Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [252]
The British and French governments, in a declaration that was circulated widely in Arabic, conveniently discovered that their main goal in the war on Ottomans had been “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.” Words were cheap. The British, as Curzon had said, were confident that Arabs would willingly choose Britain’s protection. The French did not take Arab nationalism seriously at all. “You cannot,” said Picot, “transform a myriad of tribes into a viable whole.” Both powers overlooked the enthusiasm with which their declaration had been received in the Arab world; in Damascus, Arab nationalists had cut electric cables and fired off huge amounts of ammunition in celebration.14 The British and the French who had summoned the djinn of nationalism to their aid during the war were going to find that they could not easily send it away again.
At the end of November 1918, a dark, handsome young man who claimed, with some justification, to speak for the Arabs boarded a British warship in Beirut bound for Marseille and the Paris Peace Conference. Feisal, descendant of the Prophet and member of the ancient Hashemite clan, was clever, determined and very ambitious. He was also dazzling. No matter that he had been brought up in Constantinople; he was everyone’s image of what a noble desert Arab should be. Lansing, normally so prosaic, thought of frankincense and gold. “He suggested the calmness and peace of the desert, the meditation of one who lives in the wide spaces of the earth, the solemnity of thought of one who often communes alone with nature.” Allenby, the tough old British general, saw “a keen, slim, highly strung man. He has beautiful hands like a woman’s; and his fingers are always moving nervously when he talks.” With “the cavalry of St. George” (gold sovereigns), British weapons and advisers, Feisal had led an Arab revolt against the Turks.15
The British had gambled in backing him, and in so doing they had given undertakings that sat uneasily with that other set of promises in Sykes-Picot. In 1915 Sir Henry McMahon, a senior official in Cairo, had opened conversations with Feisal’s father, Hussein, the sharif of Mecca. “A small neat old gentleman of great dignity and, when he liked, great charm,” Hussein was interested more in the fortunes of his own family than in Arab self-determination. Immensely proud of his ancestry, which he could trace back for dozens of generations (and frequently did), he was head of one of the Arab world’s most ancient and distinguished families, guardian of Islam’s holiest sites throughout the Hejaz, and proud owner of the phone number Mecca 1. McMahon, in what has remained a highly controversial correspondence with the sharif, promised that, if the Arabs rose against the Turks, they would have British assistance and, more important, their independence. To safeguard French and British interests a few areas were specifically exempted from Arab rule: the area west of a line stretching more or less from Aleppo in the north to Damascus in the south—in other words, the coast of Syria and Lebanon—as well as the old Turkish provinces of Baghdad and Basra. The boundaries between the exempted territories and the rest were not made clear. The British later argued, in defiance of geography, that Palestine also lay west of the Aleppo–Damascus line. And what did independence mean? Hussein and his supporters assumed that, even in the exempted areas, the government would be Arab under European supervision; the rest, from the Arabian peninsula, up through Palestine to the interior of Syria and to Mosul in the north of Mesopotamia, would be an independent Arab state. This was not quite how the British envisaged it.16
In 1915 the details of what was an exchange of promises, not a firm treaty, did not matter that much. Perhaps it is also fair to say that neither side was negotiating in entirely good faith.