In hindsight, it is easy to see that the American-led King-Crane Commission was a fool’s mission. The British and French declined to nominate officials to take part in the study, thereby undermining the validity of what had become an American, rather than a multinational, delegation. As they had no intention of being bound by the commission’s findings, they did not wish to commit their own diplomats to the process. And yet the King-Crane Report is a unique document, providing in the words of its authors “a fairly accurate analysis of present political opinion in Syria”—a glimpse into the aspirations and fears of rural and urban communities in that brief moment between Ottoman and European rule.¹⁴ In March 1919, President Wilson named Oberlin College president Henry Churchill King and Chicago businessman Charles R. Crane to head the commission. Both men had extensive knowledge of the Middle East—King as a scholar of biblical history and Crane through his travels in Ottoman lands, dating back to 1878. The Americans set out for Syria in May 1919 with instructions to meet with local representatives and report back on the aspirations of the Arab peoples in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. The King-Crane Commission proved to be much more than just a fact-finding mission. The two men’s presence in Greater Syria set in motion intense nationalist activity involving a broader swath of the Syrian population than any political movement up to that point. When Amir Faysal returned to Syria from Paris empty-handed, he presented the imminent arrival of the King-Crane Commission to his followers as a favorable development and a serious step toward achieving Syrian national aspirations. He gave a speech to an assembly of notables from across Greater Syria to brief them on his experiences. He could not tell them the whole truth, of how he had been kept waiting and was humiliated by the peacemakers in Paris, who seemed intent on rejecting his claims to uphold their own imperial interests in Greater Syria. Now that he was back on Arab territory, speaking his own language to his own supporters, he turned the condescension back on the Europeans. “I went . . . to claim our due at the Conference which was meeting in Paris,” he explained. “I soon realized that the Westerners were profoundly ignorant about the Arabs and that their information was derived entirely from the tales of the Arabian Nights.” In many regards, Faysal was right. Aside from a handful of experts, the average politician in Britain and France would have known very little about the Arab world. ?Naturally this ignorance of theirs made me spend a good deal of time in simply giving basic facts,? Faysal explained. Looking out over the faces of his supporters, who frequently interrupted his speech to pledge their devotion, he could not admit to failure. However, he stretched the truth beyond recognition when he asserted that the Allies had recognized the independence of the Arab people in principle. He tried to present the King-Crane Commission as an extension of great power recognition of Arab aspirations. “The international committee,” he said, “will ask you to express yourselves in any way you please, for the nations today do not want to govern other peoples except with their consent.”¹⁵ Buoyed by Faysal’s words, Syrian nationalists set to work to unite the people of Syria behind a common agenda. The Arab government distributed sermons to be read in Friday prayers in Syrian mosques, political and cultural associations were enlisted to prepare petitions for the King-Crane Commission, and the headmen of villages and town quarters were mobilized to encourage an enthusiastic response to the commission. Thousands of leaflets were printed and distributed in towns and villages. For people new to nationalist politics, the leaflets provided straightforward ideas in the form of slogans. “We demand absolute independence,” asserted one leaflet in bold Arabic and English. Another leaflet exhorted all Syrians to defend their freedom and used parentheses to set out nationalist slogans within the longer text. Let no one mislead you into betraying the land of your grandfathers, or your children and grandchildren will curse you. Live free! Liberate yourself from the yoke of oppression. Seek your own benefit and make your demands the following: First: Demand (Complete Political Independence) without restriction or condition or protection or trusteeship. Second: Accept no partition of your people’s land and your fatherland, in other words (Syria in its entirety is one and indivisible). Third: Demand your country’s borders, the Taurus Mountains in the north, the Sinai Desert in the south, the Mediterranean to the West. Fourth: Seek for the other liberated Arab lands independence and union [with Syria]. Fifth: When necessary, show preference in financial or technical insistence to America on condition that it not compromise our complete political independence. Sixth: Protest Article 22 of the League of Nations setting out the necessity of trusteeship over people seeking independence. Seventh: Refuse absolutely any claim made by any state to historic or preponderant rights in our lands. (signed) An informed Arab nationalist¹⁶

Even in the Arabic original the language is awkward, but the message was unambiguous. As local communities prepared to meet with the King-Crane Commission, these demands were frequently repeated in the petitions they submitted and in the slogans chanted and painted on signs and banners. Having mobilized Syrian public opinion, Faysal and his advisors convened a makeshift parliament to present the Syrian people’s views to the international commission. The Hashemites knew enough about European statecraft to recognize that according to their rules, a nation expressed its legitimate aspirations through an elected assembly. They relied on Ottoman electoral procedures to select delegates from the inland towns of Syria. They had to resort to other methods in Lebanon and Palestine, where the British and French occupation authorities obstructed all political action.¹⁷ Leading members of notable families and tribes in Palestine and Lebanon were invited to Damascus to join the Syrian General Congress. Nearly one hundred delegates had been selected to take part in the Congress, though only sixty-nine actually managed to reach Damascus in time to participate in its deliberations. They were working against the clock to produce a statement of national aspirations before the King-Crane Commission reached Damascus.

The King-Crane Commission arrived in Jaffa on June 10, 1919, and spent six weeks touring towns and villages in Palestine, Syria, Transjordan, and Lebanon. The commissioners kept statistics on all aspects of their trip. They held meetings in more than forty towns and rural centers and met with 442 delegations, representing people from all walks of life, such as municipal and administrative councils, village chiefs, and tribal shaykhs. They received farmers and tradesmen, and representatives of over a dozen Christian denominations, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Jews, Druze, and other minority groups. They met with eight different women’s delegations and marveled at “the new role women are playing in the nationalistic movements in the Orient.” In the course of their travels they collected 1,863 petitions, with a total of 91,079 signatures—representing nearly 3 percent of the total population of Greater Syria (which they estimated at 3.2 million). The commissioners could not have been more thorough in sounding out public opinion in Greater Syria. King and Crane reached Damascus on June 25. Yusif al-Hakim, a minister in Amir Faysal’s government, recalled:They paid an official visit to the Royal Palace and to the head of the government. They then returned to their hotel, where the first people to greet them were the men of the press. In brief, they told the journalists that they had merely come to assess the will of the people in their political future, and to learn which state they would choose to serve as a mandatory over them for a period to provide technical and economic assistance, in accordance with previous statements of President Wilson.¹⁸