How did the Middle-Eastern world of c.1900 become the Middle–Eastern World of post-1945?

There is a good deal of fitting together of the understanding of events, and the ideas inherent within them, to begin to understand what went on during this time period and answer our question. Here are some important jig-saw pieces, making up this picture: –

(a)         The McMahon Correspondence [ July 1915 – January, 1916]

This ‘correspondence’, between Sir Henry McMahon [1862-1949] and the Sharif Hussein [1854 – 1931] of Mecca, preceded the Balfour Declaration.

The McMahon Correspondence, additionally, overlapped the diplomacy of its more famous successor, in substance, in that significant portions of territory, largely in the former Ottoman Empire, were thereby promised, by Britain, to the Arabs, as recompense for Arab fighting for the Allies against the Ottoman Empire, during WWI.

The substance of McMahon was, at the time, kept secret from third parties. Even had this not been so, its clauses were so ‘diplomatically’ phrased1 as to require skilful interpretation, to penetrate. It became clear later that, in practice, the Arabs’ understanding of McMahon ran wholly contrary to Jewish understanding of the Balfour Declaration, which appeared to Jews to be promising confusingly similar portions of former Ottoman territory to the Jews! This matter is certainly a major contributory factor to today’s poor international understanding between Israel and the Arabs. Put bluntly, Allied diplomatic duplicity – especially British –  partly led to the modern Middle East problem.

(b)        The Balfour Declaration [ Friday, 2^nd November, 1917 ]

This Declaration was originally a private letter to Lord Walter Rothschild from Arthur Balfour, then British Foreign Secretary. Rothschild, a prominent academic, and former British Conservative MP, was a Zionist, a close friend of Dr. Chaim Weizmann [see Summer EJ], and a leading member of British Jewry. The ‘Declaration’ was made at a time when Britain was not able to promise a National Homeland to the Jewish people, or to anyone else – since Jerusalem, and the key territory around it, was still, then, in the hands of the Ottoman Empire. This circumstance applied until Jerusalem was captured by the then ‘General’ Edmund Allenby on Tuesday, December 11^th, 1917, over one month after the ‘Declaration’ had promised that territory to the Jewish people.

(c)         The Sykes-Picot Agreement [May, 1916 ]

This was a secret agreement,2 tying up, to the satisfaction of Britain and France, the post-war disposition of key areas of territory in the Middle East. It was made during WWI, for application in the subsequent Versailles group of Peace Treaties [1918 – 1925].3 It was the outcome of negotiations carried out between Sir Mark Sykes [1879 – 1919] and Monsieur Francois Georges-Picot [1870 – 1951]. Sykes was a Yorkshire Conservative grandee, a Colonel in the British Army, a British MP, and friend of Balfour. By WWI, he had become, for the British Cabinet, the ‘go to’ expert on all things Turkish, Ottoman and Middle-Eastern.

Picot, a lawyer by training and profession, and a lifelong diplomat, was recalled by the French government to Paris from the Middle East during World War I, appointed High Commissioner in Palestine and Syria, between 1917 and 1919, and Minister Plenipotentiary in 1919.

Sykes and Picot, on behalf of their respective governments, formulated the agreement which bears their name, and which was highly significant in the shaping of the Middle East of today. Sykes-Picot was especially important, with regards to the frontiers of Iraq and Syria. It is sometimes, wrongly, claimed Sykes-Picot lies at the heart of the Arab-Israeli issue; this was already being shaped, via McMahon. So much is this misperception the case, that, when ISIL was founded, in 1999, its Twitter address was #SykesPicotOver!

(d)        Field-Marshall Edmund Allenby [1861-1936]

As a middle-ranking officer –  a ‘temporary Lieutenant-general’ – Allenby proved, on the Western Front, not to be a commander to the taste of the then C-in-C of the Western Front, Earl Haig.

Allenby, though thereafter promoted to full General, was returned to England, to a No Man’s Land, within Administration.

A most interesting example of an ‘Historical Undesigned Coincidence’ occurred at that point. The British Liberal politician, David Lloyd-George, was appointed PM in 1916. ‘L-G’ wanted [and got!] significant changes within the War Office, in the field of battle, and, in particular, wanted a ‘more dashing’ presence in the Middle East. Lloyd-George desired that Great Britain should have a leader who could conduct the Allied War-effort on the Eastern Front with energy, Sir Archibald Murray, i/c the British Expeditionary Force until then was, in L-G’s opinion, not that presence, whilst Allenby [already1 nicknamed ‘The Bull’] might well be.

Thus, an exchange was effected: the pliant Murray, promoted, was made General Officer Commanding-in-Chief [Aldershot Command], immediately subordinate to Haig, who was delighted to have a pliant subordinate; Allenby replaced Murray i/c the BEF, to the great satisfaction of Lloyd-George, the British Prime Minister, who had his cavalier in place. More ‘cavaliers’ were to follow.

Allenby’s rapid string of successes in the Allied Middle-East Campaign, thereafter, and his ‘humble entry’ into Jerusalem,2 are largely a matter of public record. Although I’ve enclosed personal information below, textbook photographs, illustrating Allenby doing as I have indicated, are not uncommon. Indeed, the Imperial War Museum3 has unearthed newsreel footage of the event, shot by a British soldier in December, 1917.

Allenby, often referred to by his rank of 1917, as ‘General Allenby’, was, in fact, honoured by his country, post war, in a number of ways: he was made up to Field Marshall Allenby on 31 July 1919, and was created Viscount Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe, on 7 October of that year. He remained in the Middle East as High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan, until 1925, when he retired from active service.

(e)         T. E. Lawrence [1888-1935]

Major T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, a British Army Officer became fluent in Arabic4 having been interested from his youth in archaeology, and going, as a teenager, on an extensive walking-tour of Syria in pursuit of this interest. He also acted as a fieldwork assistant to a number of archaeologists, including Sir Leonard Woolley, the Biblical archaeologist. By dint of his wide network of Middle-Eastern contacts, deriving from his archaeological work, and his befriending of many Arabs, winning their trust and support, he was asked by the Allies to work inside German-Ottoman lines during World War I.

Lawrence was able to persuade his Arab friends, particularly the Emir Faisal I of Iraq, and King Abdullah I of Jordan, to join the Allies against the Ottoman Turks, during the First World War. He became disaffected with the British cause, returning home a ‘broken man’,5 when told by Allenby, in late 1918, that his plan to enthrone his protégé, Feisal, on the throne of Syria, under British protection, thus ‘biffing the French out of all hope of Syria’, was, due to Sykes-Picot, to be subordinated to Syria’s being under French suzerainty, leaving Feisal no real power.

Lawrence’s success with the Arab uprising needs no elaboration here, except to say that, as the ‘practical arm’ of the McMahon diplomatic putsch, his work forms a further piece in the ‘Historical Jigsaw’ before us, and to add that Lawrence worked hand-in-glove in fighting the Ottomans with General Allenby during this War, if not entirely in the diplomacy afterwards. He also worked hand-in-glove with Gertrude Bell in progressing the politico-diplomatic outcomes in the Middle east, after the War.6

(f)         Gertrude Bell [1868 – 1926]

Bell was a highly unusual woman – a polymath in any age, exceptionally so in the 19^th /20^th centuries, given the relative suppression of women, in comparison with roles considered as ‘normal’ in today’s world. She was an academic historian, from Newcastle-On-Tyne, who obtained a first at Oxford [within 2 years]; and an archaeologist, on the one hand, and a British Imperial political officer and a spy, on the other.

Along with T. E. Lawrence, she set up, on Britain’s behalf, the Hashemite dynasties in both Iraq and Jordan, and manipulated events re-the outworking of the peace-treaties, in practice, after the War. In terms of this story, Bell played an important, though facilitatory, role; to that extent, she was a minor figure in the drama which unfolded.

(g)        Major-General Orde Wingate [1903-1944]

Wingate was a ‘distant cousin’ of Lawrence of Arabia.1 He came from a family of Plymouth Brethren, and, as such, was steeped in the study of, and consequent detailed awareness of, Biblical History.  Wingate was convinced, biblically, of the providential shaping of Jewish history, [i.e. that their return to Eretz Yisrael, the land of their ancestors was providentially-engineered], helped the Palmach, during the 1930s. Due to his studies of biblical warriors of Old Testament times, especially closely studying the strategies and tactics of Gideon in the book of Judges, Wingate gleaned a great deal of knowledge about those strategies and tactics most likely to be effective in that specific environment, and he put his findings at the disposal of the nascent Jewish State.

Infuriating some of his superiors, with his ‘pro-Jewish bias’,2 Wingate was moved by the Army from the Middle East to Ethiopia and then to South-East Asia, and, in fact, banned from Palestine in toto. In the former area, Wingate’s unorthodox guerrilla tactics were carried out by specially-trained troops, known, with an eye to a Biblical predecessor, as the ‘Gideon Force’. In Burma, also during World War II, his work in establishing, in the form of the Chindits, an early version of the SAS, he was successful, and, in using his Gurkha troops, and others, by parachute drop behind enemy lines, in the 1940s, in driving back the Japanese in Burma. His early death – in a USAAF plane-crash over north-eastern India, returning from a visit to Burma, to assess the level of success of the Chindits operations there, – led to the transfer, for a few months, of Chindits’ operations to the leadership of Lieutenant-General W. D. A. Letaigne, and, later, of the acerbic U.S. General, Joseph Stilwell.3

I have already referred to two of my Keele Professors having Jewish backgrounds. It was not until much later that I discovered that a third academic influence on me at Keele had also been Jewish: for some months, I found myself in Professor P. J. V. Rolo’s group of tutees. Paul was very knowledgeable about British and European diplomacy in Victorian times, during World War I, and in the subsequent battery of peace-treaties, and was known to the 1960s Student Body at Keele as the author of the textbook on George Canning, brilliant British Foreign Secretary and sometime British Prime Minister. Paul Rolo [1917 – 1992], I later discovered, was brought up, in a wealthy Sephardic Jew Banking family in Cairo, and worked in the part of British Intelligence now known as MI6, during WWII.

The bodies, later to be known as MI5 and MI6 were founded in 1909 by Sir Vernon Kell and Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, respectively, as the Secret Service Bureau [MI5] and the Secret Intelligence Service [SIS, later MI6]. From the start, MI5 dealt with domestic British security-intelligence, and MI6 with issues relating to foreign intelligence. Professor Rolo worked for the SIS, or, in modern money, MI6.

From Prof. Rolo, too, I learned of the duplicity of British diplomacy, in WWI, in which Britain promised, via the McMahon Correspondence, effectively, the same pieces of oriental real-estate to Arab nationalists it was, within 18 months, in the Balfour Declaration, to promise to their Zionist counterparts.

(g)        Georg Antonius and his Arab Awakening [1938]

Professor Paul Rolo knew the world of Arabs, and Arab nationalism inside out, as well as the world of International Diplomacy.

As Paul’s student, I read Georg Antonius’s The Arab Awakening [1938], the seminal work on what was, from 2010 in Tunisia, to be known as The Arab Spring. Professor Rolo pointed out, vis-a-vis my unbridled student-zeal, that Antonius was describing things at their most seminal: these were tiny groups of Arab intellectuals, meeting, huddled, in the garrets of back-street apartments, and certainly not any kind of mass-movement.

Nonetheless, Antonius’s title holds true – it was indeed the Arab Awakening he had been describing. Antonius traced the awakening back to Muhammad Ali Pasha [1769 – 1849] and it occurred at the very same time that the above events, regarding the re-establishment of Israel in their own land happened. Of course, those advances of the Jewish cause would fuel the fires of need for independence for the Arab peoples, long held down by the alien Turkish influence of Ottoman supremacy.

The ottomans increased this feeling of desire for independence, for revenge, to be rid of alien influences, by seeking to put down savagely, not only what came to be known as the Arab Revolt [1916 – 1918], but also any leanings towards independence anywhere. Thus came about the ‘Armenian Massacres’ [1915-1917], the ‘Assyrian Genocide’ [1914-1923], and the ‘Pontic Genocide’, [1913-1923].

(h)        In Conclusion

The above jockeying of persons, boundaries, countries, and alliances has, therefore, produced a setting of the stage for a further Act in the Play of the Human Drama, as follows: –

[I]         The Stage-Set

Peace-negotiations, peace-treaties and Alliances [complete with the relevant diplomatic duplicity] provided the context for the Play, against a Back-drop of two World Wars, and the concomitant redrafting of many national boundary-lines, resulting in an aggregation of perceived rightful inheritances, and bitterly-wronged grievances, providing an explosive admixture

[II]        The Actors

The individuals, both major and minor, acting out their roles on the International Stage included, as it absolutely had to, an array of highly unusually-gifted, and unusual figures – whom some would describe as ‘cavalier’, others, even, ‘buccaneer’…but outstanding, even extraordinary, figures, they certainly were. These actors – many with a full awareness of the roles of the others on stage, some with an awareness of their place within the Plot, even whilst they were playing out their own parts.

[III]      The Plot: ‘Providence’ or ‘Pot-luck’?

By this heading is meant that which brought about the roles the Actors on the Stage would play – their [positive] relationships with relevant Prime Ministers – Allenby with Lloyd-George, Wingate with Churchill – along with a Full Supporting Cast of experts, such as Gertrude Bell, would be described by some commentators as ‘Chance’, and by others as ‘Divine Providence’. Overall, it is clear that the steering of events went in one direction – viz. Towards the facilitating, establishment and nurturing of the modern state of Israel. Thus, for instance, Balfour’s ‘Declaration’ came to be accorded superiority over both McMahon and Sykes-Picot, especially in the context of the Holocaust. Later, Wingate, at the behest of Churchill, was positioned in a role in which he was able to assist the nascent Jewish State against its detractors, and would-be demolishers, notably including Mohammed Amin al-Husseini [1897 – 1974], the second Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who, in the 1930s, supported both fascists and Nazis.

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Addendum

I had had thoughts of including all of these jigsaw pieces this time, but I found space too limited to squeeze them in here. So it a matter for future reference. It includes the understanding of each of the following separately, their development and inter-relationships: –

[a] The Romanov Dynasty [1613 – 1917]’s invention of the pogrom & the influence thereof.

[a1] The siege of Sidney Street, London [1911].

[b] Captain Alfred Dreyfus, and the Dreyfus affaire [1894 – 1906] in France.

[b1] Theodore Herzl [1860 – 1904], Austrian newspaper reporter, Jew, organiser & Zionism [1890 on].

[c] Lloyd-George wartime British PM [1916 – 1922], & the ‘Gunpowder Plot’ of WWI.

[c1 Dr. Chaim Weizmann [1874 – 1952], academic, Jewish nationalist, & Israeli President.

[d] The 1930s Jewish cultural hegemony in Europe, and the effects upon it of Nazism.