Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

In 1906 a British hunting party entered lands of the village of Dinshaway in the Nile Delta on a pigeon shoot. A group of outraged peasants surrounded the British to stop them from killing their pigeons, which they raised for food. In the fracas that followed, one British officer was injured and died seeking help. Lord Cromer was out of the country at the time, and his caretakers grossly over-reacted. British soldiers arrested fifty-two men from the village and convened a special tribunal, as the Egyptian public followed developments avidly through the newspapers. Ahmad Amin’s politics and reading habits changed dramatically after the Dinshaway Incident. He remembered the date precisely—June 27, 1906—when he and his friends were having dinner on a roof terrace in Alexandria. “When the newspapers came, we read that four of Dinshaway’s people were sentenced to death, two to hard labor for life, one to fifteen years in prison, six to seven years in prison, and five to fifty lashes each. We were [overcome with grief], the banquet turned into a funeral, and most of us wept.”⁴⁵ Henceforth, Amin claimed, he only read Mustafa Kamil’s radical nationalist newspaper in his local coffee shop. Amin’s conversion to nationalism was repeated across Egypt. Newspapers conveyed the tragedy to people in the cities, and folk poets spread the news from village to village with the songs they composed recounting the tragedy of Dinshaway and the injustice of British rule. Calm eventually returned to Egypt, though Dinshaway was not forgotten nor were the British forgiven. In 1906 the foundations for a nationalist movement were all in place. Yet nationalists in Egypt found themselves confronting a British Empire that was looking to expand its presence in the Arab world rather than retreat. Indeed, Britain’s moment in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East was just beginning.

CHAPTER 6

Divide and Rule: World War I and the Postwar Settlement

Nationalism emerged in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire at the start of the twentieth century. It was at first difficult for the Arab peoples of the empire to imagine themselves in a separate state after nearly four centuries under Ottoman rule. The early nationalists grappled with conflicting notions of what an Arab state might look like. Some imagined a kingdom centered in the Arabian Peninsula whereas others aspired to statehood in discrete parts of the Arab world, like Greater Syria or Iraq. Nationalists before their time, they were marginal in their own society and faced such repression from the Ottoman authorities as to discourage others from following their lead. Those who wished to pursue their political dreams were forced into exile. Some went to Paris, where their ideas were nourished by European nationalists; others traveled to Cairo, where they were inspired by the Islamic reformers and the secular nationalists agitating against British rule. Arab disenchantment with Ottoman rule grew more widespread after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. The Young Turks were ardent nationalists who instigated the revolution to force the sultan to restore the 1876 Constitution and to reconvene the Parliament. These measures met with widespread support among the Arab subjects of the empire, who believed the Young Turks would liberalize Ottoman rule. They soon learned, however, that the new regime in Istanbul was determined to strengthen its hold over the Arab provinces through a more rigorous application of Ottoman rule. The Young Turks introduced a series of measures they viewed as centralizing, but which many Arabs saw as repressive. In particular, they promoted the use of Turkish as the official language of the empire over Arabic in the schools and public administration of the Arab provinces. This policy alienated Arab ideologues, for whom the Arabic language was an integral part of their national identity. The very measures the Young Turks imposed to reinforce the Arabs? attachment to the empire had the unintended consequence of encouraging a nascent nationalist movement. By the 1910s, groups of intellectuals and army officers had begun to organize secret nationalist societies to pursue Arab independence from Ottoman rule. Some of these nationalists entered into correspondence with the European powers through their local consulates, hoping to secure outside support for their aims. The difficulties faced by the early Arab nationalists were nearly insurmountable. The Ottoman state was omnipresent, and it cracked down ruthlessly on illegal political activity. Those seeking independence for the Arab lands lacked the means to achieve their goals. Gone were the days when a strong man from the Arab provinces might rise up to defeat Ottoman armies, like Muhammad ’Ali had done. If the Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century had achieved anything, it was to make the central government stronger and the Arab provinces more subordinate to Istanbul’s rule. It would take a major cataclysm to shake the Ottoman grip on the Arab world. The First World War was to prove that cataclysm.

The Ottoman Empire entered the First World War in alliance with Germany in November 1914. It was a war that the Ottomans would have preferred to avoid. The empire was battle weary after fighting the Italians in 1911 over Libya and the Aegean Islands, and after two devastating wars with the Balkan states in 1912 and 1913. As a major European war loomed in the summer of 1914, the Ottoman government hoped to stay out of the fight and secure a defensive alliance with Britain or France. However, neither Britain nor France was willing to enter into binding commitments against their Entente partner, Russia, whose territorial ambitions the Ottoman Empire feared most of all. One of the leaders of the Young Turk government, Enver Pasha, was a great admirer of Germany. He believed Germany, as the only European power without territorial ambitions in the Middle East, could be trusted. Russia, France, and Britain had enlarged their own empires at the Ottomans’ expense in the past and were likely to try to do so again. Enver was impressed by Germany’s military prowess, and he argued forcefully that Germany alone could provide the protection the Ottomans needed against further European encroachment into Ottoman domains. Enver led the secret negotiations with the German government and secured a treaty of alliance shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe, on August 2, 1914. The treaty promised German military advisors, war materiel, and financial assistance in return for an Ottoman declaration of war in support of the Central Powers. The Germans had hoped to exploit the Ottoman sultan’s titular role as caliph, or leader of the global Muslim community, to foment a jihad against Britain and France. Given the millions of Muslims in British and French colonies in South Asia and North Africa, German war planners believed that such a jihad would have devastating consequences on their enemies’ war effort. When the Ottomans finally declared war on the Entente Powers, on November 11, 1914, the sultan called on Muslims around the world to join in jihad against Britain, Russia, and France. Though the sultan’s call had little effect on the international community of believers, who were preoccupied with their own daily concerns far from the European theaters of war, it did raise serious concern in Paris and London. Long after the outbreak of war, British and French strategists actively courted the support of high Muslim officials for their war effort in a bid to counter the sultan-caliph’s jihad.

At war once again, the Ottoman authorities clamped down ruthlessly on anyone suspected of separatist tendencies. Arab nationalists came under particular attack. One of the three leaders of the Young Turks government, Cemal Pasha, took control of Greater Syria and led the suppression of Arab nationalists there. Drawing on papers confiscated from the French consulate that implicated some of the most prominent Arabists in Beirut and Damascus, Cemal charged scores of Syrians and Lebanese with high treason. A military tribunal was established in Mount Lebanon in 1915 that, over the course of the year, sentenced dozens to be hanged in Beirut and Damascus and condemned hundreds more to long prison sentences, and thousands to exile. These draconian punishments earned Cemal Pasha the nickname al-Saffah, or “the blood-shedder,” and convinced a growing number of Arabs to seek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Yet the hardships of the war years affected everyone in the Arab provinces, not just those engaged in illicit political activities. The Ottoman army conscripted thousands of young men into active service, many of whom over time were wounded, succumbed to disease, or killed in action. Peasants lost their crops and livestock to the government’s requisition officers, who paid for these goods in freshly printed paper money that had no real value. Poor rains, and a locust plague, compounded the farmers’ problems and led to a terrible famine that claimed nearly half a million lives in Mount Lebanon and the Syrian coastal regions. Nevertheless, and to the surprise of the European powers, the Ottomans proved a tenacious ally. Ottoman forces attacked British positions in the Suez Canal zone at the start of the war. They defeated the French, British, and Commonwealth forces at Gallipoli in 1915. They secured the surrender of the Indian Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia in 1916. They contained an Arab revolt along the Hijaz Railway line from 1916 to 1918. And they forced the British to fight for every inch of Palestine until the autumn of 1918. After that, the Ottoman war effort collapsed. British forces completed their conquest of Mesopotamia, Palestine, and—with the help of their allies in the Arab Revolt—Syria. The Ottomans retreated to Anatolia, never to return to Arab lands. In October 1918, the last Turkish troops slipped over the border north of Aleppo, near the spot where Selim the Grim had begun his conquest of Arab lands 402 years earlier. Four centuries of Ottoman rule over the Arab lands came to an abrupt end. When the defeated Ottomans withdrew from their Arab provinces, there were few who mourned their passing. With the end of Ottoman rule, people in the Arab world entered a period of intense political activity. They looked back on the Ottoman era as four centuries of oppression and underdevelopment. They were electrified by a vision of a renascent Arab world emerging into the community of nations as an independent, unified state. At the same time, they were aware of the danger posed by European imperialism. Having read in their newspapers about the hardships of French rule in North Africa and of British rule in Egypt, the other Arab peoples were determined to avoid foreign domination at all costs. And, for a brief, heady moment between October 1918 and July 1920, it seemed as though Arab independence might be achieved. The greatest obstacles they faced were the territorial ambitions of the victorious Entente Powers.

No sooner had the Ottomans entered the world war on Germany’s side than the Entente Powers began to plan for the postwar partition of the empire. The Russians were first to stake a claim, informing their Entente allies in March 1915 that they intended to annex Istanbul and the straits linking the Russian Black Sea coast to the Mediterranean. France accepted Russia’s claim and set out its own plans to annex Cilicia (the southeastern Turkish coast, including the cities of Alexandretta and Adana) and Greater Syria (roughly equivalent to modern Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Jordan), including the holy places in Palestine. In considering their allies’ demands, Britain was forced to weigh its own strategic interests in Ottoman territory. On April 8, 1915, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith convened a committee to consider postwar scenarios for a defeated Ottoman Empire. The interdepartmental committee, named after its chairman, Sir Maurice de Bunsen, aimed to balance “the prospective advantages to the British Empire by a readjustment of conditions in Asiatic Turkey, and the inevitable increase of Imperial responsibility.” At the end of June 1915, the de Bunsen Committee presented its findings. In the event of a partition of the Ottoman Empire, Britain sought to preserve its position in the Persian Gulf, from Kuwait to the Trucial States (the modern United Arab Emirates), as an exclusive sphere of influence. Furthermore, Britain sought to bring all of Mesopotamia?Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul?under its control. Britain also sought a land bridge linking Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean port of Haifa, with a railway line to ensure imperial communications.¹ What is striking is how closely the eventual postwar settlement corresponded to the recommendations of the de Bunsen Committee—particularly given the tangled web of promises that Britain subsequently concluded with its wartime allies. The British concluded three separate agreements between 1915 and 1917 for the postwar partition of Ottoman Arab lands: an agreement with the sharif of Mecca for the creation of an independent Arab Kingdom; a European pact for the partition of Syria and Mesopotamia between Britain and France; and a pledge to the Zionist movement to create a Jewish national home in Palestine. One of the challenges of British postwar diplomacy was to find a way to square what were, in many ways, contradictory promises. The first promise was the most extensive. Shortly after the de Bunsen Report was filed, Lord Kitchener, Britain’s secretary of state for war, authorized British officials in Cairo to negotiate an alliance with the sharif of Mecca, the Ottoman-appointed chief religious authority of Islam’s holiest city. It was early in the war, and the British were concerned that the Ottoman call to jihad might indeed have the impact the Germans had hoped for—a general uprising in the Muslim world that would destabilize Britain’s colonies. The British hoped to turn the tables on the Ottomans with a counter-declaration of jihad by the highest Islamic official in the Arab world—in essence, turning the budding Arab nationalist movement against the Ottomans. Such an Arab revolt would also open an internal front against Germany’s eastern ally. By the summer of 1915, British and Commonwealth troops were in dire need of relief, pinned down by fierce Ottoman and German resistance in Gallipoli. In July 1915, Sharif Husayn ibn ’Ali of Mecca entered into correspondence with the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon. In the course of their eight-month correspondence, which ran until March 1916, McMahon promised British recognition of an independent Arab kingdom, to be ruled by Sharif Husayn and his Hashemite dynasty, in return for the Hashemites leading an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule. Britain promised to support the Arab revolt with funds, guns, and grain. Most of the negotiations between Husayn and McMahon concerned the boundaries of the putative Arab kingdom. Sharif Husayn was very specific in his territorial demands: all of Syria, from the Egyptian border in the Sinai up to Cilicia and the Taurus Mountains in Turkey; all of Mesopotamia to the frontiers of Persia; and all of the Arabian peninsula, except for the British colony of Aden. In his famous letter of October 24, 1915, Sir Henry McMahon confirmed the boundaries proposed by Sharif Husayn, with two exclusions. He ruled out Cilicia and those “portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo” in which France had declared its interests, and upheld British claims to the provinces of Baghdad and Basra, which could be satisfied by a joint Anglo-Arab administration. “Subject to [these] modifications,” McMahon assured Husayn, “Great Britain is prepared to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca.” Husayn grudgingly accepted these exclusions, warning that “at the first opportunity after this war is finished, we shall ask you . . . for what we now leave to France in Beirut and its coasts.”² On the basis of this understanding with Great Britain, Sharif Husayn called for an Arab uprising against Ottoman rule on June 5, 1916. The Arab Revolt began with attacks on government positions in the Hijaz. Mecca fell to the Hashemite forces on June 12, and the Red Sea port of Jidda surrendered four days later. The large Ottoman garrison in Medina was able to withstand the Arab attack and was resupplied by the Hijaz Railway line. The Hashemites were determined to cut this vital line of communications with Damascus to force the surrender of Medina and complete their conquest of the Hijaz. They moved northward to sabotage the 1,300-kilometer-long (or 810-miles long) railway in more exposed parts of the Syrian Desert. This was where T. E. Lawrence came into his own, setting charges under culverts and trestles to disrupt the trains heading to Medina. In July 1917, the Arab Army, commanded by Sharif Husayn’s son, Amir Faysal, took the Ottoman fortress in the small port of al-‘Aqaba (in modern Jordan). Faysal established his headquarters in Aqaba, from which point his forces harassed Ottoman strongholds in Ma’an and Tafila while keeping up a steady stream of attacks on the Hijaz Railway. However, the Arab Army never managed to overcome Ottoman defenses and take the town of Ma’an. Moreover, they encountered resistance from Arab tribes and townsmen allied with the Ottomans. In the nearby town of Karak, the tribesmen and townspeople formed a 500-man militia and set off “fired with enthusiasm to fight Faysal and his band” on July 17, 1917. The Karak volunteers fought a three-hour battle against the Hashemite-led forces and declared victory after killing nine men from the Arab Army and capturing two of their horses. This minor engagement revealed the extent to which the Arab Revolt divided local loyalties between supporters of the Ottomans and of the Hashemites. In August 1917, British and French intelligence concurred that the tribes of Transjordan were firmly in the Ottoman camp.³ Sharif Husayn’s counter-jihad had failed to win over the Arabs as a whole. Faced with stubborn Ottoman resistance in Ma’an and fighting on what was sometimes hostile territory, the Hashemites raced northward to the oasis town of al-Azrak in August 1918. From this new base, the Arab Army, which had expanded to a force of 8,000 men, set off in a pincer movement with General Edmund Allenby?s army in Palestine, to take the city of Damascus. With the fall of Damascus on October 2, 1918, the Arab Revolt had secured its greatest ambition?and Sharif Husayn expected Britain to honor its commitments.

Britain’s second wartime agreement for the disposition of Ottoman territory was the most complex. Britain was aware of France and Russia’s territorial ambitions in Ottoman lands, though the three wartime allies had not yet struck a formal agreement. While McMahon was still in negotiations with Sharif Husayn, the British and French governments appointed delegates to conclude a formal agreement on the postwar division of Ottoman territory. The French were represented by Charles Franзois Georges-Picot, the former consul general in Beirut, and the British by Lord Kitchener’s Middle East advisor, Sir Mark Sykes. The two sides reached an agreement in early 1916, to which Russia subscribed on condition that its territorial claims be accepted by Britain and France. The final accord, which came to be known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, was concluded in October 1916. It painted the map of the Middle East in shades of red and blue: the red zone corresponded to the provinces of Baghdad and Basra, in which the British would have the right “to establish such direct or indirect administration or control as they desire,” and the blue zone covered Cilicia and the Syrian coastal region, where the French enjoyed the same prerogatives. Palestine was the exception, shaded in brown as an area under “an international administration,” whose ultimate form remained to be determined. In addition, Britain claimed an area of informal control stretching across northern Arabia from Kirkuk in central Iraq to Gaza, and the French claimed informal control over a vast triangle running from Mosul to Aleppo and Damascus.⁴ The agreement also confirmed the boundaries of those territories claimed by Russia in eastern Anatolia. The Sykes-Picot Agreement created more problems than it resolved. The British later regretted offering France trusteeship over Mosul and northern Mesopotamia, and they had second thoughts about internationalizing the whole of Palestine. Moreover, the Sykes-Picot Agreement respected neither the spirit nor the letter of the Husayn-McMahon correspondence. It was, in the words of one Palestinian observer, “a startling piece of double-dealing.”⁵

Of all the wartime promises made by the British government, the third proved the most enduring. After centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe and Russia, a group of European Jewish thinkers had united around the dream of establishing a homeland in Palestine. Starting in 1882, waves of Jewish immigrants had fled persecution in Russia, and a small minority—some 20,000–30,000 in all—settled in Palestine. From 1882?1903 most of this first wave settled in the cities of Palestine, but some 3,000 lived in a series of agricultural colonies along the coastal plane and the northern highlands of Mount Carmel, supported by European Jewish philanthropists like Moses Montefiore and Baron Edmond de Rothschild. This movement gained momentum in 1896 with the publication of Theodore Herzl’s landmark book, The Jewish State. Herzl, a Viennese journalist, encouraged the spread of a new Jewish nationalist movement that came to be known as Zionism. Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in the summer of 1897, in which the World Zionist Organization was established and set out its aims, “to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.”⁶ The World Zionist Organization needed to gain international support for its project. With the outbreak of World War I, the organization moved its headquarters from Berlin to London. The leader of the organization was Chaim Weizmann, a chemistry professor whose contributions to the war effort (he made a discovery of direct application to the production of artillery shells) gave him access to the highest levels of British government. Weizmann took advantage of his connections to seek the government’s formal support of Zionism.⁷ After more than two years’ active lobbying with Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour, Weizmann secured the endorsement he sought. In a letter dated November 2, 1917, Balfour reported to Weizmann: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.⁸

Such a sweeping pronouncement clearly had British interests at heart. By extending their support to Zionist aspirations in Palestine, Balfour told the war cabinet, “we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda both in Russia and America” where “the vast majority of Jews . . . appeared to be favourable to Zionism.” Moreover, the Zionists returned the favor and, following the Balfour Declaration, lobbied for Palestine to be placed under British rule, resolving one of Britain’s misgivings with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which left Palestine under an ill-defined international administration.

The moment of truth, when Britain was forced to confront its conflicting promises, came in December 1917. The Balfour Declaration was a public statement, openly discussed by the British government. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, in contrast, was concluded in secret between the three Entente partners. Following the Russian Revolution in October 1917, the Bolsheviks began to publish confidential documents from the foreign ministry to discredit the secret diplomacy of the tsarist government?among them the exchange of letters that constituted the Sykes-Picot Agreement. News of the secret agreement for the partition of the Ottoman Empire reached Istanbul before the Arab world. The Ottomans and Germans saw an opportunity to drive a wedge between the Hashemites and the British. The Ottomans, besieged by the British army in Palestine, seized on British perfidy to approach the Hashemites with a peace offer. The Ottoman commander, Cemal Pasha, elaborated on the theme of the British duping the Arabs in a speech he gave in Beirut on December 4, 1917:Were not the liberation promised to the Sharif Husain by the British a mirage and a delusion, had there been some prospect, however remote, of his dreams of independence being realised, I might have conceded some speck of reason to the revolt in the Hejaz. But, the real intentions of the British are now known: it has not taken them so very long to come to light. And thus will the Sharif Husain . . . be made to suffer the humiliation, which he has brought upon himself, of having bartered the dignity conferred upon him by the Caliph of Islam [i.e., the Ottoman sultan] for a state of enslavement to the British.⁹

Cemal Pasha offered generous terms to the Hashemites with the hope that they might abandon their alliance with Britain and return to the Ottoman fold. Sharif Husayn and his sons faced a difficult decision, but they opted to preserve their alliance with Britain in order to seek their independence from the Ottomans. Arab trust in British promises, however, had been shaken—and with good grounds. Between the Husayn-McMahon correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration, the British government had promised most of Greater Syria and Mesopotamia to at least two parties, and in the case of Palestine, to no less than three.

To reassure their Arab allies of their good intentions, in November 1918, after the final Ottoman retreat from Arab territory, the British and French issued a palliative public statement. In their joint declaration, the countries set out their war aims in Arab lands as “the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national governments and administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations.” ¹⁰ The British and French took pains to reassure the Arabs that they sought no gain from their actions. Such disingenuous statements calmed Arab public opinion in the short run but had little bearing on Anglo-French imperial interests that underlay their partition agreements. As the Great War came to an end, the victorious Entente Powers set themselves the daunting task of restoring order—their vision of it, that is—to a world troubled by war. In the great queue of postwar issues to be resolved, the impatient leaders of the Arab world were told to take a number and have a seat. The peacemakers would address their concerns, and the conflicts of interest arising from British wartime promises, in due course.

In more than 100 meetings between January and June 1919, the leaders of the victorious Entente met in Paris to impose terms on their vanquished foes—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. A serving American president left the United States for the very first time to play a role in world diplomacy. David Lloyd George and George Clemenceau, the prime ministers of Britain and France, took the lead in setting the agenda. Together with Italy, these states comprised the Council of Four that would make most of the decisions in Paris. After four years of “the war to end all wars,” France and Great Britain were determined to use the Paris Peace Conference to ensure Germany would never rise to pose a threat to the peace of Europe again. They would use the conference to redraw the maps of Europe, Asia, and Africa, including the Arab world. And they would reward their own war efforts with the territory and colonial possessions of the defeated powers. Among the peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson spoke with an idealism that electrified people under foreign domination around the world. In his address to a joint session of Congress delivered on January 8, 1918, Wilson set out a vision of America’s postwar policies in fourteen famous points. He declared an end to “the day of conquest and aggrandizement” and asserted the radical view that in colonial matters the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the claims of the imperial power. Wilson addressed Arab aspirations in his twelfth point, assuring Arabs “an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” For many in the Arab world, this was their first encounter with the emerging American superpower that would come to dominate world affairs in the twentieth century. As the world assembled in Paris to work out the terms of peace, the Arabs looked to Woodrow Wilson as the standard-bearer of their aspirations. Among the Arab delegations to present their case in Paris was the commander of the Arab Revolt, Amir Faysal. Born in the Arabian highlands of Taif, Faysal (1883–1933) was the third son of Sharif Husayn ibn ’Ali of Mecca (served 1908–1917). Faysal spent much of his childhood in Istanbul, where he received an Ottoman education. He was elected in 1913 to the Ottoman Parliament to represent the Hijazi port of Jidda. Faysal visited Damascus in 1916 and was appalled by Cemal Pasha’s repressive measures against Arab nationalists. While in Damascus, Faysal met with members of secret Arab nationalist societies and took the leading role in commanding operations during the Arab Revolt of 1916?1918. Following the Ottoman retreat in 1918, Amir Faysal established an Arab government in Damascus with the aim of redeeming Britain’s pledge to support the creation of an Arab Kingdom. At the Versailles Peace Conference, Faysal sought to consolidate his position in Syria and to force the British to honor their commitments to his father, as set out in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence of 1915–1916, over Britain’s other wartime promises. He came to terms with the Balfour Declaration and even signed an agreement with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in January 1919 conceding Palestine to the Zionist movement on condition that the remainder of his demands for an Arab kingdom be fulfilled in full by the Allies. “But if the slightest modification or departure were to be made” to Hashemite demands for an Arab kingdom, Faysal penned at the bottom of his agreement with Weizmann, “I shall not then be bound by a single word of the present Agreement.”¹¹ Faysal had good reason to doubt that he would ever have to honor his agreement with Weizmann. In January 1919, Faysal presented the Supreme Council of the Paris Peace Conference with a memorandum setting out Arab aspirations. He intended to be realistic, going so far as to tone down many of his father’s original demands set out in his correspondence with McMahon three years earlier. In his memo, Faysal wrote that “the aim of the Arab nationalist movements . . . is to unite the Arabs eventually into one nation.” He based his claim on Arab ethnic and linguistic unity, on the alleged aspirations of prewar Arab nationalist parties in Syria and Mesopotamia, and on Arab service to the Allies’ war effort. He acknowledged that the different Arab lands were “very different economically and socially” and that it would be impossible to integrate them into a single state at once. He sought immediate and full independence for Greater Syria (including Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan) and the western Arabian province of Hijaz; accepted foreign intervention in Palestine to mediate between Jewish and Arab demands, and in Mesopotamia, where Britain had declared its interest in oil fields; and declared the Yemen and the central Arabian province of Najd (with whose Saudi rulers Britain had concluded a formal agreement) outside the scope of the Arab kingdom. Yet he maintained a commitment to “an eventual union of these areas under one sovereign government.” He concluded, “If our independence be conceded and our local competence established, the natural influences of race, language, and interest will soon draw us into one people.”¹² This vision of a unified Arab state was the last thing that the Allies wanted. Faysal’s presence in Paris was an embarrassment to the British and French alike. He was holding the British to their word and getting in the way of French imperial ambitions. The Americans provided a way out for what was becoming an awkward situation for Britain, France, and the Hashemites. Wilson suggested the formation of a multinational commission of enquiry to determine the wishes of the Syrian people firsthand. For Wilson, the commission would set a precedent for national self-determination, putting the principles of his Fourteen Points to work. For Britain and France, the fact-finding commission would defer consideration of Hashemite claims for months, during which time they would be free to dispose of Arab lands as they saw fit. Faysal took the suggestion at face value and thanked Wilson for giving the Arabs the opportunity to express ?their own purposes and ideals for their national future.?¹³