Promises and Dreams

The Arabs were loyal to their Ottoman overlords in the First World War, but the British incited sedition among them, bribing a man in high religious office to head a rebellion. The inducement they offered him was power and glory, rule of an Arab independency of undefined dimensions.

The man was Hussein Ibn Ali, of the clan of the Hashemites and the tribe of the Quraish, Sharif of the Holy City of Mecca, a descendant of the Prophet. The British gave him arms, supplies, subsidies and advisers. When asked also for a firm definition of his dream-kingdom, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, sent him a 'clarification' in a letter of 24 October 1915, which made it clear that the British could not promise to give the Arabs territory which the French might claim; but as they did not know what the French might claim, the promises remained unclear. Ever since, the Arabs have interpreted the letter one way – that the Palestine region was included in the promised Arab state – and the British another way – that it was not. The vagueness was useful. Britain's immediate need was to gain an alliance with the Sharif without promising anything that could not be denied if a different need arose later. Britain was pursuing, as states must, the politics of interest. The Suez Canal route to India was her essential interest. If she conquered the Middle East, she would try to retain control of the region and keep out the French and Russians.

Two years later, on 2 November 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews 'a national home' in Palestine, provided that 'nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish communities in Palestine'. There were several motives behind it. One was compassion for the Jewish people who had suffered persecution for centuries; another was gratitude for their contribution to mankind in general and the British in particular. Lord Balfour felt that Britain had special reason to be grateful to Chaim Weizmann, the famous Zionist and scientist, for inventing a method of synthesizing acetone which was badly needed during the First World War. But there were two more compelling purposes. One was to induce American Jews to help persuade the United States government to enter the war; another to provide a pretext for keeping that part of the Middle East from France, a keen rival for power and influence there.

In 1916 the British and French had agreed, in a secret document known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, on how they would divide up the territory between them once they had conquered it from the Turks. It was against the spirit of the times, when high principles were asserted against the old ideas of empire, principles which President Wilson of the United States soon afterwards set out in fourteen points which were later enshrined in the Covenant of the League of Nations. By the new ideal, never again would the great powers impose their will on little nations.

The Sykes-Picot Agreement fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks when they seized power, and they published it, to the embarrassment of the British and French. It was never implemented, but it is important because it shows what the Powers intended, irrespective of any promises they made.

The British made another 'promise' to the Arabs in 1918. It is known as the Declaration to the Seven. The 'Seven' were Syrians, who came to Cairo to ask the British what their intentions were in the Middle East; they were given a pledge that Britain would recognize 'the complete and sovereign independence of any Arab area emancipated from Turkish control by the Arabs themselves'. It was a rash undertaking. It may have helped to prompt a deception that was to give the Arabs a false understanding of their own military power and achievements.

In order to provide Sharif Hussein and his sons, Ali, Abdullah and Faisal, with territory to claim on these conditions, T.E. Lawrence arranged a ruse whereby the Arab rebels seemed to 'liberate' Damascus. In fact, Damascus was taken from the Turks by the Australian Light Horse Brigade, and only after that did Lawrence and the Arab forces enter the city. But the British allowed the fiction of a conquest by the Arabs to be treated as true.

After the British and French won the war, kingdoms were created for the Sharifians. Sharif Hussein was made King of the Hejaz, although he did not keep his crown for long. In 1924 Ibn Sa'ud, ruler of the neighbouring Nejd, deposed him, and joined the Hejaz and the Nejd into a new kingdom which he named Saudi Arabia after himself.

Ali, the Sharif's eldest son, was heir to the fleeting kingdom of the Hejaz, so the British did not have to provide him with a throne. Iraq was proposed for Abdullah, but meanwhile, Faisal, who had become King of Syria (but only from March to July 1920), was thrown out by the French. He was then given Iraq, and the British had to find something else for Abdullah. What remained in their power to give away, or so they made out, was Palestine, over which they had been granted a mandate. So, in September 1922, they presented three-quarters of it, stretching eastward from the River Jordan to a chosen line in the desert, to Abdullah, who named it Transjordan. They also paid him a handsome annual stipend from the pocket of the British taxpayer for ruling over it.

Transjordan immediately became one part of Palestine in which the Jewish national home policy 'promised' by the Balfour Declaration was not to be implemented; although it was because of the Declaration and the duty it imposed on the British to make Palestine a homeland for the Jews that they had been granted the Mandate at the San Remo peace conference in 1920 and by the League of Nations in July 1922.

What was left for a national home for the Jews was kept from Arab control, causing discontent among the Arabs. All the newly created Arab states fell far short of Arab dreams; but in Palestine the dignitaries, the men who had had a certain degree of power under the Turks, did not gain even a less-than-satisfactory piece of reality in the new dispensation.

The Slaughter by the Innocents

The sanjaq, the administrative area, of Jerusalem had grown in importance under Turkish overlordship in the fifty years or so before the war. Although the Jews were a majority in the city, it had been the prominent Muslim families who, under the Turks, divided the chief public offices between them, not amicably but in a rivalry which created its own balance of power. Under Muslim rule the Jews were second-class citizens, known as the peoples of the dhimma (non-Muslim subject peoples; literally the peoples of the covenant or obligation). They suffered from numerous disabilities designed to keep them humble: they were forbidden, on pain of death, to marry Muslim women; they were not allowed to build their houses higher than those of Muslims, or to ride horses, or to drink wine in public, or to pray or mourn with loud voices, and they had to wear distinctive clothing. While it is true that some Jews rose to high rank in Islam, to honours, riches and even to power, most lived poor and insecure lives. From time to time, at the whim of individual Muslim rulers, they were massacred, stripped of all they possessed, reduced to virtual slavery. The Balfour Declaration ignored these customs.

Christians too were a dhimmi people, but they joined with the Muslims in opposing Zionism. The Jerusalem notables formed a Muslim-Christian Association for that very purpose, while similar organizations sprang up in Jaffa and other centres. There were two Muslim Jerusalemite families prominent among those who took the lead: the Husseinis and the Nashashibis. In spite of longstanding mutual antagonism between them, they joined to oppose the Jewish national home policy.

At first, the movement against Zionism among the region's traditional Arab leadership did not aim for an independent Palestinian state. The idea of Arab independence had grown along with the new idea of Arab nationalism, but in 1918 there was no Palestinian nationalism. The Arab leaders in Palestine wanted union with Syria, which was to be granted independence. The British were determined not to let this happen. The French, however, encouraged the idea, so they could include Palestine in their own sphere of influence.

The British were happy to inform the League of Nations that they intended to implement the Jewish national home policy because it helped them to gain the Mandate over Palestine, but they shirked making their intention clear to the Arabs. They delayed publishing the Balfour Declaration in Palestine for two years; so the Arabs believed that if they demonstrated their hatred of the policy violently enough, Britain would give it up. Some of the British officials on the spot in Jerusalem seeded these hopes in Arab breasts, because they flowered in their own.

The late publication of the Balfour Declaration coincided with Arab excitement over the approaching coronation of Faisal in Damascus, and resulted in an outbreak of mass anti-Zionist protests in Palestine in early 1920. The slogans were aggressive: 'Palestine is our Land; The Jews are our Dogs.'

The British military authorities banned demonstrations, but there was nothing they could do about religious gatherings, even if they wanted to. An important Muslim festival fell on 4 April – Nabi Musa, associated with the 'grave of Moses' between Jericho and Jerusalem – and the celebrations, with processions, reached their climax in Jerusalem. The authorities knew that these religious festivities were to serve as a demonstration in favour of Faisal becoming king of a united Syria and Palestine. One of the British officials, quietly intent on sabotaging his government's policy, actually urged the organizers to turn the celebration into a riot.

The British helped them by arranging to have the army sent out of jerusalem, although for the past two months there had been violence in the streets and repeated attacks on Jews, which should have provided reason enough for keeping the army there now of all times. Jewish policemen too were kept off duty in the city, and so it came about that the indigenous Jewish community in their Old City quarter was left without protection.

The organizers made full use of their opportunity, delivering inflammatory speeches when the procession halted on the way to the shrines in the Old City. Most fiery among them was Amin al-Husseini. Then the small police force which had been allowed to remain, consisting of Arabs only, diverted the crowd from the usual route through the Jewish quarter. What followed was a massacre. It went on for two days. Jews old and young were beaten to death, burnt alive, stoned. Their houses and shops were looted so thoroughly that even the frames of doors and windows were torn away when everything else was gone.

When order had been restored, the authorities set about finding and punishing the culprits. Two Arabs, who had fled the country as soon as the massacre was done, were found guilty of inciting a riot and were sentenced, in absentia, to ten years' imprisonment: one was Amin al-Husseini. For good measure, a Jew, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, an ex-officer of the British army, was also convicted. He had tried to get through to the Old City with a small Jewish self-defence unit, but had been held back by the police. For attempting to come to the rescue of the victims with armed men, he was sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment.

A court of inquiry found that the attacks on the Jews were made 'in customary mob fashion with sticks, stones and knives', and were 'of a cowardly and treacherous description, mostly against old men, women and children, and frequently in the back'.

Yet the court concluded that the blame for the massacre lay with Jews and not Arabs. Zionist 'impatience' and 'attempts to force the hands of the Administration' were 'largely responsible'. How the riot had been caused by Zionist impatience was not explained. A small amount of blame was attributed to the Military Governorate for failing to prevent the inflammatory speeches and for withdrawing troops from the city. All allegations of bias on the part of the Administration were insistently dismissed as 'unfounded'. And the British government at home was rebuked for 'interfering' with its unbiassed administrators.

The Arabs who had carried out the massacre were excused and exonerated from all culpability, on the grounds that they had felt alienated and exasperated by 'non-fulfilment of promises made to them by British propaganda' and a 'sense of betrayal' caused by the Balfour Declaration. They feared Jewish competition and domination; the court sympathized. It was the Arabs who had been victimized, subjected to 'Zionist aggression'. The findings in its own report, that the Arab leaders had inflamed the mob with 'anti-British and anti-Zionist propaganda', did not persuade the court to attach any blame whatsoever to the Palestinian Arab leadership in general.

The court did, however, quash Jabotinsky's conviction, and not the sentences on the two young Arabs.

The Mufti

The massacre in Jerusalem did not prevent the granting of the Mandate to Britain at the San Remo peace conference later that same month, April 1920.1 Arab leaders resented the terms of the Mandate because they incorporated the Balfour Declaration. The Jews did not complain. Now they could surely depend on the national home policy being carried out, especially as the first High Commissioner appointed to head the new civil administration on 1 July 1920 was himself a Jew and a believer in Zionism, Sir Herbert Samuel.

Almost immediately, however, Sir Herbert gave them cause to wonder if they could rely on better protection from the new administration than from the old. One of the first things he did was grant an amnesty to Amin al-Husseini: so five months after the massacre their arch-enemy was back in Jerusalem, a free man.

Amin's older half-brother, Kamil al-Husseini, held the highest religious office in Palestine as Mufti of Jerusalem. He was friendly to the Jews and smoothed the way for a Christian power to be accepted by the Muslims. The British rewarded him well. They even gave him a promotion not really in their power to give by bestowing on him the title of the ' Grand Mufti', never before used in Palestine. After his death, on 21 March 1921, his family received a pension much larger than Ottoman law prescribed.

The election of a new Mufti had to be in accordance with Ottoman law. The Husseinis put forward Amin's name, the Nashashibis put forward a name from another family, and two other candidates were proposed by other factions.

When the election results reached the High Commissioner, Amin al-Husseini's name stood at the bottom of the list. That should have meant that he was not considered for the appointment.

He was not even properly qualified for it. The Mufti was supposed to be a man of exemplary character, and Amin had been convicted for inciting a riot. He should be learned in religion, and Amin, although he had entered al-Azhar University in Cairo, had not graduated and was not a learned man of religion. Only, in 1913, he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and was therefore entitled to call himself 'Haj', meaning pilgrim. Haj Amin was so certain that he would be the next Mufti that he anticipated his appointment by growing the beard and putting on the turban traditionally worn by the holder of the office.