From the Arab point of view, the Mufti's meeting with the Führer was a case of history repeating itself as farce, having earlier played itself out as tragedy. The groundwork for the meeting had been prepared through a COrrespondence between the two, at which the German side had committed itself to recognizing the "independence and freedom" Arab people. Precisely such a compact had been concluded between an Arab political leader and Britain in 1915, when lined story: "Saddam had offered to talk it out". The Hindu (New Delhi), January 23, 1991, p. 6; and "Saddam was willing to discuss package deal," The Statesman (New Delhi), January 23, 1991, p.9 2. Maxime Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Great Britain, pp. 204-5. 3. The historical material on colonial policies in the Arab world is derived in essence from the following works: John Bagot Glubb, Britain and the Arabs, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1959; Anthony Nutting, The Arabs, a Narrative History from Mohammad to the Present, Hollis and Carter, London, 1964; and George Antonius, The Arab Awakening, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1938. Maxime Rodinson, op. cit., also has important insights. The documentation on the Hussain-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot agreement, and the declarations and statements of the "allied powers", have been reproduced in the annexes to Antonius' book. 4. Walter Lacquer (ed): The Israel-Arab Reader, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1969, p. 82. 5. Chandra Bose was an Indian nationalist leader who sought an anti-Brush alliance with Germany and 13 May 13, 1991 • #206 Internationa/ Viewpoint
MIDDLE EAST the first of the major imperial conflagrations of this century was raging. Victorious Britain in 1918 was in a position to honour its commitments, but chose not to. Defeated and divided Germany in 1945 was, contrariwise, in no position to demonstrate whether it had equivalent tendencies to play fast and loose with wartime pledges.
A further throwback to July 1920 and the nature of the "linkage" in the received political consciousness of the Arab world would become clearer. Palestine that year echoed with militant slogans against the British mandate. Amman witnessed a mobilization of Bedouin tribesmen intent on marching on Damascus and ejecting the French. And Iraq exploded in insurrection against the occupying army of British India.
For much of August 1920, all of Iraq with the exception of the major towns, was held by the rebels. The uprising was not crushed until October, and even then the British had to hand out various concessions to buy peace. But from the position of strength that they had acquired through various dubious deals since 1915, Britain could afford to make concessions, without significantly compromising its geopolitical interests in the area.
First stirrings of Arab nationalism
After centuries under the yoke, strivings of Arab nationalism were beginning to emerge by the early years of the century. Baghdad, Beirut and Damascus were the main centres of Arab nationalist groupings. And as the focus of their aspirations, these groups turned to the Hashemite dynasty, represented by Hussain, the Sharif of Mecca, and two of his sons, the Emirs Faisal and Abdullah.
When the Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany, the BritishFrench axis began seriously exploring means of undermining their enemy from within, by playing upon Arab nationalist scntiments. The British agent in Cairo, Lord Kitchener, had established contact with Sharif Hussain by October 1914, seeking to open a front against the Turks
The Sharif's counsels were divided. Abdullah favoured the conclusion of an alliance with the British without delay. But Faisal saw little point in exchanging Turkish domination for the British or the French. His contacts with the Arab nationalist bodies of Iraq and Syria (the al-Ahad and the al-Fatah) had convinced him that there was little to between the Turks and the "allies". Firm commitments to independence should be won, he argued, before the "allies" were to be favoured with the support of the Arab population.
A memorandum was drafted jointly by al-Ahad and al-Fatah, which Hussain forwarded to Kitchener's successor in Cairo, International Viewpoint #206 • May 13, 1991
Lord McMahon. It required that, as a precondition for Arab support, the British should recognize the independence of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula except for Aden.
McMahon's reply was evasive. He was prepared to "confirm" Britain's "desire for the independence of the Arab countries", but could not go so far as to specify the boundaries of the future Arab state. Such an exercise, he suggested, would be "premature and a waste of time", when hostilities were underway
Flattery and florid platitudes
But Sharif Hussain was insistent. This was not the usual "Eastern potentate" who could be deflected with the flatteries and florid platitudes that the British were accustomed by policy to. The "proposed frontiers and boundaries", he told McMahon in a letter written in September 1915, were the "demands of our people", who "believed that these were the minimum necessary for the establishment of the new order for which they are striving." Politely rebuffing McMahon's flattery, Hussain reminded him that the aim was "to ensure that the conditions which are essential to our future shall be secured on a foundation of reality and not on highlydecorated phrases and titles."
1915, McMahon finally relented, committing Britain to recognizing Arab sovereignty over the entire area mentioned by Hussain. He only pleaded for exempting those areas that were not "purely Arab" such as "the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo." Another quite distinct arrangement was conceived of in respect of the two vilayets (provinces) of Baghdad and Basra, where Britain had an established position and certain special interests. McMahon also reaffirmed that these commitments would not prejudice treaties already concluded between Britain and "certain Arab
Though there remained areas of ambiguity, Sharif Hussain was greatly encouraged by this letter. He was willing to renounce the Arab claim to the predomi-
Turkish districts of Mersin and insisted that the vilayets of Aleppo (now Naleb) and Beirut, and their "Western maritime coasts" were "purely Arab provinces, in which the Muslim is indistinguishable from the Christian." He also rejected the suggestion that the British could maintain their sovereignty over the provinces of Baghdad and Basra, since these were integral to the Arab people's appreciation of their civilization. However, he said, the parts of southern Iraq that occupied by British troops could remain so "for a period of time to be determined by negotiation" and the "agreements in force with certain chiefs in those parts (would) be respected."
Certain features of this compact with the Sharif of Mecca are of special significance to understanding the crisis in the Arab world today. Britain had at various points in the 19th century concluded treaties with the Arab chieftains of Oman, Qatar, and all the other states which today comprise the United Arab Emirates. These treaties were crucial to the safety of the maritime traffic to the East, which then flowed mainly through the Suez Canal. Tucked away at the head of the Persian Gulf, Kuwait was not of great significance in this scheme of things. the chieftancy of Kuwait after murdering two of his half-brothers. The murdered man's sons fled to Basra and placed themselves under the protection of the Turkish Sultan. To ward off the threat from Basra, which then maintained a jurisdiction thought it prudent to seek an alliance with
Britain's interest had meanwhile been aroused by a German cartel's plan to extend the Berlin-Baghdad railway towards the Persian Gulf, and directly access the sea routes to the east. The project naturally conceived of Kuwait as a railway terminus, considering the well-known deficiencies of Basra. A treaty with the al-Sabah's was now seen by Britain to serve the important function of frustrating the German bid to gain access to the Persian Gulf.
### British apply coercive diplomacy
By a treaty of 1899, Kuwait was placed under the protection of Britain. coercive diplomacy with the Turkish Sultan enabled Britain to gain recognition of Kuwait as an autonomous caza (minor district) of the vilayet of Basra. Another treaty, drawn up in 1913, sought to define the boundaries of Kuwait, but significantly remained unratified from the Ottoman side. When World War I broke out, diplomacy was rendered entirely redundant.
Hussain's last note to McMahon committed the Arabs to honouring the special arrangements concluded by Britain in the vicinity of Basra. It would be reasonable to assume that this meant Kuwait. However, Hussain remained silent on treaties concluded with other chiefs of the Gulf region. The Hussain-McMahon negotiation thus remained inconclusive on several matters of detail, though the issues of principle had been stated with great clari-
In October 1915, Emir Faisal raised the banner of revolt against the Turks and began his march on Damascus with an Arab Bedouin army. In May 1916, Mark Sykes for Britain and Georges Picot for France, put their signatures to a secret document partitioning the Ottoman Empire between the two "allies". Because
of its interests in the northern
Ottoman Empire, Tsarist Russia was also allowed in on the anticipatoed division of the spoils.
The Sykes-Picot agreement is a watershed in the Arab world's relations with the West. As an instance of colonial duplicity, it is perhaps unparalleled; in violation of the Hussain-McMahon compact, it drastically curtailed the territory that would be under Arab sovereignty in the postwar dispensation. To begin with, it excluded the entirety of the Arabian peninsula, Lebanon, Palestine, the provinces of Baghdad and Basra, and that portion of Syria that fell west of a line drawn from Aleppo to state was to be confined within a rough quadrilateral, bounded by
Aleppo, Aqaba, Mosul, and the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.
And even this supposedly autonomous state was divided into two zones in each of which the British and the
French would enjoy exclusive rights of finance and enterprise.
The proposed Arab state was to be completely landlocked, except for the very narrow access to the straits of Agaba. It was to have been sparsely settled and predominantly arid. The entire Mediterranean coast and the Tigris-Euphrates delta - areas of rich historical association for the
Arabs — were to be placed under Anglo-
French tutelage.
Palestine under
"international control"
The Mediterranean coast north of Tyre, was to be the exclusive preserve of the
French, while the British retained Baghdad and Basra.
Palestine was to be retained under "international control" — in other words, it would be run by a cabal of the "allied powers", rather than by any single one of them. The French had been keen on keeping Palestine, which would have given them control over the entire eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean.
But Tsarist Russia too had its ambitions, cloaked under the religious garb of pro-
Orthodox Church. Britain, moreover, was averse to having any other European power in close proximity to the Suez
Canal zone. Given these irreconcilable
"international control" seemed a claims, reasonable compromise.
It is again significant that the pretence of Kuwaiti autonomy had no place within the secret councils of the colonial powers.
British ambitions had been expanded to take in all of Southern Iraq, on the assumption that the term covered the tiny enclave of Kuwait also.
When the Bolshevik revolutionaries seized power in Russia, they publicly tore up the Sykes-Picot agreement, in token of their repudiation of imperialist politics. News of the agreement filtered through to the Sharif Hussain, who was aghast at the magnitude of the deception. Early in 1918, the British foreign secretary, A. J. Balfour, sought to assuage Arab anxieties with the plea that the Sykes-Picot agreement incorporated various "stipulations" regarding "the consent of the populations and the safeguarding of their interests."
Nothing could have been further from the truth. Sykes-Picot did not merely disregard Arab interests, it sought to override them. That this patent deception should have come from the author of the programme to establish a "Jewish National Home" in Palestine and that this concession to Zionism had made while Arab nationalists were being fobbed off in a variety of ways, showed which way the wind was blowing
The Emir Faisal was by now suspicious of Anglo-French intentions, and saw sufficient cause to accelerate his march towards Damascus. He reached the city on October 1, 1918, to a rapturous reception by its people. He was many days ahead of the British troops under Field Marshal Allenby. Shortly afterwards, the Ottomans surrendered. On November 7, Britain and France issued a joint declaration that their aim for the land that had been "liberated" from the Turks, was the institution of "national governments and administrations" that would "derive their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and the choice of the indigenous populations."
All through 1919, Faisal travelled around the imperial capitals of Europe, seeking to win concrete commitments that embodied this abstract principle. The French were openly hostile to his proposals, while the British were uneasy and
While all this was underway, the al-
MIDDLE EAST Fatah and the al-Ahad had reconstituted themselves into popular representative bodies that claimed to represent the people of Syria and Iraq. In July 1919, the General Syrian Congress passed a resolution declaring its intention to establish a constitutional monarchy in Syria, with Damascus as capital. Developments in Baghdad followed virtually the same course.
General Syrian Congress proclaims independence
The "allies" continued to be ambivalent. On March 8, 1920, the General Syriindependence of Syria with Emir Faisal as monarch. The territory covered by the independent state took in all of present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. At the same time, a similar gathering in Baghdad proclaimed the independence of Iraq, with Emir Abdullah as the constitu-
The "allies" would have none of it. They signalled their rejection of the Syriaction, and proceeded to another of their infamous cabals at San Remo in April 1920. The San Remo cabal did away with even the marginal concessions to Arab sovereignty embodied in the Sykes-Picot agreement. It resolved upon placing the whole of the Arab country under mandatory rule, from the Mediterranean to the Persian frontier. Syria was broken up into three fragments Christian Lebanon and Palestine were hived off, and the residual became the truncated "Syria" that is 6. Historical details on the formation of the Kuwaiti state can be had from J. B. Kelly, Arabia, the Gulf and the West, Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1980 written from a British Foreign Office perspective. Molly Izard, The Guif: Arabia's Western Approaches, John Murray, London 1979, is also useful, though written in 15 May 13, 1991 • #206 International Viewpoint
MIDDLE EAST known by that name to this day.
Syria and Lebanon were placed under the French mandate, while Britain was given the mandates for Iraq and Palestine. The Palestine mandate carried with it the proviso that the Balfour declaration on the "Jewish National Home" would be energetically implemented. And the mandate for Iraq took in the entirety of the provinces of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul — it was not thought necessary to separ ately mention Kuwait, since the autonomy of that tiny enclave was not a pretence that the imperial powers thought it necessary to maintain among themselves.
On July 1920, the French military commander for the Eastern Mediterranean sent an ultimatum to the newly enthroned King Faisal of Syria.
French expeditionary force takes Damascus
Five days later, a French expeditionary force marched on Damascus, overcame the resistance of small Arab bands, and took the city. Faisal was forced to leave Damascus on July 28. Iraq exploded in resentment; the Emir Abdullah began mobilizing his Bedouin tribesmen for an assault on Damascus; and Syrian Druze militiamen launched the first of the guerilla campaigns which were to harass the French colonial administration over the next five years.
Perhaps 5,000 Iraqi lives were lost in the insurrection before it was crushed in October 1920. Britain then launched a desperate fire-fighting operation to establish a modicum of civil order. Faisal was received in Baghdad, and after a quick referendum, recognized as King of Iraq. At the same time, his brother Abdullah was proclaimed King of Trans-Jordan, with its capital at Amman.
The designs of the Sykes-Picot agreement were carried through to their fruition in the creation of these two states. Both states were almost entirely land-locked. Iraq was fortunate enough to be given the provinces of Basra and Baghdad, which were rich in associations with
Arab civilization. But when the east bank of the Jordan river was constituted into an autonomous state the rather improbable name of Trans-Jordan, it was forced to sever its historical ties with the Mediterranean coast and the cities of Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem. What remained state whose name reflected an uncertain territoriality, and an unformed historicity. It had a ruling Bedouin military class and a settled Palestinian population. when the frontiers of Iraq and Jordan were thus defined. The British Conservative government of the time had come to view control over the Persian Gulf as the 16 key to the defence of empire in India. And they were most disinclined to surrenInternational Viewpoint #206 • May 13, 1991 der their strategic enclave at the head of the Gulf to the mercies of a nationalistminded monarch in Baghdad.
Arab nationalism was a movement that was throttled at birth. A comparison with India would heighten some of the contrasts between the relatively enlightened policy practised in the continent, and its most bigoted manifestation in the Arab countries.
The constitutional reforms that began in India with the Royal Proclamation of 1919, enabled the incipient Indian bourgeoisie to incrementally occupy the political space that was being vacated by the power. At the same time, the growth of indigenous industry and commerce that began with the fiscal reforms of the mid-1920s strengthened the internal solidarity of at least a section of the bourgeoisie, enabling them to emerge as a class capable of administering a mod-
The Arab world witnessed contrary tendencies. While the forces of national intedisintegration was encouraged in the Arab world. Arbitrary divisions were super-imposed on an area of great cultural homogeneity, causing enormous disruptions to the growth of bourgeois
Damaging severance of regional unity
Much of the land in Palestine, for instance, had been owned by the Damascus and Beirut based bourgeoisie. But the severance of the connection between Syr la, Lebanon and Palestine, destroyed all the growth potentialities of this small Arab elite. Most of the land-owners in Palestine had no choice but to sell their landholdings. And into this vacuum stepped — not other Arabs — but Jewish immigrants who embodied the European ethos of capital and enterprise
David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, and the architect of that aggressive policy towards its neighbours, was one of the Zionist pioneers in Palestine. He has described the ideology underlying the growth of Jewish settlements in the most noble terms: "the return of the Jews to their Land was bound up with the lofty mission to make the Middle East bloom establish friendly co-operation between the Semitic peoples." Much colonial conquest has been rationalized in precisely such terms, and the "friendly cooperation" between colonizers and subject pophas never been more than euphemism for a relationship of domimutual exclusion. subtle suggestion of this in Ben Gurion's affirmation that Jewish immigrants were "independent in economy, culture and and "able to
As Arab resentment grew at their dispossession from the land, the Jewish Trade Union Congress (the Histadrut) thought it necessary to insist that Jewish enterprise should employ only labour. And through the organization of the Jewish Defence Force (the Haganah) Ben Gurion sought to impress upon the Arabs that "the presence of Jews in Palestine was not a feeble or fleeting factor, but a decisive one, a historical reality."
Cultural identity of Palestinians denied
Less than two decades after Palestine had been torn from its centuries-long association with Damascus and Beirut, the Royal Commission on Palestine found it easy to deny the cultural identity of the Palestinian Arabs. "In the twelve centuries and more since the Arab conquest, Palestine had virtually dropped out
And a decade later, the Jewish Agency for Palestine was able to win its case for Israel with the preposterous claim that "Palestine cannot be described as an Arab country either by historical significance or in respect of the forces which now shape its political and social character." Indeed, the decapitated and divided Palestine was easily portrayed as an area that owed its "lustre in the history of mankind to its Jewish connections. "0
In 1948, the state of Israel was proclaimed with the backing of a big power cabal at the UN: united in their opposition to Israel, the Arabs were divided in every other respect, and went down to the first of their many military defeats. But the iron had entered the soul. Filled with bitand rancour, they refused to accept the imperial fait accompli that had planted a European outpost in their midst, and merely decided to bide their time until the opportunity to strike back came
With the end of World War II, the mantle of enforcing colonial law passed on to white settler colony of the United States. The task of preserving the state of permanent instability in the Arab world had now to be performed by the US. Pax Britannica was transformed into the Pax Anglo-Americana. effort to repair some trivial damage to the Pax was followed by a breach that the upholders of the peace never foresaw. Characteristically obtuse, the American clique has failed to comprehend that its every intervention in the Arab world has invariably proved expensive in terms of its different political ram7. David Ben Gurion, Israel, Years of Challenge, Anthony Blond, London, 1964, p. 13 9. Cited in the Jewish Agency for Palestine, The Jewish Plan for Palestine, Jerusalem, 1947, p. 105.