Palestine: A Twice-Promised Land?

Isaiah Friedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138512924
• eBook ISBN: 9781351290067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

In this book, Isaiah Friedman examines one of the most complex problems that bedeviled Middle East politics in the interwar period, one that still remains controversial. The prevailing view is that during World War I the British government made conflicting commitments to the Arabs, to the French, and to the Jews. Through a rigorous examination of the documentary evidence, Friedman demolishes the myth that Palestine was a "twice-promised land" and shows that the charges of fraudulence and deception leveled against the British are groundless.

Central to Arab claims on Palestine was a letter dated 24 October 1915, from Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, to King Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, pledging Arab independence. Friedman shows that this letter was conditional on a general Arab uprising against the Turks. Predicated on reciprocal action, the letter committed the British to recognize and uphold Arab independence in the areas of the Fertile Crescent once it was liberated by the Arabs themselves. As all evidence shows, few tribes rebelled against the Turks. The Arabs in Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia fought for the Ottoman Empire against the British. In addition to its non-binding nature, McMahon's letter has been misinterpreted with respect to the territories it covers. Friedman's archival discovery of the Arabic version actually read by Hussein indisputably shows that Palestine was not included in the British pledge. Indeed, Hussein welcomed the return of the Jews just as his son Emir Feisal believed that Arab-Jewish cooperation would be a means to build Arab independence without the interference of the European powers.

Myth-shattering and meticulously documented, Palestine: A Twice-Promised Land? is revisionist history in the truest sense of the word.

1

A Follow-up to the Dialogue with Arnold J. Toynbee

Replying to the criticism made by Professor Trevor-Roper, Professor Toynbee wrote:

I agree that my claim cannot be sustained if I have not tried to test my theories and hypotheses by the facts, or if I have tried but have not done the job properly or successfully. For, while it is true that theories and hypotheses can never be deduced from facts, it is also true that they can be validated only if they are confronted with the relevant facts and are confirmed by them.¹

Toynbee’s self-proclaimed credo was: “I have greater respect for the historical evidence than I have for a particular hypothesis that I happen to have picked out of my tool-bag.”² The author of the present study had therefore expected that Toynbee would be willing to continue our discussion and clarify certain points that remained unresolved. Regretfully, my further correspondence elicited no reply, and on 22 October 1975 he died.

In 1969, Toynbee told this author that, when considering the question in the autumn of 1918, much depended on the meaning of the phrase “Vilayet of Damascus.” In Ottoman administrative usage, vilayet was used in a wider sense, covering Cis-Jordanian Palestine, whereas, in Arabic, wilāya meant “environs” or “banlieux.” He further stated that McMahon could not have used the Ottoman terminology in his letter of 24 October 1915, in which case Palestine was meant to be included.³

However, there is no scintilla of evidence that this was what Toynbee thought when preparing his “Memorandum” on British Commitments to King Hussein” (October/November 1918). His reason for concluding that the British Government was pledged that Palestine “shall be ‘Arab’ and ‘independent’” was quite different.⁴ Moreover, it is most unlikely that the word wilāya was considered by him at any time. Toynbee did not know Arabic and the term in this particular sense does not exist.

In vain can one search for wilāya among British, French, or German official records. Nor does it appear in the vast literature of travelers, among whom Seetzen⁵ and Volney⁶ are prominent. The latter, noted for his acuteness of mind, was familiar with Arabic and, during his lengthy sojourn in Syria, learned to appreciate the customs and character of the native people. His book was translated into five languages including Arabic. The term does not appear in Baedeker’s authoritative handbook either,⁷ or in any other guidebooks of the time. Nor is it mentioned in any of the letters of Gertrude Bell or T. E. Lawrence. In her memorandum of 23 June 1917, Miss Bell gave a vivid description of Damascus and its environs, but nowhere does she use the term wilāya.⁸ This is important, since Syria, by her own admission, was the province with which she was “most familiar.”⁹ In his comprehensive memorandum on Syria, Lawrence used the familiar Arab word Shám for Damascus.¹⁰ Had wilāya been in current use, he would have undoubtedly mentioned it as well when describing its neighborhood.

Major Hubert Young served on the staff of Emir Feisal’s army in 1918 and took part in operations in the Dera’a-Damascus region. He spoke Arabic fluently. Nonetheless, he never, as far as evidence goes, came across the word wilāya used in the sense indicated by Toynbee.

Even more telling is its absolute absence from the classic study of Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine. Geographie Administrative (Paris, 1896), whose thoroughness and erudition is noticeable on every page. His map of the administrative division of the region during the Ottoman period was published in the Palestine Royal Commission Report (the Peel Report) of 1937, and later in countless modern Middle East histories and textbooks. Similarly, the word does not appear in the specialized studies of Gibb and Bowen,¹¹ Rafeq,¹² Barbir,¹³ Maoz,¹⁴ and others.

Ironic as it may seem, the Palestine Delegation to London in 1922 did not mention the word wilāya at all when they challenged the British for equating the term “district” with the Ottoman “vilayet.” They argued that the name of the area in question was not the Vilayet of Damascus, but the Vilayet of Syria and, since Homs were “districts” within the Vilayet of Syria, the district of Damascus could only have meant a smaller administrative unit. “Palestine,” they concluded, “thus comes within the scope of the promise.”¹⁵ Antonius repeated this argument in his book The Arab Awakening (pp. 177–178), which appeared first in November 1938.

It was not until the Round Table Conference in London early in 1939 that the word wilāya was aired for the first time. The person who brought it out was the same Antonius, then Delegate and Secretary-General to the Arab Delegation. He claimed that the Arabic wilāya did not correspond to the Turkish vilayet and that, in the given context of the 1915–1916 Correspondence, the word wilāya was “without any reference to administrative boundaries.”¹⁶ This interpretation, as we shall see later was palpably not true and was meant merely to confuse his British opposite numbers. Sir Michael McDonnell, the Legal Adviser to the Arab Delegation, reiterated this argument, insisting that the Arabic word wilāya “does not necessarily impart an Ottoman vilayet, which was a determined administrative unit,” and that “the Sharif was using the Arab term wilāya … in the sense of the environs of the towns named.”¹⁷

It was from these statements in 1939, that Toynbee learned that wilāya could mean “environs” or “banlieux,” but not before that time. In 1967, when writing to the present author, and thereafter in his “Comments,” he quite erroneously attributed this interpretation to himself when he prepared his “Memorandum on British Commitments to King Hussein” in 1918.

Since the meaning of the terms vilayet/wilāya/district was so hotly disputed — still remains controversial — a more detailed examination is called for.

The word wilāya is derived from the Koran (Sura IV, 62) and in constitutional law means the sovereign power (e.g., sultan), or the power delegated by the sovereign, the office of a governor, a wāli. In time it came to be applied to the area governed by a wāli. In Turkish, it was pronounced vilayet, and, from the sixteenth century (when it was called also eyalet), the term was applied to the largest administrative units.¹⁸ The Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam¹⁹ also states that the term means the appointment and certificate of appointment of an official, and, in later times, an administrative district.

Professor Bernard Lewis, in his Handbook, equates wilāya with vilayet, or state.²⁰ Professor Philip Khoury put it thus: “wilāya(A); vilayet(T) = Ottoman administrative unit or province.”²¹ Dr. Welga Rebhan, in her authoritative history of Arabic political terms during the nineteenth century, states that wilāya means Herrschergewalt, which stands for sovereign power.²² According to the Arabic-English dictionary of J. G. Hava (a Jesuit priest), which appeared in Beirut in 1915, wilāya means: government, supremacy, dominion, management of a province, state, vilayet; while the most authoritative and relatively recent dictionary of Hans Wehr²³ terms it similarly: sovereign power, rule, government, administrative district, headed by a wāli, vilayet, province, state. In this respect, there is no material difference between the colloquial and literary Arabic. Wilāya is essentially associated with a governmental, not geographical, concept and is invariably related to a large administrative unit, not to a town and its environs.²⁴ Arab scholars at the University of Haifa have confirmed this deduction.²⁵ The Arab scholar Rafiq Tamimi entitled his book (in Arabic) that dealt with the Vilayet of Beirut, Wilāya Bairut (Beirut, 1331/1913).²⁶ The substantive body of all this learned opinion belies the Antonius/McDonnell contention.

Contemporary records show that British officials considered the terms wilāya, vilayet, and district, as well as province, to be synonymous in meaning. Thus, in a cable to Grey, Cheetham referred to “districts of Mesopotamia.”²⁷ On the other hand, General Barrow used the Arabic term “Basra wilayat,”²⁸ while Lord Crewe, Secretary of State for India, stated during the meeting of the War Council on 19 March 1915 that “Basra Vilayet must be part of the British Empire.”²⁹ Holderness, Admiral Jackson, Major-General Calwell, Sir Mark Sykes, and other members of the de Bunsen Committee used the terms “province, vilayet” interchangeably during their meetings with regard to the districts of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra.³⁰ In his important telegram of 20 October 1915 to McMahon, Grey used the word “Vilayet” with regard to Basra, but “province” for Baghdad, although they had an identical administrative status. On the other hand, the Viceroy of India (4 November 1915) called Basra a “Vilayet” but used the Arabic word wilāya for Baghdad. The following day McMahon applied “vilayets” to both Baghdad and Basra, while Sykes, in his cable from Cairo to the Director of Military Operations on 21 November 1915, wrote “Baghdad and Basra provinces.”³¹ On 2 November 1918, in a note to the India Office, the Foreign Office referred to Mosul as “district,” while the Political Officer in Baghdad (Wilson) on 27 November 1918 preferred to use the Ottoman term “vilayet.”³²

Hedjaz was a vilayet, but Lt. General Sir Edwin Locke Elliot, in a conversation with Sir Afsur Bahadur of Hyderabad, chose the English term “district” of Hedjaz.³³ The British Consul in Aleppo followed a similar pattern when reporting to Sir Louis Mallet, the British Ambassador in Constantinople: “Syrians in this district [of Aleppo].”³⁴ Sir Reginald Wingate urged the necessity of holding on to the Aleppo and Beirut Provinces and, in the same breath, insisted on retention of Baghdad and Basra Vilayets.³⁵

It is even more illuminating to juxtapose the English and Arabic versions of the Correspondence,³⁶ in which wilāya is invariably translated as district, province, or vilayet. Thus, Sharif Hussein, in his letter of 5 November 1915, used the word wilāyātain, which is the dual of wilāya, with regard to Aleppo and Beirut; at the British Residency it was translated into “provinces of…” In the second paragraph of the same letter, where the English translation reads “since the provinces of Iraq …,” the Arabic original is wilāyāt, the dual number of wilāya. Vilayets of Aleppo and Beirut in McMahon’s letter of 14 December 1915 were translated as wilāyat (plural); whereas “Vilayet of Baghdad,” in the same letter of McMahon, as well as in his subsequent one of 30 January 1916, was translated as wilāya (singular). These examples remove any doubt about the identity of meaning of the English, Turkish, and Arabic terms. Parenthetically, it should be added that wilāya is even stronger in meaning than its English equivalent, since it denotes rule and authority; the territory that it covered was always governed by a high-ranking official called a Vali (in Arabic, wāli). The Ottoman vilayet was merely a linguistic derivation of the Arabic word. Professor Geoffrey Lewis, the distinguished philologist in Turkish at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, thinks that “vilayet is simply the Turkish pronunciation of the Arabic wilāya.”³⁷

There was, however, an exception. In his much quoted letter of 24 October 1915, McMahon referred to the districts of Mersina and Alexandretta (translated in Arabic to wilāyāt) — obviously a lacuna in his knowledge, since neither Mersina nor Alexandretta were vilayets, the first laying in the Vilayet of Adana and the second in that of Aleppo. But the error was seized on by those who rejected the British equating district with vilayet as additional proof to fortify their case. Their deduction, however, is fallacious, if not mischievous, for, had this been so, the vilayets of Aleppo and Beirut, as well as those of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, would have to be downgraded in their respective administrative status, which is absurd.

At this juncture it would be of interest to point out that, in his reply of 5 November 1915, Sharif Hussein committed a similar mistake. The relevant sentence translated literally to English reads:

We renounce our insistence on the inclusion of the vilayets of Mersina and Adana in the Arab Kingdom. But the two vilayets of Aleppo and Beirut and their sea coasts…³⁸

Was Hussein as ignorant as the High Commissioner in this particular case, or was he merely repeating his correspondent’s error? The only explanation for this peculiar confusion is that, before the introduction of the Law of Vilayets in 1864,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Preamble
• Maps
• 1 A Follow-up to the Dialogue with Arnold J. Toynbee
• 2 The “Pledge” to Hussein and the Sykes-Picot Agreement
• 3 Toynbee versus Toynbee
• 4 Pro-Arab or Pro-Zionist?
• 5 Sykes, Picot, and Hussein
• 6 A Fatal Misunderstanding
• 7 The Sharifians, the Palestinians, and the Zionists
• 8 The Declaration to the Seven and Lawrence’s “Capture” of Damascus
• 9 The Weizmann-Feisal Agreement and After
• 10 The King-Crane Commission and the Unmaking of the Weizmann-Feisal Agreement
• Notes
• Appendices
• Index