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