1917 is the year during which the tide turned against the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. In March, British forces, mostly troops of the Indian Expeditionary Force, captured Ottoman Baghdad. In December, Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, pushing across Sinai into Palestine, captured Jerusalem – in T.E. Lawrence’s phrase “the supreme moment of the war.” Meanwhile, British policymakers issued the Balfour Declaration, promising to support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine once the war was won. As this presentation will make clear, Britain’s campaigns and diplomatic initiatives in 1917 were made with an eye on an eventual post-war settlement – the consequences of which haunt the Middle East today.
Lecture given by John Calvert, Professor of History at Creighton University, during the Museum and Memorial's 2017 Symposium.
Lecture Transcript
00:00:08:22 - 00:00:50:04
John Calvert
Well, I'd like to thank Lora Vogt and her team for organizing this really wonderful event. And it really is an honor and a privilege to be included in such a distinguished group of historians and to speak to such a knowledgeable and informed audience. I want to begin by evoking a scene that unfolded in a rural Yorkshire churchyard on a drizzly afternoon in September 2008. After a short prayer,
00:00:50:06 - 00:01:40:08
John Calvert
men in hazmat suits working inside a sealed tent wiggled loose a gravestone, and they excavated the coffin that lay underneath and gently pried open the cover and inside were the skeletal remains of Sir Mark Sykes. During the Great War, Mark Sykes had succeeded, quite literally, in leaving his trace on the map of the world. He was the British government's lead negotiator in the secret 1916 deal with France that led to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, an imperial carve-up that laid the groundwork for many of the conflicts that have plagued the region since.
00:01:40:11 - 00:02:15:04
John Calvert
But it wasn't to chastise Sir Mark for having sown what Jonathan Schneer has called “dragon's teeth,” that the men in hazmat suits exposed his remains to light. Rather, it was the manner of his death that intrigued them. While negotiating the terms of the postwar settlement in Paris in 1919, Sykes became one of the estimated 40 to 50 million victims worldwide of the so-called Spanish flu.
00:02:15:06 - 00:02:47:02
John Calvert
Exhausted by constant travel and overwork, he was an easy mark for the virus. On February 15th, in and out of delirium, he sent word to find out about how Zionist matters were going. The next day, after making his confession and receiving the sacrament, Sykes had converted to Catholicism as a boy at the behest of his mother. He passed away in his Paris hotel room just days short of his 40th birthday.
00:02:47:05 - 00:03:15:27
John Calvert
The fact that Sir Mark was buried in a hermetically sealed iron coffin gave medical investigators some hope that they might find tissue to allow them to better understand the mutations and behavior of the flu virus in order to inhibit the breakout of another future pandemic. As it turned out, Sir Mark's mortal remains failed to divulge the sought after information.
00:03:16:00 - 00:03:45:03
John Calvert
A crack in the top of the caskets lead lining precluded the possibility of investigators finding anything useful. It is not hard to ignore the symbolism of this exhumation. It was as though Sir Mark was summoned to witness almost 100 years after the fact, the sectarian wreckage wrought in the Middle East by the state system that he had a hand in crafting.
00:03:45:05 - 00:04:18:16
John Calvert
Sykes, of course, wasn't the only statesman involved in Britain's wartime Middle East diplomacy, but he was the most prominent. And he was ubiquitous, popping up like Forrest Gump everywhere, especially in 1917, the year that decided the fate of the post Ottoman Arab East. Now, at first blush, Mark Sykes was an unlikely impresario. He was the only son of a wealthy landowner.
00:04:18:19 - 00:04:47:07
John Calvert
He grew up in a world of servants and tutors, horses and shooting parties. At Cambridge, he was an indifferent student. He left the university without taking a degree. Yet he traveled widely, initially in the company of his father and then on his own. And it was during his travels that the Ottoman Empire that he gained this lifelong passion for the East.
00:04:47:07 - 00:05:35:02
John Calvert
At Sledmere House, the family estate in Yorkshire, he had a dedicated Turkish room full of all kinds of exotica and bric a brac culled from his eastern journeys. People liked him. He was good to his friends. He was what the English in those days called a hail fellow, well-met. The worst anyone said of him was that he was a dreamer - and T.E. Lawrence, his words, “the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements.” After serving in the Boer War, he took up diplomatic postings in Ireland and Istanbul. In 1914 while serving as an intelligence officer,
00:05:35:04 - 00:06:07:12
John Calvert
he caught the notice of Secretary of State for War Herbert Kitchener, who decided to make use of his knowledge of the East. Sykes thereafter immersed himself in the nefarious art of diplomatic intrigue, gaining a reputation as a smart negotiator and an expert on all things Islamic. Even though his knowledge of Arabic and Turkish was limited to a few stock phrases.
00:06:07:14 - 00:06:36:12
John Calvert
Now when Sykes got to the war office, he found that Britain's war plans for the Middle East were notional and imprecise. And we have to remember that Britain had not intended to go to war against the Ottoman Empire. In fact, over the previous half century, it had been Britain's policy to keep the Ottomans afloat as a bulwark against the expansionist designs of the Russian czars.
00:06:36:15 - 00:07:08:17
John Calvert
But now, of course, the Ottomans were in the German camp. It was only when Russia began insisting on a postwar partition of the Ottoman Empire, which would give it the straits and Eastern Anatolia, and when France made a claim over Greater Syria, including Palestine, that Britain's Asquith government began to see the merit of forging an agreement that would safeguard its own interests in the East.
00:07:08:19 - 00:07:49:21
John Calvert
And what were those interests? Well, security over the northern approaches to the Suez Canal, Britain's lifeline to its Indian empire and protection of the newly discovered oil fields around Abadan, at the head of the Gulf, upon which Britain's fleet of oil powered big gun battleships depended. Britain wasn't at all confident that its ally France, pumped up, as it was by an anti-British colonial lobby in Paris, would leave the land bridge linking Sinai and the Gulf alone should the Ottomans be vanquished.
00:07:49:23 - 00:08:25:04
John Calvert
So Kitchener chose Sykes to represent Britain's interests in the ensuing talks with France. Sykes' French counterpart, François Georges-Picot, was a seasoned diplomat and a keen advocate of France's historical mission in the Levant. Immediately, the discussions began. Picot put Sykes on the spot by insisting on Syria, by tabling France's Syrian demand. So in consultation with the Foreign Office,
00:08:25:07 - 00:09:10:26
John Calvert
Sykes worked out a compromise, and that compromise was that France should directly control the coastal areas of Syria. The area marked in blue Britain would have corresponding rights within a southern, in southern Mesopotamia in the area there marked in pink or red, as well as control over a tiny enclave encompassing the ports of Haifa and Acre. It was agreed that Palestine, which was coveted by both powers, should be internationally administered within a smaller brown zone,
00:09:10:29 - 00:09:41:05
John Calvert
details to be resolved postwar. In the extensive lands in between the areas marked A and B, Sykes and Picot agreed to recognize independent Arab states or semi-independent Arab states. One would be in the orbit of France. That would be Region A and the other in the region of Great Britain in the orbit of Britain, Area B, client states, in effect.
00:09:41:08 - 00:10:13:17
John Calvert
Now, as soon as the essentials of the agreement were in place, Sykes traveled to Petrograd, reobtained Russian approval from Foreign Minister Sazonov. Britain and France officially signed off on the agreement in May 1916. Britain's Asquith government, which harbored no strong imperial design in the Levant, didn't mind at all that Sykes had given up Palestine to a would-be international administration.
00:10:13:19 - 00:10:54:14
John Calvert
The feeling in the Asquith government was that its bleeding French ally needed some type of satisfaction, some type of future reward to keep it going. But many in Britain's foreign policy establishment, including Mark Sykes, were not so sure. They felt that the agreement was far too generous to France. And soon after the deal was struck, Sykes stated that he would do whatever it took to amend the Palestine portion of the document in Britain's favor.
00:10:54:17 - 00:11:28:15
John Calvert
Now, while Sykes and Picot were negotiating the imperial carve-up of Syria and Mesopotamia, entirely separate negotiations were proceeding between Britain and the Sharif Hussein, the Hashemite Amir of Mecca. At issue were the terms of a possible Arab revolt against the Ottomans. Now the British agency in Cairo thought the Sharif Hussein to be a good bet. Hussein had prestige,
00:11:28:15 - 00:11:57:19
John Calvert
he was a Sharif, an honorific title that denoted descent from the Prophet Muhammad and the clan of Hashem. And he was an Amir or prince of Mecca. He looked after the Holy mosques of Mecca and Medina on behalf of the Ottomans. And most important, he was unhappy at the heavy hand of the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress.
00:11:57:21 - 00:12:34:00
John Calvert
The CUP was putting Hussein on a short leash. Hussein didn't like that, and so he was quite willing to entertain this notion of engaging in an Arab revolt against the Sultan in alliance with the British. The British believed that Hussein's credentials would allow him to neutralize the Ottoman call to jihad, which threatened to turn the Muslims of South and Central Asia and North Africa against their imperial masters.
00:12:34:03 - 00:12:59:19
John Calvert
But of course, the Sharif had an asking price. He wrote that he would only rebel if the British promised to sponsor the creation after the war of an independent Arab state under the control of his Hashemite family, a state that included the Arabian Peninsula, minus Aden and other sort of British enclaves in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf
00:12:59:21 - 00:13:30:17
John Calvert
and all of Greater Syria and Mesopotamia. Now, the British officials in Cairo replied to Hussein that his request was feasible. They would indeed be willing to entertain the idea of an independent Arab state. But they ruled out coastal Syria because of France's claim over it. And nor, the British said, could the Hashemites expect to control all of Mesopotamia, which was a special concern to them.
00:13:30:19 - 00:14:03:08
John Calvert
But the yes, the rest, yes, the Hashemites could have it. So Hussein really did believe that the British did back the creation of some form of Arab state after the successful conclusion of the war against the Ottomans. It was this vague promise of Arab statehood that got the Sharif on board. The Sharif assumed that during subsequent negotiations he might get all or most of what he asked for.
00:14:03:10 - 00:14:38:13
John Calvert
And so in June 1916, less than a month after the signing of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Arab revolt got under way with several thousand desert warriors attacking the Ottoman garrisons in the Hejaz, taking the Red Sea ports and within a year plunging northward into southern Syria. Britain did its best to sustain the revolt, supplying its fighters with gold, weapons and military advisers, including the mercurial T.E. Lawrence.
00:14:38:16 - 00:14:50:07
John Calvert
At this stage, the Hashemites knew absolutely nothing about France and Britain's proposed imperial carve-up.
00:14:50:09 - 00:15:24:05
John Calvert
Unabashed by this duplicity, Mark Sykes designed the rebellion's flag, crafting a design that recalled the glories of the early caliphates. White for the Umayyads, the black representing the Abbasids, green for the Fatimids, and red for the Hashemites of yesterday and today - the message being that with British patronage, the Arabs could replicate the glories of the past and reemerge in the modern era as a great people.
00:15:24:08 - 00:15:55:20
John Calvert
Sykes appears to believe that the Anglo-French provision for Arab client states in the interior regions of Greater Syria, which he helped devise, would be ample reward for Hashemite cooperation with the British. Yet in 1916, the possibility that the provisions of the Sykes-Picot Agreement might come to fruition seemed remote. For one thing, the record of British arms in the Middle East was dismal.
00:15:55:23 - 00:16:38:10
John Calvert
Not only had Britain suffered catastrophic defeat at the Dardanelles evacuating the last of its troops from the Gallipoli Peninsula in early January of that year, on April 29th, 13,000 Anglo-Indian troops beaten down by disease and starvation had been forced into surrender at Kut-al-Amara in Mesopotamia. Humiliation made all the worse by the fact that British general Townshend had offered the Ottomans a £1 million ransom for the safe passage of his troops, an offer the Ottomans refused to consider.
00:16:38:12 - 00:17:11:23
John Calvert
And then there was the ingrained prejudice of Britain's top brass toward Eastern campaigns. Chief of the Imperial General Staff William Robertson was loath to commit additional resources against the Ottomans. He believed that the Middle East was a peripheral campaign to the great struggle going on in the Western Front, the battles at the Dardanelles and in Mesopotamia he saw as black holes that swallowed up entire British armies for no ostensible purpose.
00:17:11:26 - 00:17:29:01
John Calvert
He was adamant that British forces in the Middle East should cease any pretense toward aggression and adopt instead a defensive posture sufficient to ensure the security of Suez and the oil fields adjacent to Basra.
00:17:29:03 - 00:18:04:00
John Calvert
But then came movement, not from deskbound politicians, but from a British general in the field. In late summer 1916, the war cabinet appointed Lieutenant General Frederick Stanley Maude who had distinguished himself at the Dardanelles to take command of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force. Immediately, Maude began to organize the men and resources available to him for a renewed thrust with the aim of capturing Baghdad, the hallowed goal that had eluded Townshend.
00:18:04:03 - 00:18:39:16
John Calvert
In London, Robertson raised eyebrows at Maude's preparations, but gave him leeway. He really didn't know the full extent of Maude's plans. So over the winter months of 1917, Maude's invigorated force crept northward, supported on the Tigris by a fleet of gunboats. Despite the logistical sophistication of the operation, which included the building of a narrow-gauge railway, the Indian and British troops found it tough going.
00:18:39:18 - 00:19:21:15
John Calvert
The sucking mud of the alluvium pulled them down, disease swept the ranks, but persistence paid off, leading to success with creeping barrages and coordinated infantry attacks, breaching line after line of Ottoman defenders. Now, like the American forces of 2003, Maude's Anglo-Indian force encountered little or no resistance in Baghdad itself. In the face of superior firepower, the opposition simply melted away.
00:19:21:18 - 00:19:51:00
John Calvert
What the British did find was a city in crisis. As is the case during the American-led offensive. The hasty withdrawal of the enemy created a security vacuum in which looters were quick to take advantage. A March 16th, 1917 report from Britain's Guardian newspaper could well have been written in a 2003 edition of The New York Times or Washington Post.
00:19:51:02 - 00:20:21:29
John Calvert
It read, "Many shops had been gutted and the valuables had all been cleared. The rabble was found busily engaged in dismantling the interiors, tearing down bits of wood and iron and carrying off bedsteads. They even looted the seats from the public garden." Soon enough, however, the British imposed their authority over the city and Maude arranged for the first division of the 4th Hampshire Regiment to reenter the city.
00:20:22:01 - 00:20:55:24
John Calvert
For this staged photograph from his perch in London, Mark Sykes wrote a proclamation printed in Arabic and English, on 11 by 18 inch posters which soldiers affixed to walls all over the city. The war cabinet had wanted a low-key declaration. Sykes argued in favor of one that would appeal to the so-called Arab mind, which presented the British as liberators, not as conquerors.
00:20:55:26 - 00:21:28:23
John Calvert
"Your palaces have fallen into ruins. Your gardens have sunken into desolation. And your forefathers and yourselves had grown, have grown in bondage. It is the wish not only of my king and his peoples, but also of the great nations with whom he has an alliance that you should prosper. Even as in the past, when your lands were fertile and Baghdad was one of the wonders of the world." One senses that Sykes had a good time writing this proclamation.
00:21:28:25 - 00:22:05:18
John Calvert
It gave him an opportunity to indulge his romantic image of the Islamic East and its peoples. Later, he was somewhat embarrassed by its bombast, admitting that it, quote, "contained a great deal of Oriental and flowery language not suitable to our modern climate," end quote. Yet there was political purpose behind the words in inviting the Arabs of Mesopotamia to, quote, "assume the management of their affairs in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain."
00:22:05:20 - 00:22:20:08
John Calvert
He aimed to smooth the way for Arab acceptance of British domination, as spelled out in the still-secret Franco-British agreement.
00:22:20:10 - 00:23:08:26
John Calvert
Now the British victory in Baghdad encouraged the war cabinet to reassess its moratorium on offensive action in Egypt and Palestine. Since the spring and summer of 1916, British forces, under Archibald Murray, had held a line that cut across from el-ʻArīsh to the oases of northeastern Sinai, just at the top of the map there. This line was deeply entrenched and it was supplied by miles of railway and water pipes that had been constructed by the Egyptian Labor Corps.
00:23:08:28 - 00:23:23:08
John Calvert
But now with Mesopotamia more or less in the bag, Robertson gave Murray to go ahead and end the stasis in Sinai and advance into Ottoman Palestine.
00:23:23:11 - 00:23:58:19
John Calvert
Now, in cutting Murray loose, Robertson was following, to his chagrin, the orders of Liberal Prime Minister Lloyd George, whose government had replaced Asquith's government in December 1916. Lloyd George was distressed at the costly stalemate in Flanders and France, and he called for a decisive victory in the Middle East, one that would rally the British people behind his government and add to his popularity.
00:23:58:22 - 00:24:28:21
John Calvert
He was very much like his liberal Victorian-era predecessor, William Gladstone. Like Gladstone, Lloyd George held the, quote, “unspeakable Turk” in contempt and he looked forward to the day when Britain might feast on the Ottoman carcass. In this, he differed from Asquith, who was less concerned with Eastern affairs and would have been content with a reformed, not a destroyed, Ottoman Empire.
00:24:28:24 - 00:24:57:27
John Calvert
Murray's forces attacked Gaza head on at the end of March, but they were beaten back by the well-fortified Ottoman defenders. Licking his wounds, Murray tried again three weeks later, this time employing all the weapons of industrial warfare; aircraft after artillery shells that fired a mixture of phosgene and chlorine gas and eight tanks. But yet again, the Ottomans held fast.
00:24:57:29 - 00:25:22:29
John Calvert
And so these failures prompted Lloyd George in July 1917 to replace Murray with the stalwart Edmund Allenby, who arrived in Sinai fresh from the Arras battlefield in France. Lloyd George told Allenby, quote, "Give me Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the British people."
00:25:23:01 - 00:26:00:03
John Calvert
So Allenby went to work, eager to fulfill his mandate. But rather than launch another full frontal assault on the Gaza stronghold, he opted for a flanking maneuver that sent Australian mounted infantry, the famous Light Horsemen, against the meagerly defended town of Beersheba in the Negev Desert. It was probably the largest cavalry attack of the Great War, and over the days that followed, British artillery bombarded Gaza as the mounted infantry continued to roll up the Ottomans from the east.
00:26:00:06 - 00:26:43:10
John Calvert
By November 7th, Gaza was in British hands, and as we speak, Australians and New Zealanders are gathered in Israel, celebrating with their Israeli, commemorating with their Israeli hosts, this very famous battle. Now protected on the right flank by the Hashemite irregulars of the Arab Revolt, who by this time had emerged out of the peninsula in full swing, Allenby's forces then fought their way through the cold, rain-soaked Judean hills, entering the holy city on December 9th, 1917, just in time for Christmas.
00:26:43:12 - 00:27:13:26
John Calvert
If Beersheba was Allende's masterpiece, the capture of Jerusalem was his crowning achievement. In the space of a month, at the cost of less than 20,000 casualties, Allenby's forces had pushed 40 miles into enemy territory and had taken a city of world historical significance. And this, of course, compared favorably with developments in Flanders. There, as Matthew Hughes points out in his book on Allenby,
00:27:13:28 - 00:27:27:17
John Calvert
after almost four months of fighting and for the loss of 300,000 men, Haig had advanced five miles and had captured an obscure village called Passchendaele.
00:27:27:19 - 00:27:55:07
John Calvert
Many in the war cabinet continued to question Palestine's importance to the war effort. Robertson wondered how the capture of one or two Ottoman provinces might contribute to overall victory. Yet even a critic like Robertson agreed that the capture of Jerusalem had propaganda value and was, as forecasted, a morale booster. Now in the days leading up to Jerusalem's capture,
00:27:55:08 - 00:28:31:18
John Calvert
Sykes was hard at work in faraway London, devising a victory celebration. Again, he composed an official proclamation, but this time he avoided the elaborate rhetoric and focused on the practical issue of governance, taking care not to offend Muslim sensibility. Every effort, the proclamation read, would be taken to ensure that Jerusalem’s al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf, where you find the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, would remain under Muslim supervision.
00:28:31:21 - 00:29:17:00
John Calvert
And here, Sykes was noting that imperial affiliation transcended religious particularism, that the British were protectors of the religions of the Empire's peoples, most especially Islam. Sykes also made sure that Allenby didn't enter Jerusalem as a mounted warrior, but would dismount and humbly advance to the Jaffa Gate on foot. This was in stark contrast to Kaiser Wilhelm, who during his 1898 visit to the holy city, rode through the gates, triumphantly dressed in something resembling crusader garb.
00:29:17:02 - 00:29:53:25
John Calvert
So the message was clear. Allenby was a restorer of justice and fairness among the creeds. The Kaiser, a vain and inglorious tyrant without scruple or respect for Islam. Yet there was distance between the imperial purposes of Sykes, his propaganda, and the way the occupation of Jerusalem was received by the British public. For the public, Jerusalem was redolent of the Old and New Testaments, of hymns and sermons,
00:29:53:27 - 00:30:34:03
John Calvert
Sunday school classes and the family Bible, and the Crusades. All over Britain, church bells rang, announcing the taking of the city. Punch Magazine published a drawing of Richard Lionheart looking down toward Jerusalem, nodding contentedly: “my dream comes true.” So this is the Holy Land of the Protestant imagination, a region of ruins and biblical remnants, which the Palestine Exploration Society had done so much to advance with its surveys and archeological discoveries dating from the 1860s onward.
00:30:34:05 - 00:31:11:21
John Calvert
But as you can imagine, all of this talk about Christian restoration in the Holy Land distressed very much the War Office, and it responded with a defense advisory note that told the British media, in no uncertain terms, not to play up Crusader and Christian themes, but to little avail. These themes continued regardless of this advisory note, so that by 1918, even the War Office relented and allowed all of these populist themes to persist.
00:31:11:24 - 00:31:48:22
John Calvert
Now, the saga of 1917 had one final, important chapter. On November 2nd, as British and Australian forces were engaging the Ottomans at the third battle of Gaza, Britain made yet another advance booking for the political arrangement of the postwar Middle East. The Balfour Declaration, which promised Zionists that Britain would sponsor the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
00:31:48:24 - 00:32:24:11
John Calvert
Now the proximate origins of the Balfour Declaration traced back to the spring of 1917, when Lloyd George set Sykes the task of working for the addition of Palestine to the British area designated by the Sykes-Picot Accord. Sykes jumped at the chance to revise this accord, and by then Sykes had come to know about Zionism, an ideology at that time, barely 40 or 50 years old, which defined the Jews as a singular nation deserving of political sovereignty -
00:32:24:13 - 00:33:09:06
John Calvert
the goal Zionists considered pressing given the incidents of anti-Semitism in the world, especially in the Russian Empire, where most European Jews lived. In Zionism, Sykes saw an opportunity to nullify France's portion in an internationalized Palestine. He saw that a Jewish enclave in Palestine could function as a buffer protecting British, Egypt and the canal from imperial competitors. Sykes was encouraged when he learned that, for their part, the Zionists were interested in British patronage, without which they would be powerless to fulfill their dream.
00:33:09:08 - 00:33:24:02
John Calvert
But like the Hashemites, the Zionists didn't know anything about the Sykes-Picot Agreement. They had assumed that there would not be any type of conflict with any power.
00:33:24:04 - 00:34:03:02
John Calvert
There were, of course, other motives that prompted Sykes and British statesmen to support Zionism. One of these had to do with the belief among many British backing - who backed the Jewish territory, that the Jewish territorial nationalism might encourage Jews in the wavering countries of the United States and Russia to fully engage in the war until total victory. At the time, Russia was in a state of unrest and it wasn't certain to what extent the United States would sort of engage in the war.
00:34:03:05 - 00:34:36:06
John Calvert
There was this idea among the British that, you know, backing a Jewish homeland in Palestine would mobilize the power of Jewish financiers in the United States. But, of course, the idea that world Jewry acted as a bloc was an exaggeration of its unity and its ability to influence opinion. There are actually very few Zionists among the Jewish population in Europe or America.
00:34:36:08 - 00:35:10:20
John Calvert
Yet the idea of international Jewry was a common one, and it reflected the genteel and sometimes vociferous anti-Semitism that was current among the British upper class. But I must say that this was not an idea that the Zionists’ lobbyists in London made efforts to nullify. They saw that there is utility in this idea of a Jewish bloc, you know, heavily in favor of Zionism.
00:35:10:22 - 00:35:54:04
John Calvert
Yet another factor leading to British support for Zionism had to do with the visceral, romantic and religious sensibilities of these same British statesmen. Despite this defense advisory note that I was just talking about that dissuaded the media from religious pronouncements, men like Sykes, Lloyd George, Leo Emery and Foreign Secretary Balfour - whose name was appended to the declaration - shared with the people of Britain a pietistic instinct and were attracted to the idea of having a hand in the return of a people of the Bible to its ancestral homeland.
00:35:54:07 - 00:36:25:17
John Calvert
Lloyd George, the former chapel boy from North Wales, famously quipped that he knew the map of the Holy Land better than he did that of France. During his 1904 trip to Jerusalem, Sykes wrote, quote, "Imagine how picturesque and interesting a walk in the city would be if the children of Israel retained their ancient and handsome dress."
00:36:25:17 - 00:36:56:24
John Calvert
Sykes' mission to sabotage the Palestine portion of the French-British Agreement turned out to be rather simple and straightforward. During meetings in London, he convinced Zionism's leading lights Chaim Weizman and Nahum Sokolow to go directly to Georges-Picot and other French officials and argue their case. Sykes, in the meantime, would take care of the introductions and quietly reinforce the Zionist case at functions and over dinner drinks.
00:36:56:27 - 00:37:25:28
John Calvert
In the end, I think, due as much to Weizman and Sokolow's charm as to their arguments of justice and repatriation for the Jewish people, the French were won over agreeing that the plan for Palestine's internationalization should be rescinded. But then again, with no troops in the region, the French would have been powerless to make a contrary case. It's at this point that the Zionists got wind of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
00:37:26:00 - 00:37:56:00
John Calvert
They got wind of this agreement in April 1917, just prior to the final dotting the I's and crossing of the T's. And they were shocked to see that Palestine, which they assumed was going to be theirs, was, according to the Sykes-Picot agreement, going to be internationalized. And thus they pressed Britain for the Balfour Declaration to make some sort of official pronouncement on the matter.
00:37:56:03 - 00:38:17:13
John Calvert
The declaration itself went through many revisions, every word in it was significant. The authors avoided the word “state,” choosing the more ambiguous phrase “national home.” Nor was the extent of this Jewish homeland made clear. It was to be somewhere in Palestine.
00:38:17:15 - 00:38:47:09
John Calvert
And although reference was made to the protection of the civil and religious rights of the indigenous native Arab population, the declaration said nothing about the Arabs’ political rights. In addition, the declaration promised that with the establishment of the homeland, no harm would come to Jews in any other country, meaning the Jews of Great Britain and other Western countries.
00:38:47:11 - 00:39:18:07
John Calvert
And here the intended target of this phrase were Jews belonging to the British establishment who were amongst the declaration's most vociferous opponents. Men like Edwin Montagu, a cabinet minister, feared that Zionism might lead some or even many within British society to call his and others’ patriotism into question, even accuse them of dual allegiance: are you loyal to the Crown or to the Jewish national home?
00:39:18:10 - 00:40:00:14
John Calvert
And the declaration takes pains to make the point that this will not happen. So in 1917, just to conclude, Britain's conflicting agreements were finally exposed to the harsh lights. The Balfour Declaration was a private letter. It was sent to Lord Rothschild, but news of it immediately got out, causing raised eyebrows, as you can imagine, especially amongst the Hashemites and their British advocates in the Arab bureau who supported the creation of a unitary Arab state - including Palestine - under some form of British tutelage.
00:40:00:17 - 00:40:33:25
John Calvert
T.E. Lawrence spoke for this faction when he queried Sykes, quote, "What have you promised the Zionists and what is their program? Was the acquisition of land for the Jews to be by fair purchase or by forced sale and appropriation?" And Lawrence went on to predict growing acrimony between Jews and Arabs. The traveler, Arabist and government consultant Gertrude Bell, writing to her parents from Baghdad, also decried the declaration.
00:40:33:25 - 00:41:03:02
John Calvert
She wrote, "I hate Mr. Balfour’s Zionist pronouncement. To my mind, it is a wholly artificial scheme divorced from all relation to facts, and I wish it the ill success it deserves." As for the Sykes-Picot Agreement, it was eventually published in the Zvezda and Pravda in late November 1917 by the Bolsheviks, who found a copy of it in the Tsarist archives.
00:41:03:05 - 00:41:56:12
John Calvert
Shortly thereafter, the Manchester Guardian picked up the story and publicized it. The Hashemites, of course, were crestfallen at the news. They had been aware of France's ambitions in Syria, but they expected Britain to keep the French at bay, not sign off on French claims over the coastal strip. Their sense of betrayal was very, very bitter, prompting a man like George Antonius, the Lebanese Christian, author of “The Arab Awakening,” who wrote in 1938 that the Sykes-Picot agreement was a shocking document, a startling piece of double-dealing that demonstrated greed allied to suspicion.
00:41:56:14 - 00:42:17:27
John Calvert
And this, of course, is a sentiment that continues to reverberate in the Arab world today. All three agreements - the Sykes-Picot Accord, the pledge made to the Sharif Hussein, the Balfour Declaration - were, of course, contingent on the success of British arms.
00:42:18:00 - 00:42:56:12
John Calvert
Over 1918, British and colonial troops continued their advance through the deserts and mountains of the Levant and Mesopotamia. In October, British and Australian troops reached Damascus just ahead of the Hashemites. Several months later, the British handed northern Syria over to its French ally, just as the Anglo-French agreement had stipulated. At the San Remo conference in 1920, Britain agreed to incorporate the Balfour Declaration into its mandate over Palestine.
00:42:56:14 - 00:43:25:25
John Calvert
So what were the British thinking in making so many contradictory promises? The British asked themselves the same question. “We have got into an extraordinary muddle,” Balfour wrote to Lord Curzon in September 1919. Perhaps we should not be so harsh, though. We have to remember that this was wartime. Britain's only objective in 1917 was to win the Great War for civilization,
00:43:25:27 - 00:44:11:26
John Calvert
and to that end, its statesmen were willing to promise anything to anyone who might give them an upper hand in the conflict and grow the empire in the process. At the same time, it's not hard to see at work a range of attitudes - racial, cultural - that privileged European imperial interests over the self-determination of Asian and African peoples.
Thank you very much. And I'd be very happy to entertain questions.
00:44:11:28 - 00:44:36:11
Speaker 3
First of all, thank you for a very nice presentation. Much appreciated. It's my understanding that there was quite a bit of a divide, friction, cross-purposes, even between the India office and the Arab bureau. How did that friction play out in terms of British Middle East strategy during the war, as well as shaping how the British approach to the postwar Middle East?
00:44:36:14 - 00:45:15:20
John Calvert
Yeah, thank you. Very good question. Yes, there was friction between the Arab bureau in Cairo and the Indian office, primarily over Mesopotamia. The British, of course, were interested in Mesopotamia as a bridge to its Indian possessions and so forth. There's also the interest of oil that I talked about, and the India office just sort of assumed that Mesopotamia fell within its orbit and were chagrined when, you know, the Arab bureau in Cairo started sort of planning for Mesopotamia and sort of taking control with reference to the Arab revolt of that territory.
00:45:15:22 - 00:45:39:28
John Calvert
In the end, though, the Indian office lost out, primarily because of their mismanagement of the war in Mesopotamia. It was the India office that was managing the first sort of drive up the Tigris and Euphrates River Valley towards Baghdad. The campaign that ended in disaster at Kut-al-Amara - one of the great disasters ever to have befallen in the British Empire -
00:45:40:01 - 00:46:19:25
John Calvert
the first surrender of all of these thousands of troops, very few of whom, you know, survived the war. Those taken prisoner were sort of forced marched to prison camps in eastern Anatolia and only a handful survived. But yes, the conflict was acrimonious. Primarily, it was about Mesopotamia. You know, the Indian office actually had big plans for Mesopotamia. They had this idea of transporting hundreds of thousands of Indian peasants and cultivating sort of the waste kind of lands of the area, making it agriculturally fertile and so forth.
00:46:19:27 - 00:46:41:10
John Calvert
I mean, Mesopotamia had been sort of the breadbasket of the Middle East, the center of civilization in the Middle East, until it was laid to waste by Hulagu Khan in 1258. Baghdad was destroyed without a strong central authority, the irrigation canals silted up,
00:46:41:12 - 00:47:01:26
John Calvert
agriculture died, the populations moved elsewhere and Bedouins moved in. And I think the India office had this idea of reviving Mesopotamia by making it a part of its Indian empire.
00:47:01:29 - 00:47:16:10
Speaker 4
Thanks. It's a great talk. I know you're a scholar of contemporary Jihadi ideology, so I was wondering to what extent these contradictory agreements come up in ISIS rhetoric appealing to its followers, if any?
00:47:16:12 - 00:47:44:14
John Calvert
Right. Well, it's interesting. A couple of years ago, there was this ISIS video that circulated on the Internet showing a bulldozer destroying the bern that divided Syria from Iraq. I mean, as you know, the modern Middle East, the modern map of the Arab Middle East is roughly based on the lines charted out by Sykes and Picot. As far as the Arab nationalists were concerned,
00:47:44:16 - 00:48:08:04
John Calvert
you know, these were artificial borders and so forth, dividing Arabs from one another. You know, people like Gamal Abdel Nasser in the fifties and sixties, you know, believed that, you know, divided the Arabs are weak, united they will be strong. Arab nationalism, of course, was a secular movement. But now, of course, in recent decades, we have sort of a new political phenomenon, political Islam.
00:48:08:07 - 00:48:30:17
John Calvert
Its most vociferous expression, of course, is jihadism. And they believe in the unity of the ummah, of which the Arab world is part, but still that all of the borders dividing Muslims from one another, including those created by Sykes-Picot are artificial and should be destroyed. So they brought a bulldozer in - you know, I mean, Islam is the primary point of sort of identity and reference -
00:48:30:17 - 00:48:52:09
John Calvert
and so bulldozers are brought in and symbolically this border was destroyed, ending sort of Sykes-Picot. But whatever, you know, sort of the political affiliation of somebody in the Middle East is - in the Arab Middle East - whether sort of, you know, Arab nationalist or Islamist, they all know about the Sykes-Picot agreement. It's something that school kids learn about in school.
00:48:52:11 - 00:49:06:07
John Calvert
The first of a whole series of betrayals and duplicity is, you know, perpetrated on the Islamic world by Western imperialism. It's held in very bad odor.
00:49:06:09 - 00:49:08:10
Speaker 4
Thank you.
00:49:08:12 - 00:49:13:15
Lora Vogt
Next question.
00:49:13:18 - 00:49:32:15
Speaker 5
Yes, you mentioned Gertrude Bell very briefly at the end. I'm sure it's a lack of time, but she spent her whole life traveling the Middle East and it was my understanding from reading her books that she was pretty influential in drawing those lines. Is that so?
00:49:32:18 - 00:50:04:09
John Calvert
That's quite right. She was the first female graduate of Cambridge University. I think I'm right in saying that. Came from a privileged background. Had personal wealth at her disposal and used it to travel throughout the Arab world and Persia and Turkey, Anatolia in pre-war years. She was an expert on the tribal affiliations of Mesopotamia and Syria, and that knowledge the War Office, found very, very useful.
00:50:04:12 - 00:50:42:09
John Calvert
So she sort of became a consultant, I would say, to the War Office. And she was involved in the postwar partition of the Arab region. The final drawing of the boundaries. She was there at the Cairo conference with Winston Churchill. I will say that Gertrude Bell wasn't necessarily a champion of Arab self-determination. She believed that the Arabs were yet too sort of undeveloped for full independence.
00:50:42:12 - 00:51:03:11
John Calvert
She believed that the Arabs required only, you know, the expert tutelage that only a country like Great Britain could provide, and that perhaps down the road Arabs would be allowed full, fettered independence. But for the time being they required tutelage and the help of Great Britain.
00:51:03:14 - 00:51:19:10
Speaker 6
Could you comment on the German-Turkish relationship, as regards the Berlin-Baghdad Express and how that fits in with the so-called Silk Road, which is a British orientation, as you know.
00:51:19:12 - 00:51:48:18
John Calvert
Right. Yeah. The Germans had significant influence in the Ottoman Empire in the years leading up to the First World War. German officers trained the Ottoman army. The Ottomans adopted the Mauser rifle in the 1880s and of course, German engineers helped plan and build the great Berlin to Baghdad Railway. One of the great engineering feats of the 19th century.
00:51:48:18 - 00:52:22:01
John Calvert
It ranks with the building of the Union Pacific, the Siberian Railway, the Canadian Pacific in terms of engineering feats, you know, crossing mountains, rivers and so forth. Sultan Abdul Hamid the second wanted the railway built to tie his empire together. It would allow him to bring troops very, very quickly to rebellious corners of the empire. One of the spur lines of that railway by, you know, went through, went south from Damascus into Hejaz
00:52:22:01 - 00:52:52:00
John Calvert
and it was that spur line in Hejaz that T.E. Lawrence and the Arab irregulars blew up during the Arab revolt. The British, of course, in pre-war days were very, very interested in this railway. They saw sort of German intrigue, you know, behind it. They're aware that the Germans attempted to establish strong influence in the Ottoman Empire. T.E. Lawrence was with archeologist Leonard Woolley at Karkemish in southern Syria,
00:52:52:02 - 00:53:17:18
John Calvert
actually, it's in yeah, just on the Turkish border, excavating Karkemish. But, you know, just a hundred meters down was this bridge that the Germans and the Ottomans were building. So, yes, they're excavating the city, but also taking notes on what the Germans and Ottomans were up to and building this railway. The Ottomans, of course, had a choice.
00:53:17:18 - 00:53:43:25
John Calvert
They could have joined the entente. They threw their lot in with the Germans as a way of getting back at their old Russian enemy. I think the Ottomans hoped that they might be able to regain some of the lands they had lost to the czars over the preceding couple of centuries. And it was a fateful decision because it meant that the Ottomans were on the losing side of the war.
00:53:43:28 - 00:53:48:12
Lora Vogt
Thank you very much. Please join me in thanking Dr. John Calvert.
