A Peace to End all Peace (91 page)

*
Karasu, however, did attempt at various times to reconcile the aims of Zionism with those of C.U.P. nationalism.

*
“It is a measure of the low degree of development of the Ottoman Empire that in 1914, its 1,900,000 square kilometers had only 5,991 kilometers of railways,” all of it single-track.
⁵

*
This opinion was rendered a week before the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany.

*
The treaty was signed the day
after
Germany had declared war on Russia. Germany had
not
been required to declare war by the terms of her treaty with Austria; as it happened, Germany declared war several days before Austria-Hungary did. The oddly drawn treaty with the Ottoman Empire therefore did not—if read literally—obligate the Turks to enter the war.

*
In March 1915 he moved into York House, St James’s Palace, a residence provided for him by King George.

*
The Circassians were a people from the Caucasus, once ruled by Turkey and later by Russia.

*
“Simla” is often used to mean the Government of India, whose summer capital it was.

*
Troubles caused by groups such as the nomadic Senussi on Egypt’s Libyan frontier were minor, and might well have occurred in any event.

*
Hussein referred to himself and his family as “Hashemites.”

*
The historical evidence now shows that this was not true.
⁵
But the left wing of the Liberal Party continued to believe that it was.

*
He told the Cabinet so; he told the Prime Minister so; and he recorded his opinion in letters and memoranda. In a diary entry for 19 March he recorded that “On the first day proposal was made I warned P. M., Lord K, Chief of Staff, L. George and Balfour that Fleet could not effect passage and that all naval officers thought so.”
³
Hankey indeed had issued such warnings, but a month later than he claimed. It was not on 13 January (when the Cabinet committee decided on the Dardanelles expedition) but on 10 February that he wrote to Balfour along those lines.
⁴
Later still he spoke to Asquith. On 13 February, the Prime Minister noted that “I have just been having a talk with Hankey, whose views are always worth hearing. He thinks very strongly that the naval operations…should be supported by landing a fairly strong military force. I have been for some time coming to the same opinion…”
⁵

*
Now called Iskenderun, and located in the extreme south of what is now Turkey, near the frontier of what is now Syria.

*
The image is one used by Lord Beaverbrook.

*
Both belonged to the Other Club, founded by Winston Churchill and F. E. Smith.

*
Historians still debate the question of whether victory in the Ottoman war in 1915 would have led to a rapid Allied victory in the German war. The “Easterners,” led by Lloyd George, never doubted that it would have done so.

*
Lawrence worked closely with the Arab Bureau, but was not officially posted to it until the end of 1916.

*
Reginald Wingate, who governed the Sudan, was alone among Kitchener’s followers in believing from the very outset of the Ottoman war that Hussein could be of
military
assistance to Britain.

*
Hussein ibn Ali, the Sherif of Mecca and its Emir, is referred to variously as Hussein, the Sherif, the Sherif Hussein, the Emir Hussein and, later, King Hussein. He is also referred to as the ruler of the Hejaz and, later, as King of the Hejaz.

*
A curious assertion, since the Arabs were already in the enemy camp.

*
Professor Elie Kedourie among them.

*
As noted earlier, advocates of an Arab Palestine have argued for decades that the geographical terms employed by McMahon, if properly interpreted, indicate that McMahon was pledging that Palestine would be Arab; and advocates of a Jewish Palestine have argued the reverse.

*
Jews whose ancestors in the Middle Ages lived in Spain and Portugal.

*
After Gallipoli, Enver resumed his earlier campaign to curb German influence. In early 1916 he indicated that even the 5,500 German troops then in the Ottoman Empire were too many, and should be withdrawn. To demonstrate that Turkey had no need of them, he insisted on sending seven Ottoman divisions to southern Europe to fight alongside the armies of other of the Central Powers. His efforts were not entirely successful; indeed, by the end of the war, there were 25,000 German officers and men serving in the Ottoman Empire.

*
It was not easy. As the archives of Austria-Hungary show, Habsburg officials expressed deep distrust of the ambitions for expansion that they ascribed to the German and Turkish empires.
¹
For centuries, Austria-Hungary had been encroaching on Ottoman territories in Europe. Her annexation of Ottoman Bosnia had brought on the Balkan Wars and set the stage for Sarajevo. She continued to dispute the Ottoman title to Albania, which she occupied in the earlier part of the world war. Harboring territorial designs of their own, Habsburg officials suspected that Hohenzollern officials were thinking along similar lines, so that Djemal’s Suez campaign brought expressions of concern from them that Germany might attempt to annex Egypt; while Ottoman officials, as always, distrusted their European partners.

*
The Liberal statesman, historian, and jurist, James Bryce, a pro-Armenian who headed a commission to investigate the 1915–16 rmenian Massacres during the war, issued a report that was damning to the C.U.P. government. Turkish spokesmen still claim that the Bryce report was a one-sided and distorted work of wartime propaganda, and cite the admission of Arnold Toynbee, one of Bryce’s assistants, that the report was intended to further Britain’s propaganda and policy objectives.
¹⁴
In this it succeeded.

*
In the end, they succeeded. Wingate was appointed High Commissioner, but not until January 1917.

*
Milner’s ideal was a union of the white peoples of the British Empire. Other members of the Milner circle, however, advocated a multiracial imperial union.

*
* Lionel George Curtis, his former secretary, in 1910 helped to found the quarterly review the
Round Table
which advocated British imperial federalism. Another former secretary, John Buchan, was a fervent imperialist who won over a vast public by his popular adventure novels. Another graduate of the Kindergarten, Geoffrey Robinson, edited
The Times
.

*
Hankey wrote to Lloyd George that Sykes was “mainly an expert on Arab affairs” but that he was “by no means a one-sided man” and that his breadth of vision could be “invaluable in fixing up the terms of peace.”
¹²

*
There is some dispute about the exact figure.

*
The German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmerman, sent a secret cable instructing his Minister in Mexico to seek an alliance with Mexico against the United States. Mexico was to be given Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The British government turned over an intercepted copy of Zimmerman’s cable to President Wilson, who published it.

*
Lloyd George was saved by Bonar Law, who held his angry Conservatives in line. Bonar Law disliked Churchill, and was bitter about not having been consulted in the matter. Nonetheless, he remained loyal to the Prime Minister. Lloyd George cleverly told him that Asquith had pledged, if he came back as Prime Minister, to bring Churchill back to power as First Lord of the Admiralty.
¹¹
The implied message was that a Lloyd George government, with Churchill confined to a relatively less important position, was preferable.

*
It was a vision that inspired secular idealists as well. George Eliot, in her novel
Daniel Deronda
(1876), proposed a Zionist program.

*
Among them were Moses Hess’s
Rome and Jerusalem
(1862) and Leo Pinsker’s
Auto-Emancipation
(1882).

*
At the end of 1984 the population of Israel was 4,235,000 and that of the West Bank was 1,300,000—a total of 5,535,000 people now living in about 25 percent of the territory of Palestine as defined by the British Mandate.

*
Born in Russia and naturalized a British subject, he was passionately pro-Allied and believed that only the western democracies were compatible with Jewish ideals. Since he held no official position in the international Zionist movement, he was free to depart from its neutrality; but as an official of the British Zionist Federation, he could nonetheless speak in a representative capacity.

*
* Years after the war, Lloyd George—in writing his memoirs—invented the story that he had given the Balfour Declaration in gratitude for Weizmann’s invention. Weizmann’s important invention was real, but Lloyd George’s story was a work of fiction.

*
The reference was to “
millet
,” a term used in the Ottoman Empire to designate a community entitled to a certain amount of autonomy in administering the affairs of its members.

*
It is sometimes pointed out that the Balfour Declaration was equally vague. But, unlike the Cambon letter, the Balfour Declaration (a) was published, (b) referred to the whole of Palestine, and (c) referred to the creation of an entity that was to have a distinctly Jewish national identity—a National Home.

*
Disraeli, of course, though of Jewish ancestry, was baptized a Christian.

*
Oscar Straus, Secretary of Commerce and Labor from 1906 to 1909.

*
Whether or not they constituted a majority in the city—and the then-current
Encyclopaedia Britannica
indicated that they did not—the Jews were economically preponderant. Baghdad, along with Jerusalem, was one of the two great Jewish cities of Asia, and a thousand years before had become the seat of the exilarch—the head of the Jewish religion in the eastern diaspora—and thus the capital of oriental Judaism. Jews in large numbers had lived in the Mesopotamian provinces since the time of the Babylonian captivity—about
BC
—and thus were settled in the country a thousand years before the coming of the Arabs in
AD
634.

*
Is was probably Lawrence’s idea, though Auda and/or Feisal may have thought of it independently.

*
British officers put this program into effect when Feisal came to Aqaba, and served with him to provide professional advice and guidance. Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce Charles Joyce, stationed at Aqaba, was the senior British officer serving with Feisal’s corps, as O.C. (Officer Commanding) Hejaz operations, reporting to Colonel Alan Dawnay of Allenby’s General Staff. Dawnay at the planning level and Joyce at the operations level were the principal British officers placed in charge of the Arab army corps. General Harry Chauvel, commander of the Australian army in the Palestine and Syria campaigns, later wrote that “Joyce was the organiser of the only fighting force of any real value in the whole of the Arab Army and I always thought that he had more to do with the success of the Hejaz operations than any other British officer.”
⁵

*
In the summer of 1916, when the Tory leader Lord Lansdowne privately argued in favor of a compromise peace, Clayton was in London; and on returning to Cairo wrote Wingate that “One impression I gained which confirmed what I have always thought, and which I know you take an interest in, was the widespread influence of the Jews. It is everywhere and always on the ‘moderation’ tack. The Jews do not want to see anyone ‘downed’. There are English Jews, French Jews, German Jews, Austrian Jews &
Salonika
Jews—but all are JEWS…You hear peace talk and generally somewhere behind is the Jew. You hear pro-Turk talk and desires for a separate peace with Turkey—again the Jew (the mainspring of the C.U.P.) [original emphasis].”
³

*
This may have been the first indication that high-ranking British officials were thinking of restricting Zionism to those sections of Biblical Palestine that lay west of the Jordan river.

*
One of the great failures of Kitchener and his colleagues in the intelligence field had been their ignorance of the spectacular revival of the puritanical Wahhabi sect in Arabia which had begun under the sponsorship of Ibn Saud, and, in late 1912, gave birth to a warrior brotherhood: the fierce
Ikhwan
. Minutes of a Cabinet War Committee meeting on 16 December 1915, to hear testimony from Sir Mark Sykes on the Arab question, show Lord Kitchener asking, “Wahabism, does that still exist?” and Sykes answering, “I think it is a dying fire.”
³⁸
Two years later—and a full five years after the Wahhabi warrior brotherhood began to form—Gilbert Clayton for the first time reported to Sykes that “we have indications of considerable revivalist movement on Wahhabi lines in Central Arabia, such as has in the past occurred when the prestige of Islam has fallen low. We are not yet in a position to appreciate the strength of this movement,” but conditions “conduce to fostering it. This question is engaging our serious attention here…it may modify the whole situation considerably.”
³⁹