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