Zionism, WWI, and the Imperial Frame: Part II
Colonies as reparations
Chaim Weizmann and Emir Faisal in Transjordan, June 1918.
Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the Imperial War Museum and Churchill’s War Rooms with my beloved
. The above image appears there in a special exhibit dedicated to Churchill’s role in shaping the modern Middle East - he served as Colonial Secretary after WWI. It documents a meeting between Chaim Weizmann, leader of the Zionist Organization, and Emir Faisal in June 1918. Faisal was the third son of Sherif Hussein, ruler of the Hejaz and leader of the Arab Revolt, who (if you recall from Part I) had won assurance of British support for an independent Arab state following the war. The image was taken in the south of what’s now called Jordan, as the two men met to try to square the circle of Britain’s incompatible wartime promises.I was thinking about this image—and the negotiations that it documents—against the background of the recent Saudi-Israeli normalization talks. While much has obviously changed in the last century, it’s striking what remains the same: A leader from the Arabian peninsula, symbolically charged with representing “the Arab world” as a presumed monolith, sent to reach an agreement with (in Tom Segev’s words) the king of the Jews. Neither of these men represented the groups they claimed to – they were self-appointed emissaries speaking in the names of nations whose wishes were far more varied than they represented. Then as now the Arabs of Palestine were absent from the scene, their desires and aspirations largely disregarded. Then as now both men expressed disdain for them, at least according to Weizmann, who wrote to his wife that Faisal didn’t consider Palestinians to be real Arabs at all. And then as now, the negotiations occurred under the umbrella of Western imperial sponsorship with its own particular vision for what ‘peace’ and ‘stability’ meant.
The fruit of Weizmann and Faisal’s negotiations appeared six months later in an agreement presented shortly before the Paris Peace Conference began. I won’t go into the weeds, but the agreement spoke of “the Arab state and Palestine” as two distinct entities, voiced support of the Balfour Declaration and Jewish settlement, and envisioned close economic cooperation as a means to develop the entire region. Historians have pointed out that Faisal, who depended on T.E. Lawrence to translate the text of the agreement—which was presented to him in English—almost certainly did not know what he was signing, and that he amended a handwritten caveat stipulating that his agreement hinged on Britain fulfilling the conditions outlined in his memorandum of Jan. 4 (which, Ali Allawi surmises was a mistake and actually referred to his Jan. 1 memorandum to the Peace Conference). In any case, the Arabs of Palestine never appointed Emir Faisal to act as their representative. But more broadly, what happened to the Arab state? How did we end up with independent states of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine/Israel, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia instead?
In my last newsletter, I started to sketch the myriad ways that the First World War shaped the modern Middle East, paying particular attention to the Balfour Declaration. This week’s installment will continue the tale by looking at how the Ottoman Empire was carved like a cake into numerous post-war states that found themselves subject to French and British masters. The story is not just one of arbitrary borders and imperialism advancing under the guise of humanitarian assistance, but of how the nation-state form itself was exported with disastrous consequences. We are still brushing up against the limits of this form of political community and badly need to envision a future beyond the narrow straits of national belonging.
If you’ve ever conjured up an image of statesmen sitting in a European capital determining the future of those who live thousands of miles away without their consent, this is your lucky day. I want to start by introducing the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement, signed in 1916 by Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot on behalf of the British and French governments. Here’s the map:
The map was later amended to make room for Italian and Russian claims, but the general idea is that the territory north of the solid line marked A would come under the French imperial umbrella: the blue territory (Lebanon and much of modern-day Turkey) would be under direct French occupation, the rest (Syria and northern Iraq) would become a French protectorate. In the B zone, the pink territory (roughly from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf) would remain under direct British control, while the remainder of B (parts of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and southern Israel, running into Egypt, which was already under British control) would become a protectorate. Palestine was to be placed under international control of some sort. The actual boundaries of the states in the region depart widely from this imperial sketch, but the Sykes-Picot agreement remains infamous as the ultimate expression of imperial hubris. In June 2014 the Islamic State released a promotional video that featured footage of a bulldozer destroying a portion of the border between Iraq and Syria, the video triumphantly announced the end the idolatrous Sykes-Picot line.
It is impossible to comprehend this map without underscoring the imperial frame and its bundle of assumptions: that the spoils of the war would come in the form of colonies, that black and brown people were “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world” (per the League of Nations), and that the political map of the post-WWI world should be determined in Europe without any consideration of the wishes of the people who lived in the regions under examination. The Balfour Declaration could only exist within this imperial frame, which is not to negate the fact that Zionism was also a nationalist movement with extraordinary levels of organization and dedication. But imperious is perhaps the only proper word to describe two governments that plot the future of distant peoples and territories without so much as considering what the people involved might desire.
David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace offers a very detailed study of the series of post-war peace conferences that would ultimately decide the fate of the former Ottoman territories, and includes this description:
Arthur Balfour watched Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau in conference—relying for expertise only on Maurice Hankey (who was forty-one when the Peace Conference convened, some thirty-five years younger than Balfour)—and pictured them as “These three all-powerful, all-ignorant men, sitting there and carving up continents, with only a child to lead them.” [editor’s note: it’s very bad when even Lord Balfour thinks you are acting like hubristic fools]. An Italian diplomat wrote that “A common sight at the Peace Conference in Paris was one or the other of the world’s statesmen, standing before a map and muttering to himself: ‘Where is that dam’d….?’ while he sought with extended forefinger for some town or river that he had never heard of before.” Lloyd George, who kept demanding that Britain should rule Palestine from (in the Biblical phrase) Dan to Beersheba, did not know where Dan was. He searched for it in a nineteenth-century Biblical atlas, but it was not until nearly a near after the armistice that General Allenby was able to report to him that Dan had been located and, as it was not where the Prime Minister wanted it to be, Britain asked for a boundary further north.
We need to understand something about the social and political reality of the Ottoman Empire to understand just how seismic of shift the post-war settlement entailed. Most Arab territories were part of the Ottoman Empire since the early sixteenth century. Like other pre-modern land empires, the Ottoman Empire’s defining feature was its heterogeneity: dozens of ethnicities and languages and religious groups all under the imperial umbrella. Though engaged in periodic wars against Russia and European states, internally it was a relatively stable empire until the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth century. This is not to say there were no wars or conflicts. To take but one example: Muhammad Ali (1769 - 1849) was the ruler of Egypt from 1805 - 1848. While appointed by the Sultan and nominally under Ottoman control, he ruled with a great deal of autonomy and pursued an aggressive modernization agenda, sending student missions to Europe and launching a massive effort to translate contemporary philosophical and scientific literature into Arabic. Emboldened by his successes, he challenged the Ottomans for control over the Arab territories by invading Syria in 1831. His army ultimately withdrew and Egypt resumed its nominal place in the empire until it was occupied by the British in 1882.
Muhammad Ali was an ethnic Albanian. At no point did he cast his rivalry with Istanbul in terms of an Egyptian or Arab nation. Nor did anyone seem to think much of the fact—routine for the Ottomans—that territories should be ruled over by those who were not ‘native’ to them. We can contrast this rivalry between rulers to the nationalist movements that, starting with the Greeks in 1821, began to vie for political independence in the name of distinct national identities. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Ottomans had lost most of their European territories, with the remainder lost in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. In addition to Greece, these years saw Romania, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and Albania emerge as independent countries.
Nationalist movements typically mobilized romantic imagery and mythologies to make a series of arguments: that there existed a natural, spiritual even, set of ties between a particular people and a particular territory; that rulers should be drawn from the same ethnic stock as those they ruled over; and that the apparatus of government should direct itself toward securing the interests of that nation alone. We often associate nationalism with democracy because of the French Revolution, but the French case also makes it is obvious enough (hello Napoleon) that nation-states need not be democratic. More recently, I’ve argued that Israel today offers a clear example of a state that has privileged nationalism over democracy by rejecting the basic requirement of equality before the law. So too, empires of the Ottoman sort were not necessarily authoritarian. In fact, the Ottoman parliament was revived just prior to WWI, ushering in a period of vastly expanded freedom of the press, competitive elections, and multiple political parties.
Theoretically, nationalism entailed a vision of freedom through partition into homogenous ethnic units, with the accompanying idea that such divisions were natural. Accordingly, empires of the Ottoman or Hapsburg sort—some variation of which had been the norm for millennia—began to appear as a perversion of the natural social and political order. In the words of the German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder, writing at the end of the eighteenth century:
Nothing therefore seems more contradictory to the true end of governments than the endless expansion of states, the wild confusion of races and nations under one scepter. An empire made up of a hundred peoples and 120 provinces which have been forced together is a monstrosity, not a state-body.
These ideas have become so commonplace that it’s crucial to underscore how recently they emerged, and how historically contingent the nation-state is as a way of organizing political life. This was the context in which it seemed natural to the British that the Arabs were just waiting for the right moment to slough off the yoke of Turkish despotism. The irony is that there was a very small Arab nationalist movement in the Empire—chiefly made up of the intellectuals associated with the Arab renaissance or nahda—but Sherif Hussein was not one of them. His vision of politics was very much an older one, which is why I’ve used the language of ‘kingdom’ to describe what he aspired to in the post-war settlement.
The Allies conquered Palestine in 1917, culminating on Dec. 11 of that year with General Allenby famously dismounting his horse to enter the Old City of Jerusalem on foot in a show of respect. The conquest of the Holy Land offered an immense morale boost - Lloyd George called it a Christmas gift to the British people. Jerusalem’s mayor, Hussein al-Husseini, attempted multiple times to surrender his city before finally finding someone to accept. You can find this flag bearing his name, apparently used in this surrender of the city, in the Imperial War Museum (pardon the glare - it’s behind glass): mayor of holy Jerusalem Hussein al-Husseini.
1917 was also the year that the Americans entered the war - declaring war against Germany in April 1917 and against Austria-Hungary on Dec. 7. The US never declared war against the Ottoman Empire, and Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points had stipulated both future sovereignty for “the Turkish portions of the Ottoman Empire” and “security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity for autonomous development” to the other nations in the empire. This was obviously grating to the French and British, but they could not afford to alienated Wilson during the war. He also proved annoying after it though, proposing to send a commission to the Middle East to ascertain the wishes of its inhabitants! Here is Churchill on this proposal:
The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant [the Anglo-French Declaration] is even more flagrant in the case of of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the forms of asking what they are.
You might recall that the rest of the quote reads that the four powers were committed to Zionism which, right or wrong, was “of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.” Still, the American-backed King-Crane Commission (which you can read about in Andrew Patrick’s book) traveled around Syria, Lebanon and Palestine immediately after the war and found that the people preferred an independent Arab state. It noted the strong anti-Zionist sentiment across the region—"Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase"—and opposition to occupation by European powers. Moreover, those they interviewed indicated that if the people in the region required Western tutelage, it should be the Americans (then regarded more positively than European powers) who should do the job.
The partitioning of Ottoman territories into French and British hands represented exceptional treatment among the Central Powers: Germany got crippling war debt, but no one tried to dissolve it; the Hapsburg Empire was dissolved, but into independent nation-states. The best explanation I can give for the differential treatment of the Ottoman Empire is that some sort of war spoils were needed to justify the unprecedented horror and waste, and no one questioned that these should come in the form of colonies. Yet, a practical difficulty remained: How to make the case for post-war imperial expansion amid American opposition on the one hand, and the Russian Revolution on the other? After all, Lenin had in 1915 published his rebuke of the war and explained its outbreak in terms of imperial competition.
The League of Nations was the vehicle for trying to resolve these difficulties, allowing European powers to launder the old business of colonial domination through a new, humanitarian rubric. You sometimes hear people argue that the Balfour Declaration was legitimate because it was accepted by the League of Nations, as if the League were the genuine will of the international community (it was nothing of the sort). In the post-war period, the League’s great innovation was to create a new category for imperial possessions: the mandate. Here’s Article 22 of the League’s charter:
To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant.
The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League.
You can see clearly how the humanitarian justification for colonial expansion was key to casting the Mandate system as a genuine alternative to imperialism. Also of importance was the Permanent Mandates Commission, which was charged with overseeing the British, French, and Italian administration of mandated territories. Because it was the League of Nations that allotted the mandates to the Allied powers, this body could theoretically take them away in favor of another power or, less likely, full independence (in practice, they did no such thing). If you want to dig more into the Mandate system, Susan Pedersen’s The Guardians is an indispensable history.
Up for grabs were the Ottoman territories and former German colonies in Africa and the Pacific. These territories were divided into three classes depending on the “stage of the development of the people, the geographical situation of the territory, its economic conditions and other similar circumstances.” Here are the three categories with handy dividing lines thanks to Wikipedia:
There is a lot to say about the naked racism regarding the peoples of Africa and the South Pacific, and how completely incomprehensible it was that they might be capable of self-government. For our purposes though, pay attention to the top category, the “communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire.” These were the Class A Mandate, provisionally able to stand on their own subject to “administrative advice and assistance” - which in practice would take the form of French and British control. The League of Nations offered the means of making this imperial imposition not just legal, but “humane”.
That’s probably enough to digest for one day. I’ll be back early in the new year with the third and final installment in the WWI series, which will detail how the map of the modern Middle East emerged from the mandate system, and how Emir Faisal (and his brother) finally got a kingdom. Until then, wishing you a merry holiday season and happy new year. May 2024 bring real peace and security to us all.