Palestine really was the
Promised Land. So much so that it was promised to three different groups
within a couple of years.[1]
The promises were made by British imperialism, a real world power, not by an
imaginary deity in a book of very dubious provenance. What made the promises
remarkable was that they were about a land which, at the time, the British
neither possessed nor controlled. But imperial arrogance was a commodity in
ample supply when the promises were made, and it has not become scarce in the
years since.
Map of Ottoman Palestine, 1878
(Source: www.passia.org/maps/view/2)
Balfour Declaration
The most famous promise, the one
most widely known, almost to the exclusion of the others, was to ‘the Jewish
people’. Issued by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, in the
Balfour Declaration of November 1917, it read:
“His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in
Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best
endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly
understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights
and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
While something short of an
outright promise, if a major imperialist power was willing to use its ‘best
endeavours’ that was good enough for the Zionist lobbyists, after they had
failed to make much ground with the Ottoman Empire or with Germany. In particular,
they could ignore the annoying bit about not prejudicing the ‘civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ and be
hopeful that their ethno-religious racism would eventually win the day. Neither
were Zionist leaders very concerned about Jewish people being denied rights or
status elsewhere as a result, since surely that would only add to the supply of
the right kind of immigrant into Palestine.
Furthermore, it looked to them
like a step up from British East Africa! After meeting with British Colonial
Secretary Joseph Chamberlain in 1903, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern
political Zionism, had been offered an area of land in what was later Kenya as
a refuge for those fleeing from pogroms in Eastern Europe. Herzl raised this
option at the 1903 Zionist Congress in Basel, but, following protests from
Russian Zionists and Herzl’s death in 1904, nothing further came of this
so-called ‘Uganda’ Scheme.
Balfour’s brief letter should
also be put in context. He already had form as having an ambiguous view on
Jewish people. For example, while being opposed to Russian persecution of Jews,
he was strongly in favour of the 1905 Aliens Act, Britain’s first immigration
controls. The 1905 Act was focused on stopping Jewish refugees coming to
Britain, and many British politicians, encouraged by Zionists, also came to see
Palestine as a useful place to send the unwanted Jewish immigrants.
There were several other strands
in the British political class that led up to the 1917 Declaration.
Some British politicians were
Jewish themselves, and were worried that setting up a ‘Jewish homeland’ would
raise questions about their British nationality. The final part of the
Declaration about ‘Jews in any other country’ comes from this concern. Some were
evangelical Christians who, while often also anti-Semitic, saw Jewish
settlement in Palestine as part of God’s plan, and a step on the road to
salvation, just as the British Empire was in its own divine manner bringing
justice and order to the world. Some saw it as useful to have a grateful group
of people loyal to Britain settling in what would be a strategic area as the
Ottoman Empire was waiting to be carved up.
Many were also influenced by the
anti-Semitic ideas of the time, in particular the notion that Jewish financiers
had immense power and influence. So the Declaration might be a sensible policy
for gaining important friends. Naturally, the Zionist leaders discussing with
British politicians talked up this ‘Jewish power’. To complete the factors leading
up to the Declaration it is worth noting too that by 1917, with the First World
War proving very costly in lives and treasure, British politicians cast an eye
on the apparent influence of the Zionist lobby in America. They saw the Balfour
Declaration as a way of gaining further American support.
The Hussein option
But before getting carried away
with the idea that a ‘national home’ for Jewish people in Palestine was an
inescapable outcome, it is worth considering some other plans British
imperialism had for the Promised Land. Two stand out and they were made before
the much more famous Declaration. The first British proposal was implied by the
correspondence in 1915-16 between the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir
Henry McMahon, and Sharif Hussein, the Emir of Mecca.
It is important to realise that
the background to this communication was the British attempt to get support
from the Arabs for an attack on the Ottomans in the Middle East. In 1914,
Turkey had taken the Central Powers’ side in the war, and the British were
aware that there was some political opposition to Turkish rule in Arab areas of
the Ottoman Empire that they might exploit.
As an incentive for this
opposition, the British offered a kind of Arab independence over a vaguely
defined region, with two caveats. One was that, as McMahon stated, ‘it is
understood that the Arabs have decided to seek the advice and guidance of Great
Britain only’ in the administration of such an area and they would also give
Britain economic and commercial privileges over other powers. But perhaps the
most important caveat was on the territorial region of Arab ‘independence’: it
would exclude certain areas that the British might have to concede to the
French, a British ally in the war that also looked forward to greater influence
in the Middle East when the Ottoman Empire was carved up.
Quite which territory was
excluded from the offer to the Arabs was not entirely clear. Sharif Hussein
read in McMahon’s letters that these concerned an area of Syria west of Damascus.
He rejected that, but continued the correspondence and the discussion of terms.
Nevertheless, he did not think that Palestine or the important religious centre
of Jerusalem were excluded. While Palestine was also west of Damascus, it was
further south and not considered to be part of Syria.
Historians have long debated how
far McMahon deliberately misled Hussein. It is probably best to see McMahon’s
letters not just as an example of manipulative diplomacy, but also as
contingent on the circumstances. After all, even the more explicit commitments
of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence were completely contradicted by the
Sykes-Picot Agreement of early 2016!
The latter Agreement was a plan
to divide up the Middle East into regions run by the British and the French.
The French felt they had been short-changed, but they got Syria – and Lebanon,
which they later carved out from Syria. The British would not accept French
rule in Palestine, however, since it was a little too close to Britain’s
important strategic and trade route at the Suez Canal in Egypt to have a rival
power sitting there. In discussing with François Georges-Picot, Britain’s Sir
Mark Sykes sidelined the issue of Palestine by arguing that it should be
managed under an international agreement, one that he was confident would
favour British interests. That turned out to be the British Mandate for
Palestine, endorsed by the League of Nations in negotiations after 1918, in
which the British included the terms of the Balfour Declaration.[2]
It turned out that not even the
Sykes-Picot Agreement between two imperialist powers was implemented as agreed.
Responding to a more favourable conjuncture after 1918, the British were in a
much stronger position than the French and no longer had need to take account
of potential Russian incursions into the Middle East region, for which they had
favoured a French ‘buffer’ in Syria. The British also decided to shift a
portion of the Sykes-Picot ‘line in the sand’ and included Mosul in the newly
carved out Iraqi state that they would control. This was seized from the
defeated Ottomans and added to the oil reserves available to the British.
A deal with the Ottomans?
Britain’s second pre-Balfour
plan for Palestine was discussed indirectly with the Ottoman Empire in July 1917.
The British Foreign office sent Aubrey Herbert to Switzerland to discuss with
Turkish dissidents the possibility of having a separate peace with Turkey.
Herbert was a Conservative MP, the son of an earl and had considerable
experience of the Ottoman Empire, which he much favoured over Tsarist Russia.
For some time he had been advocating this plan, and the British government was
happy to explore it as a means of weakening Germany’s position in the war.
As was typical of the British in
these diplomatic discussions, much was implied and little was made explicit.
Herbert said he was not authorised to discuss terms of an agreement, but he
indicated that Britain would not wish to seize Ottoman territories. Instead it
would allow continued Turkish control, with (left unsaid) the British pulling
the strings as it had done in Egypt. There is no documentation of these
discussions, but if they had reached fruition, they would have allowed
Palestine, among other regions, to remain in a reconfigured Ottoman Empire.
In
a memorandum to the Foreign Office after the Swiss meetings, Herbert made clear
what kind of future he, and the British, had in mind for the Ottoman
territories:
“If we get the luggage it does not matter very much
if the Turks get the labels. When Lord Kitchener was all-powerful in Egypt his
secretary was wearing a fez. Mesopotamia and Palestine are worth a fez.”
Nothing came of this Ottoman
initiative, as indeed nothing came of the McMahon correspondence. They are
nevertheless useful examples of how one should not take at face value the
‘news’ that does get into the headlines. Very often there is something else
going on. Furthermore, as in many other cases, an investigation usually
suggests that the term ‘Perfidious Albion’ does not do justice to the full
extent of British duplicity.
Tony Norfield, 18 June 2019
[1] Some
material for this article is taken from the very informative book by Jonathan
Schneer, The Balfour Declaration, Bloomsbury, London, 2011.
[2] In the
event, Britain limited the scale of Jewish immigration into Palestine during
the Mandate period. It turned back boatloads of Jews escaping the Holocaust in
Europe, even though they had nowhere else to go. America, Britain and other
countries were reluctant to accept the refugees and the British did not want to
damage their relationships with other Arab countries.