Caliph, the highest title in Islam, was also the Sultan (ruler) of the Ottoman Empire. Mehmed V, like centuries of previous Ottoman Sultans, held the supreme Islamic authority over those parts of the Islamic world both within and without the Ottoman Empire.

The British were considering the possibility of enticing the Arab’s throughout Arabia and the Fertile Crescent to revolt against their Ottoman rulers. They would do this primarily in two ways. One was by promising to support an Arab Caliphate, thereby facilitating the transfer of the supreme authority in Islam to the Arabs. This was a big deal in the Islamic world, which included countries with massive Muslim populations like India, who were supportive of the Ottoman Caliphate. The other way in which the British were to incentivize the Arabs was by a pledge to support “Arab Independence” from Ottoman rule. The question became whether Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, and Mesopotamia (Iraq) would unite and support a general Arab Revolt against the Turks.

Discussions with Arab leaders began before the Turks entered the war, however, the British were careful at this point to remain non-committal and reiterate that they would not support Arab aspirations against their Turkish rulers while the British remained on friendly terms with the Turkish government. It was not until the Turks sided with the Central powers that the nature of discussions changed dramatically. At this point, British officers in the Cairo Office in Egypt began negotiating the terms of an Arab Revolt, and possible British support for an Arab Caliphate, with the Sharif of Mecca, the man believed to be capable of uniting the Arab world.

On November 5, 1914, the day of the formal declaration of war between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, a telegram, drafted by Lord Herbert Kitchener (who was at the time Consul-General at the Egypt Office) and approved by Sir Edward Grey (the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs), instructed that a message from the former to Abdullah bin al-Hussein (one of four of Sharif Hussein’s sons) be sent as follows: 

“Germany has bought the Turkish Government with gold, notwithstanding that England, France and Russia guaranteed the integrity of the Ottoman Empire if the Turks remained neutral in this war. The Turkish Government have, against the will of the Sultan, through German pressure, committed acts of aggression by invading the frontiers of Egypt with armed bands of Turkish soldiers.

If the Arab nation assist England in this war that has been forced upon us by Turkey, England will guarantee that no internal intervention takes place in Arabia, and will give Arabs every assistance against external foreign aggression. It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Khalifate at Mecca or Medina, and so good may come by the help of God out of all the evil that is now occurring.”¹⁸ 

This hinting at a Caliphate in Medina or Mecca, implying that Abdullah’s father the Sharif of Mecca would be the future holder of that title, is important to point out because it was an unwise and unsolicited offer from the British. The temptation this implanted in the Sharif, and the trouble this caused in the greater Islamic world, cannot be overstated.

The previous September the intelligence department of the Egyptian war office in Cairo produced a paper called Appreciation of Situation in Arabia. The paper asserted that the Arabs were actively uniting. It also expressed concern over the potential that Arabs may be won over by the Turks and Germans. However, this turned out to be a flawed analysis. There was no unity in the Arab world. Sharif Hussein was supported in the Hajez, but Bin Saud in the Nejaz was his sworn enemy. And, neither the Imam Yehia of Yemen nor the Idrissi of Asir were much interested in allying with the Sharif of Mecca. 

How the British came to believe that Sharif Hussein’s reach extended over the Arabian Peninsula, and into both Syria and Mesopotamia was influenced by two clandestine meetings that took place in 1914. 

Abdullah initiated the first meeting in February of 1914 with Lord Kitchener, to give him “an account of the strained relations between the Turkish authorities and the Sharif…In guarded language, he tried to sound Kitchener as to the British Government’s attitude in the event of a conflict breaking out openly between Turks and Arabs.”¹⁹ Kitchener’s opinion that Britain would not intervene due to then friendly relations with the Turks discouraged Abdullah. However, in a subsequent meeting with Oriental Secretary Ronald Storrs, Abdullah, in characteristic bluntness, asked Storrs if Kitchener would supply the Sharif with machine guns.²⁰ He also claimed “the Arabs were concentrating and solidifying,” and will “before long be in complete unity with each other and with the Sharifate.”²¹ 

The war had broken out on July 28th 1914, with Britain drawn into the conflict the following month. In September, Lord Kitchener, who had been newly appointed Secretary of State for War, instructed Storrs to ascertain from Abudallah if the Sharif would side with Britain in the event the Turks entered the war on the wrong side (which they did six weeks later). Choosing not to commit to a definite position in order to first establish an “absolute guarantee of Arab independence,”  Sharif Hussein wrote a letter to Storrs, signed by Abdullah, “in which he defined himself as being willing to come to an understanding with Great Britain, but unable yet to depart from the neutrality which his position in Islam bound him to observe.”²² 

The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the Arab Revolt

The next volley of exchanges became the source of much controversy. Known as the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence. Initiated by the Sharif in the summer of 1915 (well after the internal paper mentioned above in which the British had overestimated the extent of Arab unity). It was a series of 10 letters between Sharif Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon who was High Commissioner in Egypt at the time. After the war, Hussein claimed that McMahon promised Britain would support an independent Arab nation, spanning Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria (including Palestine).

Years later, in 1937, McMahon wrote a statement published in the London Times responding to the controversy, “I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised. I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein.”²³

For years it has been the contention of anti-colonial scholars that the British were guilty of double dealing between the Arabs and the Allies concerning their plans for Palestine. According to the standard “Chatham House” version, after the Arabs mounted their revolt against the Turks, the British reneged on promises to help the Arabs create the independent state they had envisioned. As well, it was claimed, the British had promised much of Syria (including Palestine) to both the Arabs and the French. 

There was confusion over the term “Arab Independence,” and over the area that would become an Arab state. Throughout officialdom were differing views concerning Arab nationalism. Some diplomats and military leaders advocated for mixed elements of European state nationalism and Pan-Arabism. While others, perhaps caught up in romantic notions of desert culture consistent with the philo-Arabism embodied in a sizable faction of British officials, argued for a unified pan-Arabic empire. Others felt this was an impossibility due to the many tribal rivalries and divisions within the Arab world. Sir Reginald Wingate, who was the Governor General of the Sudan until he replaced McMahon as High Commissioner in Egypt in 1917, felt that “a federation of semi-independent Arab states . . . linked together by racial and religious bonds, owing spiritual allegiance to a single Arab Primate, and looking to Great Britain as its Patron and Protector,”²⁴ was the best way to secure Arab independence.

Additional confusion was added by the British promise to protect “Mohammedan Holy Places,” along with their unsolicited offer to support a possible Arab Caliphate.

One key geographic region under dispute was Palestine. Based on the contentious letters of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the Arabs claimed Palestine was promised to them. However, Friedman has done a thorough investigation of the issue. From his book, The Question of Palestine:

“Textual examination of the (McMahon-Hussein) Correspondence alone will not lead us far. The task of interpretation requires a reconstruction of what went on behind the official facade and a scrutiny of the motives and expectations of the chief dramatis personae.”

According to Friedman, the British and French wanted “to make the creation of an Arab entity possible, as well as to harmonise it with their own legitimate interests in that region.”²⁵ Karsh provides the details of a relevant exchange on October 21, 1915, when Sir Edward Grey notified the French ambassador to London, Paul Cambon, of the correspondence with the sharif and suggested that discussions be held concerning their respective interests in Ottoman Asia. Cambon agreed and assigned François Georges-Picot,²⁶ who soon after met with Mark Sykes. 

The  Sykes-Picot negotiations were held concurrently with the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence. In the spring of 1917 Sharif Hussein was informed of the details of this Anglo-French agreement, and gave it his blessing.²⁷ These pieces of the puzzle, when placed in proper sequence, present a picture where the three main parties involved - the British, the French, the Arabs - were fully aware of each other's interest, desires, and intentions. This is not a picture of double-dealing and duplicity, but forthright negotiation.

Two exchanges from Sir Edward Grey are illuminating. The first was a note Grey sent on April 14, 1916, to Sir Wingate, authorizing him to inform the Sharif of Mecca that the British government ‘will make it an essential condition, in any terms of peace, that the Arabian Peninsula and its Mohammedan Holy Places should remain in the hands of an independent Sovereign Moslem State.” It should be noted that Palestine falls outside of the Arabian Peninsula.

In the second note from Grey, addressed to the British Ambassador in Rome, dated September of 1916, he explains the nature of a British response to the Sharifs request for recognition of an independent Arab State: “the British had prepared to do that if he (the Sharif) succeeded in establishing his independence; for all we were pledged to was that the Moslem holy places should remain in independent Moslem hands.”

The British were prepared to support Arab independence in whatever area the Arabs were able to win it. That is, the regions they were able to wrestle away from the Turks. Further, the British also made a special pledge to protect Islamic religious sites, but outside of these sacred places it was up to the Arabs “to make good their aspirations to independence.”

However, as was understood by the French and British, even if the Arabs did conquer substantial territory, they had little chance of “being able to stand on their own feet,” therefore “it was quite natural for the British and French Govern­ment to fill the vacuum and assume the role of 'protectors'.” Without this, Turkish aggression would have surely prevented an Arab state.

Friedman asserts that it was in the context of freedom from the yoke of Turkish rule that Arab Independence should be understood. He quotes from the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, where McMahon assures the Sharif that no resolution of peace will be met, “of which the freedom of the Arab peoples and their liberation from the German and Turkish domination do not form an essential condition’.”²⁸ 

Friedman asserts further, “The term ’independence’ was merely a euphemism for supersession of Turkish rule by British and French in their respective spheres of interests.”

In 1925, the honoured scholar, and mentor to the infamous Lawrence of Arabia, David G. Hogarth, contended that the British did not “ever explicitly guarantee or even promise anything beyond liberation from the Turk.”²⁹ Seven years earlier, as head of the Arab Bureau in Cairo, he was responsible for what became known as the Hogarth Message. This was a reply sent to the Sharif responding to his query about British plans to support a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, which was detailed in the Balfour Declaration.

From the Hogarth Message of January 1918:

“So far as Palestine is concerned… Since the Jewish opinion of the world is in favour of a return of Jews to Palestine…in so far as is compatible with the freedom of the existing population both economic and political, no obstacle should be put in the way of the realisation of this ideal.”³⁰

During the McMahon-Hussein exchanges, McMahon made it clear he thought negotiating borders of a future Arab state was premature while the war was still going on. It seemed a “waste of time” to be dividing up something not yet held in their hands. The Sharif on the other hand made grand claims of an Arab Nation encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, Syria and Mesopotamia (Iraq), and insisted the British agree on his desiderata. 

Did he really think he could raise an army suitable to liberate this enormous region from the Turks? Or was he casting a wide net, as is common at the onset of negotiations? Not all British officers were fooled. While the Arabs managed to liberate Mecca and keep thousands of Turkish and German soldiers tied up, allowing the British to make key advances on other fronts, they did not even come close to achieving the delusions of grandeur articulated by Hussein in his letters to McMahon. 

The first letter from Sharif Hussein to McMahon was received on July 14, 1915 (four months before the Turks entered the war). The Sharif’s messenger, Bin Arif, claimed that Arab soldiers in the Ottoman army were prepared to defect and join an Arab revolt led by Sharif Hussein. An assertion Ronald Storrs found unlikely. In the letter, the Shariff requested “England to acknowledge the independence of the Arab countries…”, then listed the boundaries previously determined by Arab secret societies in a document called the Damascus Protocol given to Hussein’s son, Faisal, in May of 1915. 

These secret societies, al-Fatat and al-Ahd, told Faisal they would support his fathers revolt if he showed the Damascus Protocol to the British. The boundaries laid out in this document would later form the basis of the Arab claim that British promises were not met. The influence of these secret societies, as will be shown, played an important role in the position expressed by McMahon during the exchanges.

Also in the letter, the Sharif requested that England "approve of the proclamation of an Arab Khalifate of Islam." This is an important dimension to keep in mind. The centrality of Islam. As well, the temptation and desire the Sharif had for the title of Caliph. The Ottomans were the holders of the Islamic Caliphate, and when they declared war on the allies, they declared jihad. This was intended to rally the entire Islamic world. Because the British had previously hinted they would support an Arab Caliphate, Hussein’s letter formalized the proposition by requesting they back his claim to the sacred Islamic title. Further, when Hussein finally proclaimed the Arab Revolt, he did so in the name of Islam. For all intents and purposes, from the perspective of the Islamic world, the Arab Revolt was a holy war.

The following is a short excerpt from Efraim and Inari Karsh’s Empires of Sand, where they explain the mindset of Sharif Hussein at the time of the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence:

“The spiritual caliphate offered by McMahon meant nothing to the sharif. He viewed the traditional position of caliph as both the temporal and the religious headship of the Muslim community, and if anything, he was interested in the temporal power bestowed by this supreme post. He had used the sharifate of Mecca as a springboard for political aggrandizement, not for religious piety. And just as he had sought British ‘infidel’ support to obtain that revered Muslim post and to defy the wishes of his lawful Muslim suzerain, the Ottoman sultan-caliph, he now used a Christian power to sponsor his quest for the caliphate and the political power that accompanied it. From a religious point of view this was sheer blasphemy, and it would have made no sense for Hussein to risk his spiritual standing unless the caliphate was a code word for the vast Arab empire demanded in his first letter.”³¹

Historian Elie Kedourie, in a monograph published in 1976 which examines in depth the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, called In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and its Interpretations 1914-1939, provides the following comparison between the Sharifian and British interpretation of Caliphate:

In the spring of 1917, for the first time “someone in Cairo realized that Husayn meant one thing by the caliphate, while the British who had so insouciantly dangled it before his eyes meant quite another. The writer of an unsigned Arab Bureau paper dealing with Husayn’s memorandum cited Kitchener’s hint in the message of October 1914, and its emphatic amplification by McMahon the following August, and added: ‘it should be noted that to the Sharif, both temporal and spiritual power are included in the word Caliphate and a much wider meaning has therefore been given by him…than was intended by H.M.G.”³²

British officers were shocked at the grandiosity of Hussein's first letter to McMahon. Storrs commented on this initial correspondence, “We could not conceal from ourselves (and with difficulty from him) that his pretensions bordered upon the tragi-comic.” 

(The photo above is from Empires of the Sand - pg 214)

McMahon’s response to the Sharif was simply to confirm British "desire for the independence of Arabia and its inhabitants,” and “approval of the Arab Khalifate." However, he left out any clarification concerning the boundaries of Arabia. He also pointed out that the Arab’s in Syria, had “lent their assistance to the Germans and the Turks,” not the British. This in part explains the general skepticism of some British officers concerning Hussein’s claims. McMahon’s noncommittal response triggered the Sharif, in his second letter, to press McMahon on the issue of definite borders. Hussein was clear that agreement was “dependent only on your refusal or acceptance of the question” of geographic boundaries.  

McMahon’s response to the Sharif, dated October 24, 1915, five days before the Turks entered the war, is perhaps the most controversial. In this letter, McMahon seems to reverse course from his previous reluctance to spell out boundaries. He acknowledges the importance of agreeing on limits and states that:

 “...the two districts of Mersina and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo cannot be said to be purely Arab, and should be excluded from the limits demanded... As for those regions lying within those frontiers wherein Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interests of her ally, France... Great Britain is prepared to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sharif of Mecca."

Why would McMahon reverse course like this when in his previous letter he had mentioned that the Syrian Arabs were supporting the Turks? Wouldn’t the Syrian Arabs be needed for the Arab revolt against the Turks? Friedman explores this question in depth. His contention is that a consequential visit to the British Cairo office by Muhammad Sharif al-Faruqi, an Arab officer who defected from the Turkish Army, and member of the al-Ahd secret society, sparked a turning-point in the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence.

Al-Faruqi’s claim was that the Arab secret societies in Mesopotamia and Syria were willing to join the Sharif in an Arab revolt, if the British agreed to support Arab independence. Further, according to Faruqi, the secret societies had been offered money and support from the Germans and Turks to join them, but preferred to work with the British. It seemed the situation required a rapid response. However, Friedman lays out a rationale based on documents, and public statements made by leaders which illustrate support was firmly in the German/Ottoman camp. He quotes a statement made in December of 1915 by Dr. Pruffer, the Consul-General in Damascus, concerning the anti-Turk movement which,

“appears much to be weakened. Among the wealthier middle classes reformism has scarcely any supporters and among the small landowners, merchants and workers, who constitute the bulk of the population, the cause of the Ottoman Government is quite popular . . . The brilliant successes of the Ottoman army strengthened the confidence of the people in the future of the Empire.” 

And five months later, Dr. Puffer’s successor reiterated a similar sentiment when he stated “no rebellion need be feared in Syria. The Syrians are shopkeepers but no warriors. They are little gifted for the profession of revolutionaries.”

In spite of this, according to Karsh, “British officials in Cairo would not be troubled by any twinge of self-doubt. Having long advocated the merits of an Anglo-sharifan alliance, they had no intention of questioning the authenticity of the ‘ultimate proof’ (Faruqi) that had unexpectedly fallen into their hands; it just fitted too neatly with their preconceptions.”³³

General Sir John Maxwell, Officer Commanding in Egypt, took Faruqi's claims seriously, he pressed Lord Kitchener “to meet Hussein’s wishes,” and, referring to the Arab secret societies, “if their overtures are rejected, or a reply is delayed . . . the Arab party  will go over to the enemy and work with them . . . On the other hand, their active assistance . . . in return for our support, would be of the greatest value in Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine.” 

In the Cairo Office, it was “Storrs, Wingate, and Gilbert Clayton, the director of military intelligence, who, together with their former master-turned-secretary-of-war Lord Kitchener, had conceived of separating the Arabic speaking subjects of the Ottoman Empire from their suzerain as a means of winning the war in the East.”³⁴

Grey, correctly, had his suspicions. Faruqi had made vastly exaggerated claims concerning the manpower and resources of the Arab secret societies. Grey had warned McMahon not to give the impression to the Arabs that the British supported Arab independence in Syria, where it was known by all parties that the French had interests. However, McMahon’s consequential letter of October 24, 1915 was dispatched “without further consultation.”  In Friedman’s words, “the Rubicon was crossed. The Arabs won their Magna Carta and Great Britain a standing embarrassment. The responsibility was solely that of McMahon.”

The Indian Office was startled by this development. Muslim loyalty to the British had weakened since war had been declared on the Turks. The Muslims of India were supportive of the Turkish Caliphate, which meant McMahon’s overtures to the Sharif about a possible Arab Caliphate were problematic.  Austen Chamberlain, Secretary of State for India, disturbed by McMahon’s letter, proclaimed that the Grand Sharif of Mecca was ‘a nonentity without power to carry out his proposals’, the Arabs were ’without unity and with no possibility of uniting’ their followers.”

Senior British officers felt that McMahon had negotiated “without great wisdom.” McMahon disagreed as he and others in the Cairo Office were far more credulous of the Sharifs claims. It is possible that the Cairo Officials didn’t actually believe the narrative they had constructed from the claims of Faruqi and the Sharif. In that case, it is plausible that McMahon and the other officers in the Cairo office professed their credulity in order to deploy a strategy that they believed would turn out much differently. According to Karsh:

“Had Britain adhered to its original position of recognizing Hussein as the ruler of the Hijaz, with or without the title of the caliphate—a solution that corresponded to the delicate balance of power and loyalties in the Arabian Peninsula—the sharif’s imperial ambitions might have died peacefully. As things were, the promise of an empire was to excite the imagination of generations of pan-Arabists and to create a lasting source of friction and acrimony, both among the Arabs themselves and between the Arabs and the West.”³⁵

Karsh goes on to summarize the gravity of the break from protocol made by McMahon concerning the unapproved letter sent to the Sharif in October of 1915:

“The importance of McMahon’s letter cannot be overstated. It signified a break with the established British position, based on the quite accurate reading of the diversity and fragmentation of the Arabic-speaking peoples, that a united Arab empire was a chimera. On the basis of no more than the account of an obscure member of two small secret societies, Cairo had committed His Majesty’s government to creating a vast empire for the sake of a local potentate (Sharif Hussein), whom they had hitherto deemed to represent none other than himself, and who, in the view of significant segments of British officialdom, did not command the loyalty and empathy of most of his would-be diverse subjects.”³⁶

To McMahon’s credit the following critical piece was included in his exchanges with Hussein:

McMahon to Hussein-

“. . . It is most essential that you spare no effort to attach all the Arab peoples to our united cause and urge them to afford no assistance to our enemies. It is on the success of these efforts and on the more active measures which the Arabs may thereafter take in support of our cause, when the time for action comes, that the permanence and strength of our agreement must depend.”

When the Sharif responded that he understood, he essentially confirmed that the agreement was not unilateral and that its “strength and permanence” depended on the success of Arab efforts. Further, the McMahon-Correspondence was an agreement made through the exchange of telegrams, not a treaty. Not an official declaration signed by a consortium of global principal powers, like the Mandate for Palestine (which still functions as Israel's legally binding land title deed). Regardless, the Arab’s milked the McMahon pledges for all they were worth and exaggerated their status to an “Arab Magna Carta” which they asserted was proof of Arab ownership of all of Palestine (from the river to the sea).

However, the pledges made by McMahon in his exchanges with Sharif Hussein were not unilateral. They were contingent on the success of the uprising of Arabs across the entire area discussed in the letters. The performance of Arab armies would determine if the objectives pledged by Hussein were achieved. It was confirmed in Hussein’s letters that he understood this. In the aftermath of the Arab Revolt it was clear that Hussein’s united Arab armies fell far short of what he had pledged to the British. However, the scrutiny and controversy is overwhelmingly focused on the pledges made by, not to, the British. 

A balanced reading of both sides, taken with a general understanding of the context of the times, the severity of the situation and its intense need for haste (due to the imminence of war), might lead an objective thinker to see that fairness did not elude the Arabs, it could not have, considering their poor military performance alone. An equal weighing of the situation might lead one to conclude that the Arab’s made out better than they ought to have, and to ask in all seriousness, exactly what it is that they have been complaining about.

According to Friedman, after the war:

“...the British had misread Hussein’s mind. In 1915-16 it suited him to give the impression of a moderate negotiator, ready to make concessions, but after the Turks had been defeated, he put his claims at their highest. He referred to his understanding with McMahon as an ‘agreement’, though the Correspondence had no contractual validity. Moreover, he substituted ‘independence of Arab [i.e. Sharifian] Kingdom ’, extending over Syria and Mesopotamia (a phrase not used by McMahon) for ‘independence of the Arabs’, and took the meaning of ‘independence’ in its literal sense. He completely ignored the reservations imposed by the British Government in their replies.”

To be clear, the British had promised to support Arab (political) Independence wherever the Sharifian army was able to establish it. Further, the British pledged to support an Arab Caliphate, which referred to religious authority. Sharif Hussein later deliberately conflated this religious authority into political authority over areas he claimed Britain “promised” Arab independence. Very crafty indeed.

In order to illustrate the failure of the Sharifian Army to meet its military objectives, a few details concerning the Arab Revolt are worth highlighting. Even though the British had given the Arabs guns and money, in February of 1916 McMahon was informed by Hussein that ‘owing to dispersal of chiefs’, the Syrians were unable to raise substantial support or achieve military objectives. This essentially crossed Syria off the list of Arab regions Hussein pledged would join the revolt. Hussein then requested that the British provide more financial aid. It was fast becoming apparent to the British officers involved that a general Arab uprising seemed little more than a Sharifian pipe dream. Hogarth concluded that the British had been misled: “The Sharif had always posed as spokesman of the Arab Nation, but in fact no such entity or organisation existed; ‘nor, given the history, economic environment and character of the Arabs, can it be expected to exist’.³⁷

The Sharif had claimed he could raise a force of 250,000 Arabs, but it turned out that only a few thousand formed a reliable fighting force. It was claimed in The Arab Awakening, that at certain points during the Arab Revolt, the total number of Arab soldiers swelled to over 70,000. But in these cases the number of soldiers armed with rifles were fewer than 20,000, and of those with arms, most were not trained in the tactics of modern warfare so did not have the skill to be effective against the more disciplined Turkish and German armies. 

The British, who were under no obligation to rescue the Sharif,  found it necessary to intervene immediately after the Arab Revolt began. British officers were livid. It was the Sharif who was supposed to provide military assistance, not the other way around. From the beginning of the Arab Revolt it was obvious to most officers in the High Command that they had been fooled by Sharif Hussein.

In 1916 the British created an Arab Legion to support the beleaguered Sharifian forces, and to inspire nationalist aspirations in the Arabs of Syria and Mesopotamia. In spite of British propaganda efforts, the Arab Legion did not result in the raising of a united Arab army to fight for Arab independence.

In an effort to consolidate Arab support, on October 3rd 1916, the Sharif had himself declared King of the Arabs, distinguishing him as the sovereign of the Arab nation.  The British and French regarded this “as an untimely and injudicious step - as indeed it was - and one which, if it were to be recognized, would involve them in complications of various kinds.”  The Sharif was essentially encroaching on the “acquired position of other Arab rulers” by choosing such a title. The allies recognized this and smartly withheld recognition of the Sharifs' faux throne. Eventually, in January of 1917, with the British and French in agreement, the Sharif was made King of the Hejaz.³⁸

All of this was little more than pageantry, most Arab troops in the Turkish army remained loyal to the Turks. As remarked by Prime Minister Lloyd George, “Right through the war and up to the end, there were masses of Arab soldiers from Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine in the Turkish Armies fighting against the liberation of their own rule.” 

When General Allenby’s forces converged on Damascus in the fall of 1918, Feisal’s expected Arab army had not materialized substantially. In order to make it appear as if an Arab Revolt had been successful, the Sharifian Army entered Damascus on 30th of September, while allied soldiers remained camped on the perimeter with instructions not to enter until the Arabs had made a show of their conquest.

The British had a strong case that the Sharif of Mecca was in breach of his agreement. Instead of pursuing that case, which would have exposed the naivety of McMahon and other British officers, along with the fraudulence of the Sharif and the failure of British officers to discover it early enough, they chose to cover up Arab duplicity and British mistakes, and to make the fateful and devastating decision to negotiate and appease Arab grievances after the war, regardless of their legitimacy. In the service of appearances, at the expense of principles.

In 1939, at the Palestine Round Table Conferences held in London, a Joint Committee of British and Arab representatives was formed to look into the McMahon Correspondence. They failed to reach a consensus interpretation. “The British representatives agreed that the language used to indicate the exclusion of Palestine was ‘not so specific and unmistakeable as it was thought to be at the time’ and that ‘Arab contentions regarding the meaning of the disputed phrase [district] have greater force than has appeared hitherto’, but maintained that ‘on proper construction of the Correspondence Palestine was in fact excluded’.”

Lord Maugham, Lord Chancellor and spokesman for the British representatives remarked that “the Correspondence as a whole, and particularly the reservation in respect of French interests in Sir Henry McMahon’s letter of the 24th October, 1915, not only did exclude Palestine but should have been understood to do so”

Lord Maugham’s conclusion has been confirmed by Official Foreign Office records, available at the Public Record Office in London. However, according to Freidman, what was surprising about the results of the Joint Committee in 1939 was, though it was “said to have examined microscopically the wording of the actual Correspondence, did overlook much other material related to its background which tends to support the British case.”³⁹

It wasn't until two years after the war ended that accusations of British double dealing appeared. Feisal, who had failed to rally Arab support in Syria during the war,  pretended not to know the French had interests there. In March of 1920, on behalf of the Syrian National Congress, Feisal had himself declared King of the Arab Kingdom of Syria. However, he was evicted later that year from Damascus by the French. At this point, the disgruntled and dethroned Feisal set his sights on Palestine, which “provided a convenient outlet for the Arabs’ mounting frustration.” It was felt by some that if it were not for Feisal’s ejection from Syria, “much less might have been heard of his father’s claim to Palestine.’⁴⁰

One of the tactics used to misrepresent the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence was to inject confusion over the word “district,” (the “disputed phrase” of the 1939 Palestinian Round Table Conference) as it was used in McMahon’s October 24th exchange in response to the Sharif’s insistence that geographic boundaries be defined. A British officer from the Foreign Office, W.J. Childs, “commented wryly that in 1915 it suited Sharif Hussein and his advisers to give the word ’district’ the widest possible interpretation, whereas in 1920, ’the narrowest interpretation promised them the greater advantage’.”⁴¹ 

At the Public Records Office, Friedman discovered the original Arabic version of McMahon’s letter from October 24, 1915, which he had previously assumed was lost. He compared the original McMahon letter to the original Arabic version, and also to a retranslation back to English of the original Arabic version done at the Cairo office in 1919. By contrasting these three documents, Friedman was able to determine that “the Arab word wilaya, the Ottoman vilayet, and the English ‘district’ were identical in meaning,” and this was understood at the time by those involved.⁴²

When McMahon wrote that “the two districts of Mersina and Alexandretta and portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus…should be excluded from the limits demanded,” The Sharif understood what this meant. The vilayet of Damascus included the area of Jordan, but West of the Jordan River, Palestine, referred to as the vilayet of Beirut and the Sanjak of Jerusalem by the Ottomans, was excluded from McMahon’s “pledge,” according to Friedman’s translation and interpretation of his October 24th letter to the Sharif.

The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence was not an official treaty. Nor was it a unilateral agreement (it was dependent on both parties holding up their end of the bargain). And, many claims about the nature of the Correspondence, what was pledged by the British, and how this was understood by Hussein, have been misleading or false. Palestine was not included in the area pledged to Hussein by McMahon. The British did not promise Palestine twice.

Conclusion 

In Kedourie’s final assessment of the British Officers involved, he claims “the records of the negotiations with Husayn were imperfectly grasped, and that from first to last faulty and sometimes fanciful conclusions were derived from them.”⁴³ He comments further musing that “one cannot help wondering if such mismanagement is not inherent in the very situation of a great power which has to cope with a multitude of problems and emergencies spread over the four quarters of the globe.”⁴⁴ However, with regards to “Anglo-Sharifian relations,” and the British Foreign Office, “the records do not show the officials to have been aware of the unsatisfactory manner in which their Cairo colleagues were dealing with Husayn.”⁴⁵

Kedourie places the onus for the “unfavourable” British diplomatic conduct on the “Cairo authorities, and of their subordinates in the Hijaz.” He further implicates McMahon and Maxwell, who “in particular, were grievously at fault in allowing Clayton to exercise a veritable monopoly in the collection and interpretation of intelligence, and at the same time to play such a prominent part in policy-making.”⁴⁶

Indeed, Military Intelligence Director  “Clayton allowed his predilections to influence his reading of the information he collected,” while Secretary Storrs “was careless, flippant, patronizing and complacent; he made a habit of going beyond, or embellishing instructions.”⁴⁷

A fair analysis of the relevant documents surrounding the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, which has been done by historians like Karsh, Kedourie, and Friedman, show conclusively that McMahon’s contentious October 24th letter did not provide “precise territorial commitments.” However, the “Chatham House version” of British double-dealing and broken promises still managed to catch on. In part, due to reports filed by British Officers who, acting as historiographers, were “simply out of their depth, neglecting the evidence in their files, asking anachronistic questions and coming up with implausible answers.”⁴⁸ 

It was “McMahon and Storrs, who were responsible for the whole muddle,” however, internal assessments failed to understand and appreciate the nature of the Correspondence, which led to conclusions that did not square with the truth. Like that of a senior member of the Eastern department, L. H. Baggallay, who “moved as much by his desire to rid Britain of the Zionist embarrassment as by his uncritical admiration for The Arab Awakening, negligently failed to look at the actual records, and produced a report which succeeded in further beclouding the issue, but not in removing the doubts about British good faith which were by now widespread.”⁴⁹

Principal among a series of misleading summary reports was Arnold Toynbee’s “commitments” memo, which was circulated throughout the Foreign Office. Harold Nicolson, undersecretary at the Foreign Office, produced an “incompetent” brief which created a “triangular situation of great embarrassment as between the French, President Wilson and ourselves (the British).”

Major Hubert Young’s summary was an “untenable reading of McMahon’s language, which yet was adopted as the official and authoritative version of what McMahon had promised…”⁵⁰

Childs’ take was perhaps the closest to reality, however, his lack of Arabic, and his reliance on Young who he mistakenly deemed an expert, “led him to offer a reconstruction of Faruqi’s thoughts which no evidence justified, and to adopt Young’s tortured exegesis of McMahon’s prose.”

What these officers failed to appreciate was the incompatibility of ultimate human ends that inspired Isaiah Berlin’s objective pluralism. That one neat and commensurate solution for all the various players involved might be an impossibility did not seem to be part of the guiding logic. They did not use reasoned analysis to correctly interpret the plurality of interests involved in the drama, so failed to grasp the dimensional multiplicity. Choosing monistic explanations that offered a virtuous appeal, a “plausible” anti-colonial narrative they were convinced was true, were terrible decisions with a lasting impact. This tall tale, much of it from the mouths and pens of the officers involved, of British double dealing in the Middle East during WWI and after, has become a mainstay of anti-colonial, anti-western historiography. It’s time to tell a different story. It’s time to tell the truth.

The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, especially concerning McMahon’s October 24, 1915 break from protocol, essentially obligated the British Government to consider partitioning the Ottoman Empire (which triggered the need for French and British allies to discuss their respective interests in the region). These discussions resulted in the Sykes-Picot agreement, a topic covered in the next essay. 

It would be fair if the reader took away from the preceding essay, a critical assessment of the erroneous conduct of certain British Officers, but never-the-less a defense of overall British intentions and imperial designs concerning the Arabs, the Jews and the Allies during WWI. However, in subsequent essays in this series the reader can expect to encounter an examination of the darker side of British officialdom, concerning antisemitism during the British Mandate of Palestine (after the League of Nations designated it a protectorate). 

___

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1. Palestine, a Twice-Promised Land: The British, the Arabs & Zionism : 1915-1920 by Isaiah Friedman (Introduction Pg xvii)

2. Empires of the Sand (Pg 2)

3. Empires of the Sand (Pg 5)

4. Empires of the Sand (Pg 2)

5. The Proper Study of Mankind (Introduction pg 37)

6. The Hedgehog and the Fox’ (1953), PSM 436–7

7.  Empires of the Sand (pg 231)

8. The Rise and Fall of Arab Nationalism (ox.ac.uk)

9. The Arab Awakening Pg 218

10. The Chatham House Version (pg 351)

11. The Chatham House Version (pg 360)

12. Kramer, Martin (1999). "Kedourie, Elie". The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. Archived from the original on 27 December 2010. Retrieved 25 October 2016.

13. Empires of the Sand (Pg 260)

14. Kramer, Martin (1999). "Kedourie, Elie". The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. Archived from the original on 27 December 2010. Retrieved 25 October 2016.

15. Kramer, Martin (1999). "Kedourie, Elie". The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing. Archived from the original on 27 December 2010. Retrieved 25 October 2016.

16. The Arab Awakening (Pg 207)

17. The Chatham House Version (pg 21)

18. In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and its Interpretations 1914-1939 by Elie Kedourie Pg 36

19.  The Arab Awakening pg 127

20. The Arab Awakening Pg 128

21.  In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth: The McMahon-Husayn Correspondence and its Interpretations 1914-1939 by Elie Kedourie Pg 36

22. The Arab Awakening Pg 132

23. London Times, (July 23, 1937).

24. Empires of the Sand by Efraim Karsh (pg 207)

25. The Question of Palestine (Pg 67)

26. Empires of the Sand by Efraim Karsh (pg 222)

27. Empires of the Sand by Efraim Karsh (pg 228)

28. The Question of Palestine (Pg 66,67)

29. D. G. Hogarth, ‘Wahabism and British Interests*, Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs, vol. 4 (1925), p. 72. Cf. p. 95.

30. Hogarth Message - Wikipedia

31. Empires of the Sand by Efraim Karsh (Pg 209)

32. In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth (pg 259)

33. Empire of the Sands by Efraim Karsh (pg 217)

34.  Empire of the Sands by Efrain Karch (pg 215)

35. Empire of the Sands by Efraim Karsh (pg 221)

36. Empire of the Sands by Efraim Karsh (pg 220)

37. The Question of Palestine Pg 76

38. The Arab Awakening Pg 213

39. The Question of Palestine Pg 81

40. The Question of Palestine Pg 92

41. The Question of Palestine Pg 94

42. Palestine, A Twice Promised Land By Isaiah Friedman (Introduction)

43. In The Anglo-arab Labyrinth (Pg 531)

44. In The Anglo-arab Labyrinth (Pg 529)

45. In The Anglo-arab Labyrinth (Pg 530)

46. In The Anglo-arab Labyrinth (Pg 530)

47. In The Anglo-arab Labyrinth (Pg 530)

48. In The Anglo-arab Labyrinth (Pg 532)

49. In The Anglo-arab Labyrinth (Pg 532)

50. In The Anglo-arab Labyrinth (Pg 531)