CHAPTER 7
By the time of the postwar settlement conferring the mandates of Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine on Great Britain, the British Empire in the Arab world was already a century old. The British East India Company had been drawn into the treacherous waters of the Persian Gulf in the early nineteenth century to combat the growing threat to merchant shipping posed by the seaborne tribes of Sharja and Ras al-Khaima, now part of the United Arab Emirates. The Persian Gulf was a vital land-and-sea link between the Eastern Mediterranean and India, and the British were determined to put a stop to Gulf piracy. In the process of subduing what they called the “pirate coast,” the British transformed the Persian Gulf into a British lake.
The record of British grievances against the Qasimi confederation of tribes in Sharja and Ras al-Khaima dated back to 1797. The East India Company attributed a string of attacks on British, Ottoman, and Arab shipping to the Qawasim (plural of Qasimi). In September 1809, the East India Company dispatched a sixteen-ship punitive expedition to the pirate coast. The fleet was under instructions to attack the town of Ras al-Khaima and burn the ships and stores of the Qasimi raiders. Between November 1809 and January 1810, the British fleet inflicted significant damage on Ras al-Khaima and a string of four other Qasimi ports. The British burned sixty large and forty-three small vessels and seized some £20,000 in allegedly stolen property before returning home. Yet for failing to secure a formal agreement with the Qawasim, the British would continue to face attacks on their shipping in the Gulf.1
Within five years of the first British expedition, the Qasimis had rebuilt their fleet and resumed their seaborne raiding. In 1819 a second British expedition was dispatched from Bombay to subdue the Qasimis. With twice the forces, and a focus on Ras al-Khaima, the expedition not only succeeded in seizing and burning most of the Qasimi shipping but also achieved the political settlement that had eluded the first campaign. On January 8, 1820, the shaykhs of Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, Umm al-Qaiwain, and Bahrain, as well as the Qasimi family who ruled over Sharjah and Ras al-Khaima, signed a general treaty pledging a complete and permanent cessation to all attacks on British shipping. They also accepted a common set of maritime rules in return for trade access to all British ports in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. By granting the seafaring shaykhdoms access to ports under British control, the agreement gave all parties an economic incentive to preserve the peace on the high seas and in-shore waters. These terms were confirmed in the Perpetual Treaty of 1853, which outlawed maritime hostilities between all of the states in the Gulf. The mini-states of the “pirate coast” now came to be known as the Trucial States, so called for the formal truce struck with Britain and among themselves.
It was the beginning of a nineteenth century Pax Britannicus during which the Persian Gulf developed into an out-and-out British protectorate. The British deepened their control over the Gulf through a series of bilateral agreements concluded with the rulers of individual shaykhdoms. In 1880 the shaykh of Bahrain signed an agreement that effectively placed his foreign relations under British control, promising “to abstain from entering into negotiations or making treaties of any sort with any State or Government other than the British without the consent of the said British Government.” The British concluded similar agreements with the other Persian Gulf shaykhdoms.2 In the 1890s the British went even further, obtaining from the Gulf rulers “nonalien-ation bonds,” in which they pledged not to “cede, sell, mortgage or otherwise give for occupation any part of [their] territory save to the British Government.”3 Britain took these measures to ensure that neither the Ottoman Empire, which since the 1870s had sought to extend its sovereignty over the Persian Gulf, nor any of its European rivals might threaten Britain’s paramount control over this strategic sea route to its empire in India. Kuwait and Qatar both sought British protection against Ottoman expansionism and joined the Gulf “protectorate” in 1899 and 1916, respectively.
Britain’s growing reliance on oil gave the Persian Gulf added significance in the twentieth century. With the conversion of the Royal Navy from coal to oil in 1907, the Arab shaykhdoms of the Persian Gulf took on a new strategic role in British imperial thinking. In 1913 Winston Churchill, then first lord of the admiralty, confronted the House of Commons with Britain’s new dependence on oil. “In the year 1907,” he revealed, “the first flotilla of ocean-going destroyers wholly dependent upon oil was created, and since then, in each successive year, another flotilla of ‘oil only’ destroyers has been built.” By 1913, he claimed, there were some 100 new oil-powered ships in the Royal Navy.4 As a result, Britain’s priorities in the Persian Gulf expanded from trade and communications with India to reflect this new strategic interest in oil.
The first major oil reserve in the Persian Gulf region was struck in May 1908 in central Iran. Geologists had every reason to believe that exportable quantities of oil remained to be discovered in the Arab states of the Gulf. The British began to conclude agreements with the gulf shaykhdoms for exclusive rights to explore for oil. The ruler of Kuwait gave the British a concession in October 1913, pledging to allow only persons or firms approved by His Majesty’s government to prospect for oil in his territory. A similar agreement was concluded with the ruler of Bahrain on May 14, 1914. The prospect of oil, combined with commerce and imperial communications, made the Persian Gulf an area of particular strategic importance to Great Britain by the First World War. In 1915 a British government report defined “our special and supreme position in the Persian Gulf” as “one of the cardinal principles of our policy in the East.”5
In 1913 a new Arab state burst upon the Pax Britannicus in the Persian Gulf. The Al Sa‘ud (whose eighteenth-century confederation challenged Ottoman rule from Iraq to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina until defeated by Muhammad ’Ali’s forces in 1818) had reestablished their partnership with the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab to launch a new Saudi-Wahhabi confederation. At their head was a charismatic young leader named Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Faysal Al Sa’ud (1880–1953), better known in the West as Ibn Saud.
Ibn Saud began his rise to power in 1902 when he led his followers to victory over their long-standing rivals, the Rashidi clan, to seize the Central Arabian oasis town of Riyadh. His fighters, known as the Ikhwan (“the brothers”), were zealots who sought to impose their austere Wahhabi interpretation of Islam across the Arabian Peninsula. They also reaped the rewards of religiously sanctioned plunder whenever they conquered a town that rejected their message. These incentives of faith and gain combined to make the Ikhwan the strongest fighting force on the peninsula. Ibn Saud declared Riyadh his capital, and over the next eleven years he deployed the Ikhwan to expand the territory under his rule from the Arabian interior to the Persian Gulf.
In 1913 Ibn Saud conquered the Hasa region of Eastern Arabia from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans had attempted to integrate this isolated Arabian region (known today as the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia) to their empire in 1871 in a bid to extend their influence over the Persian Gulf—a bid the British were determined to stymie. By 1913 the Ottomans had all but abandoned their administration in the district. The Saudis took the main town of Hufuf unopposed and emerged as the dominant new power among the Arab Gulf states.
Faced with a powerful new Gulf ruler, the British concluded a treaty with Ibn Saud by the end of 1915. The treaty confirmed British recognition of Ibn Saud’s leadership and extended British protection over the central and eastern Arabian territories then under his control. In return, the Saudis pledged not to enter into agreement with, or to sell any territory to, any other foreign power without prior British consent, and to refrain from all aggression against other Gulf states—in essence turning Ibn Saud’s lands into another Trucial State. In concluding the agreement, Britain gave Ibn Saud £20,000, a monthly stipend of £5,000, and a large number of rifles and machine guns, intended to be used against the Ottomans and their Arab allies, who had sided with Germany against Britain in World War I.
But Ibn Saud had no interest in fighting the Ottomans in Arabia. Instead, he used British guns and funds to advance his own objectives, which increasingly led westward toward the Red Sea province of the Hijaz, in which lay Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam. Here Saudi ambitions confronted the claims of another British ally—Sharif Husayn of Mecca, with whom Britain had concluded a wartime alliance in autumn 1915. Sharif Husayn, like Ibn Saud, aspired to rule all of Arabia. By declaring the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule in June 1916, Sharif Husayn hoped to realize his ambitions in Arabia, Syria, and Iraq with British support. Yet by fighting the Ottomans and extending his forces along a 1,300-kilometer (810-mile) stretch of desert, the sharif had left his home province of Hijaz vulnerable to Ibn Saud’s forces. The vast Arabian Peninsula was not big enough to accommodate the ambitions of both men. Between 1916 and 1918, the balance began to shift in Ibn Saud’s favor.
Conflict between the Saudis and the Hashemites became inevitable when Sharif Husayn declared himself “king of the Arab Countries” in October 1916, following the outbreak of the Arab Revolt. Even his British allies, who had promised him an “Arab kingdom,” were only willing to recognize him as “king of the Hijaz” in addition to sharif of Mecca. Ibn Saud was unlikely to let the self-proclaimed King Husayn’s claim stand.
Throughout World War I Britain tried to keep the peace between its two Arab allies and to focus their energies on fighting the Ottomans. However, the Saudi-Hashemite battle for ascendancy broke into open conflict just months before the collapse of the Ottoman war effort. A remarkable exchange of unpublished letters written by the two desert monarchs captures the rivalry just as tempers rose with the summer heat in 1918.
With his forces fully engaged against the Ottomans all along the Hijaz Railway line, King Husayn was growing increasingly concerned by reports that the Saudi ruler had been distributing weapons among tribes that had recently pledged allegiance to the Wahhabi cause. These were no doubt arms that the British had provided Ibn Saud, and the Hashemite ruler was increasingly concerned that British arms would be used against his own forces. In February 1918, Husayn wrote to admonish Ibn Saud: “Do the [Wahhabi] tribesmen believe God will find them innocent of hostilities against the people of Islam,” he wrote, “who trust in God to protect their lives and property?” Husayn warned his rival that it was an act against God’s religion to arm Muslims to fight against fellow Muslims.6
Ibn Saud was outraged by Husayn’s letter. After all, what went on in the Najd was no business of the sharif of Mecca. Ibn Saud’s response provoked a fresh riposte from Husayn in May 1918. If Ibn Saud’s actions had been limited to the Central Arabian province of the Najd, the Hashemites might not be so concerned. However, the Saudi ruler had recently secured the allegiance of one of King Husayn’s own governors, a man named Khalid ibn Luway, in the oasis town of al-Khurma on the Najd-Hijaz frontier. “There is no cause for deceiving Khalid ibn Luway, or to use tricks and subterfuge on him,” the old king complained.7
The oasis town of Khurma was strategically located between the rival Arab rulers’ territories, and with a population of 5,000 it was an important settlement in its own right. Though he had been a subject of the sharif of Mecca, Khalid had declared his adherence to Wahhabi doctrine in 1918, placed his town under Ibn Saud’s rule, and diverted its taxes from Mecca to the Saudi treasury. In his memoirs, King Husayn’s son Amir Abdullah wrote that Khalid “killed innocent people, even putting his own brother to death because he did not share his religious convictions. He kept persecuting any of the Hashemite tribes who would not follow the Wahhabi movement.”8 King Husayn tried to persuade the wayward governor to return to the fold, but to no avail.
The dispute over Khurma led to the first armed conflict between the Hashemites and the Saudis. King Husayn dispatched a force of over 2,600 infantry and horsemen in June 1918 to retake Khurma but found the town reinforced by Ibn Saud’s Ikhwan fighters.9The Hashemite troops were decimated by the Saudis in two separate engagements. The British, concerned lest their Arab allies succumb to internecine fighting before the Ottomans had been defeated, put pressure on Ibn Saud to seek peace with King Husayn.
Buoyed by his fighters’ victories in Khurma, Ibn Saud drafted a condescending letter to Husayn in August 1918. The Saudi leader deployed titles as a way of asserting geographic sway. Whereas Ibn Saud claimed to be “amir of Najd, Hasa, Qatif and their dependencies,” he only recognized Sharif Husayn as “amir of Mecca”—not “king of the Arab Lands,” as Sharif Husayn wished, nor even king of the Hijaz, as the British acknowledged. He pointedly avoided making any reference to the Hijaz at all, as though the sovereignty of that vast Red Sea province had yet to be decided.
Ibn Saud acknowledged receipt of King Husayn’s letter of May 7 with the reservation that “some of the things expressed in your letter were not appropriate.” He also acknowledged British pressure to reconcile their differences, for the campaign against the Ottomans was reaching a critical stage and “the dispute is harmful to all,” he explained. Yet Ibn Saud could not let prior Hashemite provocations go unchallenged. “Your Eminence will undoubtedly have suspicions that I played a role in the matter of the people of al-Khurma,” he wrote. However, he argued that the Hashemites themselves were to blame for the governor’s defection and the townspeople’s adherence to the Wahhabi cause. “I kept them in check as far as I could,” he continued, “until your forces marched over them twice”—referring to the two Hashemite engagements at al-Khurma—“and that which God had ordained happened,” a smug reference to the defeat the Saudis dealt the Hashemite forces.10
Looking to the future, Ibn Saud proposed a truce with the Hashemites based on the status quo. Khurma would stay under Saudi rule, and King Husayn would write to the governor of the oasis town to reassure him that there were no differences between the Saudis and the Hashemites. Ibn Saud and King Husayn would preserve the peace between their followers, guaranteeing the compliance of the tribes of Najd and Hijaz to the truce. In hindsight, it was the best offer Husayn would ever get from the Saudis—mutual recognition of borders and territories with the Hashemites left in control of the Hijaz.
King Husayn did not even consider Ibn Saud’s offer; he returned the letter unopened, telling the messenger: “Ibn Saud has no claim on us and we have no claim on him.” Instead of pursuing a truce, King Husayn dispatched another force to al-Khurma in August 1918 in a bid to restore his authority over the oasis. He assigned one of his most trusted commanders, Sharif Shakir bin Zayd, to command the expedition. The king reassured his commander that he had dispatched sufficient camels and supplies “for you to do great things with.”11 Shakir’s expedition, however, was easily repelled by Saudi forces before even reaching the contested oasis.
Infuriated and humiliated by his repeated defeats to Ibn Saud’s forces, King Husayn ordered his son Amir Abdullah to lead a new campaign against Khurma. Abdullah had no stomach for such a fight. He and his soldiers had maintained the siege of the Ottoman garrison in Medina until their commander finally surrendered in January 1919. Abdullah’s troops were battle-weary after years of fighting the Ottomans. He also recognized that the Wahhabi soldiers were zealous warriors. “The Wahhabi fighter,” he wrote, “is anxious to attain Paradise which, according to his faith, he will enter if he be killed.”12 But Abdullah could not defy his father, and in May 1919 he took up his commission and led his force to battle with the Wahhabis.
The Hashemite army met with initial success in its final campaign against the Saudis. In May 1919, on the way to Khurma, Amir Abdullah captured the oasis of Turaba, which had also pledged allegiance to Ibn Saud. Rather than seek the goodwill of the 3,000 inhabitants of the oasis, Abdullah allowed his troops to plunder the rebellious town. No doubt he intended to make an example of Turaba, to discourage other frontier oases from siding with the Saudis. However, the behavior of Abdullah’s troops only served to increase Turaba’s loyalty to Ibn Saud. While Amir Abdullah was still in Turaba, some of the townspeople must have sent word to Ibn Saud to come to their assistance. Abdullah himself drafted a letter to the Saudi leader from Turaba in an attempt to leverage his conquest of the oasis to secure a peace agreement with Ibn Saud on terms more favorable to the Hashemites.
The Saudi fighters had no interest in coming to terms with the Hashemites. Having defeated every Hashemite army they had encountered, they were confident of carrying the day against Amir Abdullah’s force. Some 4,000 Ikhwan fighters surrounded Turaba from three sides. They struck Abdullah’s positions at dawn and nearly wiped out his forces. By his own account, Abdullah claimed that only 153 men from his detachment of 1,350 troops survived. “I personally escaped through a miracle,” he later recalled. Abdullah and his cousin, Sharif Shakir bin Zayd, cut through the back of their tent and sustained wounds as they fled the fighting.13
The repercussions of the battle reached far beyond the carnage at the oasis. Turaba demonstrated that the Wahhabis were the dominant force in the Arabian Peninsula and that the Hashemites’ days in the Hijaz were numbered. Amir Abdullah recalled: “After the battle there began a period of unrest and anxiety as to the fate of our movement, our country and the person of our King.” Indeed, his father, King Husayn, seemed to be suffering from a mental breakdown. “On returning to headquarters I found my father ill and nervous,” Abdullah wrote. “He was now bad tempered, forgetful and suspicious. He had lost his quick grasp and sound judgment.”14
The result of the battle came as a surprise to the British too, many of whom had underestimated the fighting power of Ibn Saud’s forces. They did not wish to see their Saudi ally overwhelm their Hashemite ally, upsetting the balance of power they had carefully established in Arabia. The British resident (or chief colonial administrator under the Political Service of British India) in Jidda sent a message to Ibn Saud in July 1918 demanding he withdraw from the oasis towns immediately, leaving Turaba and Khurma as neutral zones until both sides had agreed on their frontiers. “If you fail to retreat after receiving my letter,” the resident warned, “the Government of His Majesty will consider the treaty they have concluded with you null and void and take all necessary steps to hinder your hostile action.”15 Ibn Saud complied with the request and ordered his troops to withdraw to Riyadh.
To restore the balance of forces in Arabia, the British also needed to conclude a formal treaty with the Hashemites in the Hijaz. The exchange of correspondence between the then Sharif Husayn and Sir Henry McMahon had established a wartime alliance, but this did not constitute the sort of treaty such as Britain had concluded with the Persian Gulf rulers, including Ibn Saud. Without a formal treaty, Britain would have no grounds to preserve its Hashemite allies from the Saudis. And Britain preferred to see many states balancing each other in Arabia to having a single dominant power emerge that straddled both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. It was thus convenient for British imperial interests to preserve the Hashemites as a buffer against the growing power of the Saudi state.
As World War I drew to an end, the British government was anxious to conclude a formal alliance with King Husayn and his Hashemite family. They sent Colonel T. E. Lawrence, the famous “Lawrence of Arabia,” who had served as British liaison with the Hashemites during the Arab Revolt, to open negotiations with Husayn.
Between July and September 1921, Lawrence tried in vain to persuade King Husayn to sign a treaty that recognized the new realities of the postwar settlement. Husayn rejected nearly every feature of the postwar Middle East as a betrayal of Britain’s promises to him: he refused to limit his kingdom to the Hijaz; he objected to the expulsion of his son, King Faysal, from Damascus and the establishment of a French mandate in Syria; he rejected Britain’s mandates over Iraq and Palestine (which then included Transjordan); and he objected to the policy of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The British ventured one last attempt to reach a treaty in 1923, but the bitter old king refused to sign. As a result, he forfeited British protection just as Ibn Saud began to mount his campaign to conquer the Hijaz.
In July 1924, Ibn Saud gathered his commanders in Riyadh to plan the conquest of the Hijaz. They began with an attack on Taif, a mountain town near Mecca, to test Britain’s reaction. In September 1924 the Ikhwan seized the town and plundered it for three days. The townspeople of Taif resisted the Wahhabis, who responded with great violence. An estimated 400 people were killed, and many others fled. The fall of Taif sent a shock wave through the Hijaz. The notables of the province gathered in Jidda and forced King Husayn to resign his throne. They believed Ibn Saud was attacking the Hijaz because of his antagonism toward King Husayn, and that a change in monarch might change Saudi policy. On October 6, 1924, the old king complied with his people’s wishes, declared his son Ali king, and went into exile. However, these measures did not halt Ibn Saud’s advance.
In mid-October 1924, the Ikhwan captured the holy city of Mecca. They met with no resistance and refrained from all violence toward the townspeople. Ibn Saud sent messengers to sound out Britain’s reaction to the conquest of Taif and Mecca. He was reassured of Britain’s neutrality in the conflict. The Saudi ruler then proceeded to complete his conquest of the Hijaz. He laid siege to the port of Jidda and the holy city of Medina in January 1925. The Hashemites held out for nearly a full year, but on December 22, 1925, King Ali surrendered his kingdom to Ibn Saud and followed his father into exile.
Having conquered the Hijaz, Ibn Saud was proclaimed “sultan of Najd and king of the Hijaz.” The vast extent of territory under his control placed Ibn Saud in a different category from the other Gulf rulers of the Trucial States. Britain recognized the change in his status and concluded a new treaty with King Abdul Aziz in 1927 that recognized his full independence and sovereignty, without any of the restrictions on external relations accepted by the Trucial States. Ibn Saud continued to extend the territory under his rule, and renamed his kingdom Saudi Arabia in 1932.
Not only had Ibn Saud succeeded in establishing his kingship over most of the Arabian Peninsula, but he had managed to preserve his independence from all forms of British imperial rule. In this he was assisted by a critical British miscalculation: they did not believe that there was any oil in Saudi Arabia.
The exiled King Husayn of the Hijaz was within his rights to feel betrayed by the British. Not only had Britain failed to fulfill Sir Henry McMahon’s written commitments to the Hashemites, but the British had stood by and watched as the French drove his son King Faysal from Syria in 1920, and the Saudis drove his eldest son King Ali from the Hijaz in 1925.
The British, for their part, were not entirely satisfied they had discharged their commitments to their wartime ally, and they looked for a way to redeem their promises in part, if not in full. As the colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, explained to the House of Commons in June 1921, “We are leaning strongly to what I may call the Sherifian Solution both in Mesopotamia to which the Emir Feisal [Amir Faysal] is now proceeding, and in Trans-Jordania, where the Emir Abdullah is now in charge.”16 Churchill hoped that by putting Husayn’s sons on British mandate thrones he would go some way toward redeeming Britain’s broken promises to the Hashemites while providing Britain with loyal and dependent rulers in their Arab possessions.
Of all the British imperial possessions in the Middle East, Transjordan would prove the easiest to rule. However, the new state of Transjordan got off to a difficult start. With a land mass the size of Indiana or Hungary, Transjordan had a population of only 350,000, divided between the townspeople and villagers living in the high plateau overlooking the Jordan Valley and the nomadic tribesmen who made their home between the desert and the steppe. Its subsistence economy was based on agricultural and pastoral products that provided a modest tax base for a very small state. The politics of Transjordan were also fairly basic. The country was divided into distinct regions, each with its own local leadership whose view of politics was very local. A small British subsidy—£150,000 per annum—went a long way in such a place.
The British did not initially conceive of Transjordan as a separate state in its own right. The territory initially was awarded to Great Britain as part of the Palestine mandate. The decision to sever Transjordan from Palestine, formalized in 1923, was driven by two considerations: Britain’s wish to confine the Balfour Declaration’s promise of a Jewish national home to the lands west of the Jordan River; and Britain’s wish to confine Amir Abdullah’s ambitions to territory under British control.
Amir Abdullah first entered Transjordan uninvited, in November 1920. He was surrounded by a group of Arab nationalists, political refugees from his brother Faysal’s defunct Arab Kingdom in Damascus. Abdullah announced he would lead Arab volunteers to liberate Syria from French rule and to restore his brother Faysal to his rightful throne in Damascus (Abdullah himself aspired to the throne of Iraq). The last thing the British government needed was for Transjordan to become a launching pad for hostilities against the neighboring French mandate of Syria. British officials scrambled to deal with the situation before things got out of hand.
Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence invited Amir Abdullah to a meeting in Jerusalem in March 1921, at which point they updated him on Britain’s plans for its empire in the Middle East. Faysal would never return to Damascus, which was securely in French hands; instead, he was to be king of Iraq. The best they could offer Abdullah was to place him at the head of the new state of Transjordan. Landlocked Transjordan (the territory did not yet include the Red Sea port of Aqaba) fell well short of Abdullah’s ambitions, but Churchill suggested that if Abdullah kept the peace in Transjordan and established good relations with the French, they might one day invite him to rule over Damascus for them.17 It was a long shot, but Abdullah agreed to these proposals, and the Sharifian Solution became British imperial reality in Transjordan.
When Amir Abdullah established his first government in Transjordan in 1921, he drew heavily on the Arab nationalists who had served with his brother Faysal in Damascus. The British and the people of Transjordan had a common dislike of Abdullah’s entourage. The British saw them as firebrands and troublemakers whose attacks against the French in Syria were a constant irritant. For the Transjordanians, the Arab nationalists, who came to form a new party called the Istiqlal, or “Independence,” represented a foreign elite who dominated the government and bureaucracy to the exclusion of the indigenous people of the land.
One of the most outspoken opponents of the Istiqlalis in Transjordan was a local judge named Awda al-Qusus (1877–1943). Qusus was a Christian from the southern town of Karak who had served in the Ottoman court system before the First World War. Fluent in Turkish, with a spattering of English learned from Methodist missionaries, al-Qusus had traveled widely throughout the Ottoman Empire and had worked with high government officials. He firmly believed that Amir Abdullah should form his government from Transjordanians like himself, who had a real interest in the welfare of their new country. His greatest objection to the Istiqlalis was that they were only concerned with liberating Damascus. The first article of their party’s constitution, Al-Qusus wryly remarked, was “to sacrifice Transjordan and its people on the road to Syria’s betterment.”18 Certainly his own persecution at the hands of the Istiqlalis would only confirm this view.
Al-Qusus openly criticized the Istiqlalis in articles he wrote for the local newspaper. He accused government ministers of corruption and the misappropriation of treasury funds for their own projects, without Abdullah’s knowledge. The native Transjordanians responded to the judge’s criticisms by refusing to pay taxes to an “alien” government that was seen to be squandering their country’s limited funds. In June 1921 the villagers of northern Transjordan declared a tax strike that quickly escalated into a serious rebellion. The British had to resort to air strikes by Royal Air Force planes to quell the uprising.
The troubles between Amir Abdullah’s government and the natives of Transjordan only worsened after the 1921 tax revolt. Al-Qusus met regularly with a group of professional townsmen to discuss the cronyism and corruption they deplored in the amir’s government. These Transjordanian dissidents compared notes on government maladministration and openly discussed the need for reform. When Amir Abdullah faced a major tribal uprising in the summer of 1923, the Istiqlalis accused al-Qusus and the dissident townsmen of provoking the revolt, and they urged Abdullah to crack down on their domestic opponents. That very night, September 6, 1923, the police pounded on Justice Awda al-Qusus’s door and took him away.
Al-Qusus would not return home for seven months. Stripped of his official rank by order of the amir, he was exiled to the neighboring Kingdom of the Hijaz (which was still under Hashemite rule). He was joined by four other natives of Transjordan: an army officer, a Circassian, a Muslim cleric, and a rural notable who would later be celebrated as the national poet of Jordan, Mustafa Wahbi al-Tall. The five were accused of creating a “secret society” that sought to overturn the amir’s government and replace it with natives of Transjordan. They were falsely accused of being in league with the head of the Adwan tribe and encouraging the tribal revolt to facilitate their coup. The charge was high treason, and the severity of the charge was reflected in the harshness of the treatment meted out to al-Qusus and his fellows.
As they arrived at the railway station in Amman to take the train into exile, the five were in a defiant mood. Mustafa Wahbi, the poet, was singing nationalist songs and stirring the men’s defiance. “Before God and history, Awda!” he shouted. The men had no sense of the ordeal that lay before them. When they arrived in Maan, now a city in Jordan but then a town on the frontier of the Hijaz, they were taken to a dank and fetid cell in the basement of the old castle. Al-Qusus grabbed his guard and screamed: “Have you no fear of God? A place like this is not suitable for animals, let alone for people.”
The guards and their commanders, who knew their prisoners were respectable men, were embarrassed. Everything about their culture and society dictated that they should show hospitality to men entrusted to their care. Yet they were military men who had to obey orders. Their behavior toward their prisoners alternated radically between great kindness—finding clean bedding, providing tea and company—and great cruelty, torturing the detainees to secure their signed confessions to the charges leveled against them by the government. The officials who ordered the torture and dictated the confessions were of course men from Amir Abdullah’s foreign retinue. Al-Qusus and his companions were then formally indicted in absentia of “plotting against the government of His Highness the Amir with intent to overthrow the government by armed insurrection.”19 They were then sent to prison in the Hijaz, first in Aqaba and then in Jidda.
The exiles were allowed to return to their homeland as part of a general amnesty issued on the occasion of King Husayn’s assumption of the caliphate in March 1924. The new Turkish president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had just abolished the institution of the caliphate as a final measure to eradicate the influence of the Ottoman sultanate, and King Husayn, now in exile from the Hijaz, was quick to seize the honor for the Hashemite family. As was customary on high state occasions, prisoners were released as part of the celebrations.
Their prison ordeal now at an end, the five men were given first-class berths on a steamship from Jidda to the Egyptian port of Suez, whence they made their way to Transjordan. Al-Qusus sent a telegram of thanks to King Husayn and congratulated him on his (ultimately unsuccessful) assumption of the caliphate. He received a quick reply from the exiled monarch, wishing al-Qusus a safe and speedy return to his homeland, “which is in need of people like you with patriotism and friendship towards the fatherland and true adherence to the great Hashemite household.” Was the old king being ironic, or was he admonishing the political prisoners to mend their ways and prove more loyal in future? The truth of the matter was that al-Qusus had never shown disloyalty to Amir Abdullah; he had only objected to the Istiqlalis the amir put into positions of authority over native Transjordanians.
Though he did not know it, the British colonial authorities fully shared Awda al-Qusus’s concerns. The British resident in Amman, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Cox, invited al-Qusus to visit him shortly after his return from exile in the Hijaz. He asked the judge to explain the reasons for his imprisonment, and to share his views on Amir Abdullah’s government. Cox took careful notes on their discussion, thanked al-Qusus, and saw him out.
In August 1924, Cox delivered an ultimatum from the acting high commissioner in Palestine, Sir Gilbert Clayton, to Amir Abdullah. In his letter, Clayton warned Abdullah that the British government viewed his administration “with grave displeasure” for its “financial irregularities and unchecked extravagance” and for allowing Transjordan to become a focus of disorder to neighboring Syria. Abdullah was asked to commit in writing to six conditions to reform his administration, chief among them the expulsion of leading Istiqlalis within five days’ time.20 Abdullah dared not refuse. The British had sent 400 cavalrymen to Amman and 300 troops to the northern town of Irbid to back up their ultimatum. Fearing the British would depose him as quickly as they had installed him, Amir Abdullah signed the ultimatum.
After this confrontation Amir Abdullah expelled the Istiqlali “undesirables,” reformed the finances of his government, and drew natives of Transjordan into his administration. Awda al-Qusus returned to service in the Jordanian judiciary, rising to the office of attorney general in 1931. Once he had thrown in his lot with the elites of Transjordan, Amir Abdullah enjoyed the support and loyalty of his people. Transjordan went on to be a model colony of peace and stability, at very little cost to the British taxpayer until its independence in 1946.
Although Transjordan proved the easiest to manage of Britain’s Middle East possessions, Iraq was for a time viewed as the most successful mandate. King Faysal was installed in 1921, a Constituent Assembly was elected beginning in 1924, and a treaty regulating relations between Britain and Iraq was ratified later that same year. By 1930 Iraq was a stable constitutional monarchy and Britain’s work as mandatory power was complete. A new treaty was negotiated between Britain and Iraq, paving the way to Iraq’s independence in 1932. The League of Nations recognized Iraq’s independence and admitted the new state to its ranks—the only mandate to become a full member of the league in its twenty-six-year history. Iraq was the envy of all the other Arab states left under British or French rule, and its accomplishments became the goals of nationalists across the Arab world: independence and membership in the League of Nations.
As Britain ushered the young kingdom of Iraq into statehood, behind a facade of success lay a very different reality. Many Iraqis had never accepted Britain’s position in their country. Their opposition did not end with the 1920 uprising but continued to plague the British project in Iraq to the end. Though Faysal was in many ways a popular king, his own position was undermined by his reliance on the British. Iraqi nationalists increasingly came to see Faysal as an extension of British influence and to criticize him in the same breath as they condemned their imperial masters.
When Faysal arrived in Iraq in June 1921, the British went to work in promoting their candidate to the Iraqi throne. A number of local contenders threw their hats in the ring but encountered stiff British resistance. An influential notable from Basra who had made a bid for the throne, Sayyid Talib al-Naqib, went for tea with the British high commissioner’s wife, Lady Cox, and found himself arrested and exiled to Ceylon on the way home. The high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and his staff organized an exhausting tour for Faysal to visit towns and tribes across Iraq in advance of a national referendum intended to confirm Britain’s choice for Iraq’s throne. By all accounts, Faysal played his part well, traveling around the country meeting Iraq’s diverse communities and winning their allegiance. Even without British tampering, he probably would have won the consent of a majority of Iraqis to be their king. But the British left nothing to chance. Gertrude Bell, the Oriental secretary in Baghdad, famously remarked that she would “never engage in creating kings again; it’s too great a strain.”21
Faysal was crowned king of Iraq on August 23, 1921. The ceremony was held in the early morning hours to take advantage of the coolest time of day in the prodigious heat of the Baghdad summer. Over 1,500 guests were invited to witness the coronation. Sulayman al-Faydi, a notable from Mosul, described the “great splendour” of the coronation, which was “attended by thousands of guests, the roads leading to it crowded with tens of thousands of people.”22 Faysal stood on a dais flanked by the British high commissioner and members of the Iraqi Council of Ministers. The secretary of the council rose to read Sir Percy’s proclamation announcing the results of the referendum. Faysal had been elected king by 96 percent of the Iraqi voters. The assembled guests and dignitaries stood and saluted King Faysal while the Iraqi flag was raised to the strains of “God Save the King”—the Iraqis had yet to compose their own national anthem.23 The music could only have reinforced the belief that Faysal was Britain’s choice of king—as indeed he was.
Faysal’s honeymoon with his new subjects proved short-lived. Most Iraqis believed Faysal to be an Arab nationalist and expected him to free their country from British rule. They were quickly disappointed. Muhammad Mahdi Kubba, a student in a Shiite theological college in Baghdad at the time of Faysal’s coronation, captured the public’s mood in his memoirs. The British, he explained, “brought Amir Faysal, and crowned him king of Iraq, and charged him with the task of implementing their policies. At first the Iraqis welcomed the installation of Faysal, and they pinned their hopes on him, that his presence at the head of the government would open a new age of independence and national sovereignty.” Indeed, some leading notables gave their allegiance to Faysal on condition that he defend Iraq’s sovereignty and independence. One such skeptic was an influential cleric named Ayatollah Mahdi al-Khalisi, the head of Kubba’s theological school in Baghdad. Kubba witnessed al-Khalisi’s pledge of allegiance before a school assembly convened to welcome King Faysal. “Khalisi said prayers for King Faysal . . . [and] took [him] by the hand saying: ‘We give you our allegiance as King of Iraq, so long as you govern with justice, that the government is constitutional and parliamentary, and that you do not entangle Iraq in any foreign commitments.’”24 King Faysal promised to do his best, saying he had only come to Iraq to serve its people. Faysal knew full well that he would not be able to rule Iraq independent of Britain. As was mandated by the League of Nations, he was condemned to rule under British tutelage until Britain saw fit to concede Iraq its independence. Moreover, he was a stranger in Iraq, with only a handful of army officers who had served with him in the Arab Revolt and the short-lived Kingdom of Syria, for allies. Until he had established his position in Iraq, Faysal would need Britain’s support to survive. The problem for Faysal was that his dependence on Britain cost him the support of Iraqi nationalists. The irony was that it was his dependence on Britain that undermined his ability to develop the loyalty of his own countrymen—right until his death in 1933.
Faysal’s predicament became apparent in 1922 when Britain drafted a treaty to regularize its position in Iraq. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty scarcely veiled the degree of British domination over the Hashemite Kingdom—in the economy, diplomacy, and law. “His Majesty the King of Iraq,” the treaty stipulated, “agrees to be guided by the advice of His Britannic Majesty tendered through the High Commissioner on all important matters affecting the international and financial obligations and interests of His Britannic Majesty for the whole period of this Treaty.”25 Most revealing of British intentions was the duration of the treaty—twenty years—after which the situation would be reviewed and the treaty either renewed or terminated, according to the views of the “High Contracting Parties.” This was a formula for extended British colonial rule, not Iraqi independence.
The draft treaty faced widespread condemnation in Iraq. Even King Faysal discretely encouraged opposition to the treaty, both because of the limits it imposed on his power as king and to distance himself from British imperial policy. Some ministers resigned in protest. The Council of Ministers, unwilling to bear responsibility for so controversial a document, insisted on convening an elected constituent assembly to ratify the treaty. The British agreed to elections but wanted to ensure that the resulting assembly would endorse their treaty. Nationalist politicians opposed both the treaty and the elections, recognizing that the constituent assembly would serve only to rubber stamp an agreement designed to perpetuate British control.
Inevitably, Faysal’s credibility was compromised by the treaty crisis. Ayatollah al-Khalisi addressed another assembly of the students and teachers of his theological school. “We gave our allegiance to Faysal to be king of Iraq on condition,” the ayatollah intoned, “and he failed to fulfill these conditions. Consequently, neither we nor the Iraqi people owe him any allegiance.” Al-Khalisi threw in his lot with the nationalist opposition and began to issue fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) declaring the treaty unlawful and forbidding all participation in the constituent assembly elections as “tantamount to an act against religion, as a step that assisted non-believers to rule over Muslims.”26 The clerics made common cause with secular nationalists and organized a boycott campaign against the upcoming elections.
In the end, the British had to impose their treaty by force. The British authorities prohibited all demonstrations. Al-Khalisi and other opposition leaders were arrested and exiled. The Royal Air Force was dispatched to bomb tribal insurgents in the Middle Euphrates region who had risen in protest. With the opposition quelled, the authorities proceeded with the elections. Despite the fatwas and the nationalists’ campaigning, the elections did proceed and a constituent assembly was convened in March 1924 to debate and ratify the treaty.
The Constituent Assembly met and debated the terms of the treaty in earnest from March to October 1924. In the end, the treaty was ratified by a slim majority. It remained hugely unpopular with the Iraqi public, though it set in motion a number of important developments: the Assembly approved a constitution for the new state and passed an electoral law that lay foundations for both a constitutional monarchy and a multiparty democracy. However, the means used by the British to get the treaty passed tainted the instruments of constitutional and parliamentary government with imperial associations that would ultimately undermine democracy in Iraq. The new state was not seen by Iraqi nationalists as a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” but as an institution implicating Iraqis in British rule over their country.
If the British hoped things would go smoothly after the passage of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, they were to be sorely disappointed. Indeed, British and American war planners of 2003 would have found many relevant lessons to be learned from British experiences in the 1920s.
Divisions quickly emerged between the different regions and communities of the new Iraqi state, which had been forged from three very different Ottoman provinces. The problem was immediately apparent in the formation of a national army, one of the key institutions of independent sovereign states. King Faysal was surrounded by military men who had served with him in the Arab Revolt and were keen to establish an army in Iraq that would unite Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites through national military service. The project foundered in the face of active opposition from the Shiite and Kurdish communities, however, who objected to conscription as to any government initiative they believed gave disproportionate power to the minority Sunni Arab community.
The Kurds presented a particular challenge to the integrity and identity of the Iraqi state. Unlike the Sunnis and Shiites, the Kurds are not ethnic Arabs and they resented government efforts to cast Iraq as an Arab state. They believed this denied the Kurds their distinct ethnic identity. Some in the Kurdish community did not resist Iraqi claims to Arabness but used this as a pretext to demand greater autonomy in those parts of northern Iraq in which they represented an absolute majority.
At times it seemed that the only thing uniting the people of Iraq was their opposition to the British presence. King Faysal himself despaired of his subjects. Shortly before his death in 1933, the first king of Iraq observed in a confidential memo that “there is still—and I say this with a heart full of sorrow—no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever.”27
For the British, the cost of maintaining order soon began to exceed the benefits of perpetuating the mandate in Iraq. By 1930 the British reassessed their position. They had secured their interests in Mesopotamian oil through the 1928 Red Line Agreement, which awarded Britain a 47.5 percent share in the Turkish (Iraq) Petroleum Company—the French and Americans had only secured 23.75 percent of the shares each. They had established a friendly and dependent government in Iraq, headed by a “reliable” king, to protect British interests. British officials in Iraq increasingly came to the view that they would better assure their strategic interests by treaty than by continued direct control.
In June 1930, the British government concluded a new agreement to replace the controversial Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922. The terms of the new pact stipulated that Britain’s ambassador would enjoy preeminence among foreign representatives in Iraq. The Royal Air Force would retain two air bases in the country, and British troops would be assured transit rights through Iraq. The Iraqi military would be reliant on Britain for its training and provision of arms and ammunition. This still was not full independence, but it was enough to secure the country’s admission to the League of Nations. It also satisfied one of the main demands of Iraqi nationalists, who hoped the treaty would prove a first step toward independence.
Upon ratification of the 1930 Treaty of Preferential Alliance, the British and Iraqis agreed to the termination of the mandate. On October 3, 1932, Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as an independent, sovereign state. Yet it was an ambiguous independence in which British civil and military officials continued to exercise more influence than was compatible with true Iraqi sovereignty. Such informal British controls would undermine the legitimacy of the Hashemite monarchy until its ultimate overthrow in 1958.
Egyptian nationalists looked on Iraq’s accomplishments with great envy. Though the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was not so different in content from Egypt’s 1922 treaty with Britain (which conceded nominal independence to Egypt), the Iraqis had secured Britain’s nomination for admission to that exclusive club of independent states, the League of Nations. This became the benchmark of success by which nationalists in other Arab countries would measure their own accomplishments. As the Arab country with the longest tradition of nationalist activity, Egypt should have led the way toward independence from European colonial rule—or so thought the political elite. In the course of the 1930s, the Wafd, Egypt’s leading nationalist party, came under growing public pressure to secure independence from Britain.
During the interwar years, Egypt achieved the highest degree of multiparty democracy in the modern history of the Arab world. The Constitution of 1923 introduced political pluralism, regular elections to a two-chamber legislature, full male suffrage, and a free press. A number of new parties emerged on the political stage. Elections attracted massive turnout at the polls. Journalists plied their trade with remarkable liberty.
This liberal era is remembered more for its divisive factionalism than as a golden age of Egyptian politics. Three distinct authorities sought preeminence in Egypt: the British, the monarchy, and, through Parliament, the Wafd. The rivalry between these three proved very disruptive to politics in Egypt. In his efforts to protect the monarchy from parliamentary scrutiny, King Fuad (r. 1917–1936) tended to oppose the nationalist Wafd party even more than the British. The Wafd, for their part, alternated between fighting the British for independence and promoting the powers of Parliament over the monarchy. The British alternately worked with the king to undermine the Wafd when they were in power, and with the Parliament to undermine the king when the Wafd was out of power. The political elites were a fractious bunch whose internecine squabbles played into the hands of both the king and the British. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that little progress was made in securing Egypt’s independence from Britain.
Egyptians first went to the polls in 1924. Sa’d Zaghlul (1859–1927), hero of the nationalist movement of 1919, led his Wafd party to a sweeping victory and took 90 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. King Fuad named Zaghlul prime minister and invited him to form a government, which took office in March 1924. Buoyed by the public mandate of his election returns, Zaghlul immediately entered into negotiations with the British to secure Egypt’s complete independence, compromised only by the four “reserved points” of the 1922 treaty: British control over the Suez Canal, the right to base British troops in Egypt, preservation of the foreign legal privileges known as the Capitulations, and British dominance in Sudan.
Sudan was a particular sticking point. The Egyptians had first conquered Sudan during the reign of Muhammad ’Ali in the 1820s. Driven from the territory by the Mahdi’s Revolt (1881–1885), the Egyptians joined forces with the British to reconquer Sudan in the late 1890s. In 1899 Lord Cromer devised a novel form of colonialism called a “condominium,” which allowed Britain to add Sudan to its empire in collaboration with the Egyptians. Since then, both Britain and Egypt claimed Sudan was actually their own. Egyptian nationalists rejected Britain’s claim to absolute discretion over Sudan in the 1922 treaty and demanded preservation of the “unity of the Nile Valley.” This issue, more than any other of the four reserved points, provoked greatest tension between the Egyptians and the British.
Tensions led to violence on November 19, 1924, when a band of Egyptian nationalists shot and killed the governor-general of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Sir Lee Stack, as he drove through downtown Cairo. The stunned British government nonetheless used the assassination to secure their objectives in Sudan. Egypt’s high commissioner, Lord Allenby, presented Prime Minister Zaghlul with a punitive seven-point ultimatum, including changes to the status quo in Sudan. When Zaghlul refused to comply with British demands in Sudan (to withdraw all Egyptian soldiers and to allow Nile irrigation for a British agricultural scheme), Allenby gave orders to the Sudan government to implement Britain’s demands over the Egyptian prime minister’s objections. Zaghlul’s position was untenable, and he tendered his resignation on November 24. King Fuad named a royalist to form the next government and dissolved the Parliament, effectively sidelining the nationalists in the Wafd. As Zaghlul watched the British and the king enhance their powers at the Wafd’s expense, he famously remarked: “The bullets that were fired were not targeted at the chest of Sir Lee Stack; they were targeted at mine.”28 In fact, Zaghlul never did return to power, dying on August 23, 1927, at the age of sixty-eight. Zaghlul would be replaced by lesser men, whose factionalism and in-fighting eroded public confidence in their political leaders.
If the Wafd’s Sa’d Zaghlul was the hero of Egypt’s liberal age, then Ismail Sidqi was certainly its villain. Sidqi had gone to the Paris Peace Conference with the Wafd delegation in 1919, only to fall out with Zaghlul and be expelled from the party on his return to Egypt. He was one of the architects of the 1922 treaty conferring limited independence on Egypt—which Zaghlul had always opposed. The further Sidqi fell from Zaghlul’s graces, the greater he grew in King Fuad’s esteem. By 1930 Sidqi and his monarch were united by a common goal of destroying the Wafd party under its new leader, Mustafa al-Nahhas.
The Wafd swept to power once again in January 1930 after a landslide victory in the 1929 elections in which the nationalist party secured a record 212 of 235 parliamentary seats. The king invited al-Nahhas to form a government. Given his electoral mandate, al-Nahhas entered into a new round of negotiations with British Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson to secure Egypt’s illusive independence. Between March 31 and May 8, the governments of Egypt and Britain engaged in extensive negotiations. The two sides came to a deadlock over Sudan, with Britain insisting on separating discussion of Egypt’s independence and Sudan’s future, and the Egyptians refusing independence exclusive of Sudan. The breakdown in Anglo-Egyptian negotiations provided an opportunity for the Wafd’s enemies—the king and rival parties—to call for a new government. Al-Nahhas tendered his government’s resignation in June 1930. In the summer of 1930 the king and the British were in agreement: the government had to be placed in a “safe pair of hands.” Sidqi was the obvious candidate.
The king’s chamberlain called on Sidqi at his gentleman’s club in Cairo to sound out his willingness to form a minority government. “I am honoured by His Majesty’s confidence in me,” Sidqi replied, “but I wish to inform him, should he decide to appoint me at this critical juncture, that my policies would start from a clean slate and that I would reorganize parliamentary life in accordance with my views on the Constitution and the need for stable government.”29
Sidqi’s response only confirmed the king’s high opinion of the man. Sidqi had already declared his hostility to liberal democracy, denouncing the “parliamentary autocracy which the 1923 Constitution afforded, with the tyranny of the majority over the minority.” He wanted to free government from constitutional bonds and rule by decree in partnership with the king. The king sent his chamberlain to inform Sidqi that he was “very comfortable with his policies” and invited him to form a cabinet.
Taking the helm of government for the first time in June 1930, Sidqi consolidated his grip over government by claiming three cabinet portfolios. In addition to the premiership, he assumed control of the ministries of finance and the interior. Fuad and Sidqi worked together to dissolve the Parliament, postpone elections, and draft a new constitution conferring yet more power on the king. For the next three years, Egypt’s parliamentary democracy was overthrown and the country ruled by royal decree.
Sidqi made no attempt to hide his autocratic politics and his disregard for the democratic process. “It was inevitable that I would suspend the Parliament” at the end of June 1930, Sidqi confided in his memoirs, “in order to proceed to the reorganization that I had come to initiate.” When al-Nahhas and his colleagues called for mass demonstrations protesting the suspension of the Parliament, Sidqi did not hesitate to crush the movement. “I did not wait until this opposition turned to a civil war” before taking action, Sidqi explained. He sent out the army to break up the demonstrations, and violence ensued. Three days after the royal decree that terminated the parliamentary session, twenty-five demonstrators were killed in Alexandria; nearly 400 were wounded. “Unfortunately,” Sidqi continued, with the moustache-twirling panache of a vaudeville villain, “painful events occurred in Cairo, Alexandria and some rural cities. The government had no alternative but to preserve order and prevent the offenders from disturbing public order and breaking the law.”30 The British cautioned both Prime Minister Sidqi and nationalist leader al-Nahhas but did not interfere in a fight that would divert the Egyptians from their pursuit of greater freedom from British rule.
Sidqi justified his political philosophy on grounds that, in a time of economic troubles, leaders could only achieve progress and prosperity through peace and order. The crash of 1929 had ushered in a global depression that had left its mark on the Egyptian economy, and in the face of economic disruption, Sidqi viewed the Wafd and its brand of mass politics as a grave threat to public order. In October 1930, Sidqi introduced a new constitution that expanded the powers of the king at the expense of the Wafd. It reduced the number of deputies in the Parliament from 235 to 150 and gave the king control over the upper chamber by expanding the proportion of appointed senators from 40 to 60 percent, leaving only a minority to be chosen by popular vote. Sidqi’s constitution reduced universal suffrage, replacing the system of direct elections to a more complex two-stage voting process, in which the voting age was increased for the first round and introducing restrictions to the second round of voting based on financial criteria or levels of education. These measures served to take voting power from the masses (on whose support the Wafd relied) and concentrate electoral authority in the propertied elite. The powers of the legislature were reduced, as the length of the parliamentary session was reduced from six to five months, and the king’s powers to defer bills were expanded.
The new constitution was blatantly autocratic and provoked nearly unanimous opposition from politicians across the political spectrum and the general public. When the press criticized Sidqi and the 1930 Constitution, he simply closed the papers down and locked the journalists up. Even those who initially supported Sidqi found their papers closed. The journalists responded by printing underground leaflets that made virulent attacks against the autocratic government and its authoritarian constitution.
Sidqi formed his own party in 1931, when parliamentary elections loomed under the terms of the new constitution. Ever the political loner who had consistently eschewed party affiliation, Sidqi knew that he needed a party behind him to secure a parliamentary majority. He called his new party the People’s Party, an inversion of reality worthy of George Orwell’s 1984. Sidqi attracted ambitious defectors from the Liberal Constitutional Party, and from the palace’s own Unity Party—men of the elite, not of the people. The party’s program gave ample material for satirists in the opposition press, pledging “assistance to the constitutional order,” the “preservation of the people’s sovereignty” and upholding “the rights of the throne” (King Fuad had chosen well).31 The Wafd and the Liberal Constitutional Party both boycotted the elections of May 1931, and Sidqi’s People’s Party achieved an outright majority. His autocratic revolution seemed on the verge of success.
Yet ultimately Sidqi failed. His autocratic reforms provoked opposition from the real people’s party, the Wafd, and the other major political parties. The press, refusing to be silenced, kept up a steady barrage to turn public opinion against Sidqi’s government. Security conditions began to deteriorate as the public grew more outspoken against Sidqi’s government. Sidqi had always justified autocratic rule in terms of providing law and order. Faced with growing disorder, the British began to pressure for a new government to restore public confidence and curb political violence. Sidqi’s revolution had stalled and was now coming undone. In September 1933 the king dismissed his prime minister. Down but not out, Sidqi would remain one of Egypt’s most influential politicians until his death in 1950.
King Fuad made a brief stab at absolute rule. He repealed Sidqi’s 1930 Constitution by royal decree without restoring the earlier 1923 Constitution, and he dissolved the Parliament elected in 1931 without calling for new elections. The king assumed full power over Egypt for a transition period of unspecified duration. Needless to say, these measures were no more successful in restoring public confidence in the Egyptian government, and King Fuad came under pressure from both the British and the Wafd to restore Egypt’s 1923 Constitution and prepare for new elections. On December 12, 1935, King Fuad conceded defeat and decreed the restoration of the original constitution.
The political deadlock between the British, the palace, and the Wafd was finally broken in 1936. In April of that year, King Fuad died and was succeeded by his handsome young son, Faruq. Elections were held in May and returned a Wafd majority. These two developments—the return of the Wafd to power and Faruq’s coronation—were greeted with a great sense of optimism, a sort of Cairo spring. This was matched by a new British openness to renegotiate the terms of its relations with Egypt. The rise of fascism in Europe, and Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, gave new urgency to securing Egyptian consent to Britain’s position. German and Italian propaganda against British colonialism had begun to turn some heads in Egypt. Ultra nationalist new parties like Young Egypt espoused openly fascist ideologies.
To counter these dangers, the British high commissioner, Sir Miles Lampson, opened new negotiations in Cairo in March 1936. A new treaty was concluded between an all-party Egyptian delegation and the British government and signed into law in August 1936. The Treaty of Preferential Alliance expanded Egypt’s sovereignty and independence, though like the Iraqi treaty it gave Britain preferential standing among foreign nations and the right to keep military bases on Egyptian soil. It also left Sudan under British control. The gains were enough to secure Egypt’s admission to the League of Nations in 1937, five years after Iraq’s entry and the only other Arab state to join the international organization. But the compromises made, and the twenty-year duration of the treaty, pushed Egyptian aspirations for complete independence beyond the political horizon.
The experiences of the 1930s left many Egyptians disenchanted with the party politics of liberal democracy. Though the Egyptians rejected Sidqi’s autocracy, they were never satisfied with the results the Wafd obtained. Zaghlul had promised to deliver Egypt from British rule in 1922, and al-Nahhas promised the same in 1936, yet the elusive promise of independence remained a generation away.
The British mandate in Palestine was doomed from the outset. The terms of the Balfour Declaration were written into the preamble of the mandatory instrument issued by the League of Nations to formalize Britain’s position in Palestine. Unlike all of the other postwar mandates, in which a great power was charged with establishing the instruments of self-rule in a newly emerging state, the British in Palestine were required to establish both a viable state from among the indigenous people of the land and a national home for the Jews of the world.
The Balfour Declaration was a formula for communal conflict. Given Palestine’s very limited resources, there simply was no way to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Inevitably the mandate engendered conflict between rival nationalisms—the highly organized Zionist movement, and a new Palestinian nationalism forged by the dual threats of British imperialism and Zionist colonialism. Palestine would prove Britain’s gravest imperial failure in the Middle East, a failure that would condemn the whole of the Middle East to conflict and violence that persist to the present day.
Palestine was a new country in an ancient land, cobbled together from parts of different Ottoman provinces to suit imperial convenience. The Palestine mandate originally spanned the Jordan River and stretched from the Mediterranean to the frontiers of Iraq through vast, inhospitable desert territory. In 1923 the lands to the east of the Jordan were formally detached from the Palestine mandate to form a separate state of Transjordan under Amir Abdullah’s rule. The British also ceded a part of the Golan Heights to the French mandate in Syria in 1923, by which point Palestine was a country smaller than Belgium, roughly the size of the state of Maryland.
The population of Palestine was already quite diverse in 1923. Palestine was a land holy to Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and for centuries had attracted pilgrims from around the world. Starting in 1882 a new wave of visitors—settlers rather than pilgrims—began to arrive. Pushed by the pogroms of Tsar Alexander III’s Russia and pulled by the appeal of a powerful new ideology, Zionism, thousands of Eastern European and Russian Jews sought refuge in Palestine. They entered a society that had an 85 percent Muslim majority, a Christian minority representing some 9 percent of the population, and an indigenous Jewish community. The original Yishuv (as the Jewish community of Palestine was known) did not exceed 3 percent of the population of Palestine in 1882 and lived in the four towns of rabbinical learning: Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberias, and Safad.32
Two distinct waves of Zionist settlers reached Palestine before the First World War. The First Aliya, or wave of Jewish immigrants, entered Palestine between 1882–1903 and doubled the size of the Yishuv from 24,000 to 50,000. The Jewish community expanded yet more rapidly under the Second Aliya (1904–1914), and by 1914 the total Jewish population of Palestine was estimated to have reached 85,000.33
The Arab population of Palestine had watched the expansion of Jewish immigration after 1882 with mounting concern. The Arab press began to condemn Zionism during the 1890s, and leading Arab intellectuals openly criticized the movement in the early years of the twentieth century. Legislation was drafted in 1909 to stop Jewish settlement in Palestine, and Zionist activity was twice debated in the Ottoman Parliament in 1911, though no bills ultimately were passed.34
These concerns intensified after support for Zionism became official British policy with the 1917 Balfour Declaration. The King-Crane Commission, which traveled the length and breadth of Palestine in June 1919, was overwhelmed by petitions opposed to Zionism. “The anti-Zionist note was especially strong in Palestine,” explained the commissioners in their report, “where 222 (85.3 per cent) of the 260 petitions declared against the Zionist program. This is the largest percentage in the district for any one point.”
The message from Palestine was clear: the indigenous Arab people, who had opposed Zionist immigration for years, did not accept Britain’s commitment to build a Jewish national home in their land. Yet the message seemed to fall on deaf ears, as Britain and the international community determined Palestine’s future without consultation or the consent of its people. Where peaceful means failed, desperate people soon turned to violence.
Jewish immigration and land purchase provoked growing tension in Palestine from the beginning of the mandate. Opposed to British rule and to the prospect of a Jewish national home in their midst, the Arab population viewed the expansion of the Jewish community as a direct threat to their political aspirations. Moreover, Jewish land purchase inevitably led to Arab farmers being displaced from lands they had tilled as sharecroppers, often for generations.
Between 1919 and 1921, Jewish immigration to Palestine accelerated dramatically, as over 18,500 Zionist immigrants moved to the country. Major riots broke out in Jerusalem in 1920 and in Jaffa in 1921, which left 95 Jews and 64 Arabs dead and hundreds wounded. Some 70,000 Zionist immigrants reached Palestine between 1922 and 1929. In the same period, the Jewish National Fund bought 240,000 acres of land in the Jezreel Valley in northern Palestine. The combination of high immigration and extensive land purchase was blamed for the next round of violence, which erupted in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safad, and Jaffa in 1929, claiming 133 Jewish and 116 Arab lives.35
After each instance of violence, British investigations led to new policies designed to assuage the fears of the Palestinian majority. In July 1922, following the first wave of riots, Winston Churchill issued a White Paper that sought to calm Arab fears that Palestine would become “as Jewish as England is English.” He claimed that the terms of the Balfour Declaration did not “contemplate that Palestine as a whole should be converted into a Jewish National Home, but that such a Home should be founded in Palestine.”36Similarly, the gravity of the 1929 riots led to a number of new reports and recommendations. The 1930 Shaw Report identified Jewish immigration and land purchase as the primary cause of Palestinian unrest and called for limits on Zionist immigration to prevent future problems. This was followed in October 1930 by the Passfield White Paper, which called for restrictions on Jewish land purchase and immigration.
Following the publication of each British White Paper sympathetic to Palestinian Arab concerns, the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency of Palestine worked the halls of power in London and Jerusalem to overturn policies deemed inimical to their aims. By bringing great pressure to bear on Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s minority government, the Zionists succeeded in getting MacDonald to repudiate the Passfield White Paper. Chaim Weitzman and his advisors more or less wrote the letter for MacDonald, which he signed on February 13, 1931. In his letter, MacDonald confirmed that the British government “did not prescribe and [does] not contemplate any stoppage or prohibition of Jewish immigration,” nor would it prevent Jews from acquiring more land in Palestine. Arab expectations for an improvement in their situation were dashed by the MacDonald letter, which they called “the Black Letter” (in contrast to the White Paper).
A vicious cycle then dragged the Palestine mandate into chronic violence: ever-increasing Zionist immigration and land purchase provoked communal conflict, which in turn led to British attempts to introduce limits on the Jewish national home, and Zionist politicking to reverse those limits. As long as this process persisted, no progress was possible in establishing institutions of government or self-rule. The Palestinians did not wish to legitimate the mandate and its commitment to create a Jewish national home; the British did not wish to confer proportional representation, let alone self-rule, on the Palestinian majority who were hostile to the aims of the mandate; and the Zionists cooperated with every aspect of the mandate that advanced their national aims. With each round of violence, the difficulties grew more profound.
The problems of the Arab community of Palestine were compounded by divisions within their own leadership. The two leading families of Jerusalem—the Husaynis and Nashashibis—vied for ascendancy over Arab politics in Palestine. The British played upon the divisions between the two families from the outset. In 1920 the notables of Palestine created an Arab Executive to represent their demands to the British authorities, headed by Musa Kazim al-Husayni. A second representative body, the Supreme Muslim Council, was headed by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the grand mufti of Jerusalem. The Nashashibis boycotted these Husayni-dominated bodies and tried to work directly with the British. With their leadership divided, the Palestinians were disadvantaged in their relations with both the British and the Zionists.
By 1929 the shortcomings of the Palestinian nationalist leadership encouraged a host of new actors to take to the national stage. As in Egypt in 1919, nationalism provided a window of opportunity for the emergence of women into public life for the first time. Elite women, inspired by Huda Sha’rawi and the Wafdist Women’s Association, responded to the 1929 riots by convening the First Arab Women’s Congress in Jerusalem in October 1929. Two hundred women attended the congress from the Palestinian Muslim and Christian communities. They passed three resolutions: a call for the abrogation of the Balfour Declaration, an assertion of Palestine’s right to a national government with representation for all communities in proportion to their numbers, and the development of Palestinian industries. “The Congress urges every Arab to buy nothing from the Jews but land, and to sell them everything but land.”37
The delegates then began to break with tradition. Contrary to Palestinian custom, which frowned on women meeting with men in public, they decided to call on the British high commissioner, Sir John Chancellor, to present him with their resolutions. Chancellor received them and promised to communicate their message to London, to be shared with the government’s Commission of Enquiry into the troubles in Palestine. After their meeting with Chancellor, the delegation returned to the Women’s Congress, which was still in session, and held a public demonstration, further departing from accepted standards of female decorum. The demonstration turned into a 120-car parade starting at Damascus Gate and passing through the main streets of Jerusalem to distribute their resolutions to the foreign consulates in the city.
Following the congress, the delegates created an Arab Women’s Association with both a feminist and a nationalist agenda: “to assist the Arab woman in her endeavours to improve her standing, to help the poor and distressed, and to encourage and promote Arab national enterprises.” The society raised money to help the families of Palestinians who were imprisoned or executed for anti-British or anti-Zionist attacks. They sent repeated petitions and memoranda to the high commissioner seeking clemency for political prisoners, protesting Jewish arms purchases, and condemning British failures to reach a political agreement with the men of the Arab Executive—to whom they were bound by marriage and family ties.
The Arab Women’s Association was a strange hybrid of the politics of Palestinian nationalism and the upper-middle-class culture of British county ladies. They addressed each other by their husbands’ names—Madame Kazem Pasha al-Husayni, Madame Awni Abd al-Hadi—and met to strategize over tea. Yet, as in Egypt in 1919, women’s participation in the national movement was of powerful symbolic value. These well-educated and eloquent women added a powerful voice to the nascent Palestinian nationalist movement. Take, for example, the speech of Madame Awni Abd al-Hadi berating Lord Allenby in the association’s second public demonstration in 1933: “The Arab women have seen the extent to which the British have violated their pledges, divided their country and enforced a policy on the people during the last fifteen years, which will inevitably result in the annihilation of the Arabs and in their supplantation by the Jews through the admission of immigrants from all parts of the world.”38 Her message was clear: the whole of the Palestinian nation, not just its men, was holding Britain accountable for the policies of the mandate.
The Arab elites of Palestine were eloquent, but talk was cheap. For all their fiery nationalist rhetoric and repeated negotiations with the British authorities, Zionist immigration continued apace, and the British showed no signs of granting independence to the Palestinian Arabs. Following the Passfield White Paper, between 1929 and 1931 Zionist immigration had slowed to 5,000–6,000 each year. However, the MacDonald letter of 1931 reversed British policy, and with the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, a massive new influx of Jewish immigrants began to flood into Palestine. In 1932 nearly 10,000 Jewish immigrants entered Palestine, in 1933 over 30,000, in 1934 over 42,000. The peak of immigration came in 1935, when nearly 62,000 Jews entered the country.
Between 1922 and 1935 the Jewish population of Palestine had increased from 9 percent to nearly 27 percent of the total population.39 Jewish land purchases had begun to displace significant numbers of Palestinian agricultural workers—already a concern addressed in the Passfield White Paper, when the Jewish population of Palestine was half its 1935 size. The failings of the Palestinian leadership, composed exclusively of urban elites, were falling squarely on the shoulders of the rural poor.
In 1935 one man decided to channel the anger of the rural communities into armed rebellion. In the process, he provided the spark that revealed Palestine for the powder keg it had become.
Izz al-Din al-Qassam, a native of Syria, had fled the French mandate in the 1920s to take refuge in Palestine. He was a Muslim cleric who had become a preacher in the popular Istiqlal [“independence”] mosque in the northern port of Haifa. He also headed the Young Men’s Muslim Association, a nationalist and anti-Zionist youth group. Shayhk al-Qassam used the pulpit to rouse opposition to both the British and Zionism. His popularity quickly grew among those poorer Palestinians most directly affected by Jewish immigration, who looked to al-Qassam rather than the fractious and ineffectual urban notables for leadership.
In the aftermath of the 1931 MacDonald Black Letter, al-Qassam began to promote the idea of an armed struggle against the British and the Zionists. His appeal met with an enthusiastic response from the congregants at his mosque. A number of men volunteered to fight, and others contributed funds for guns and ammunition. Then, without warning, al-Qassam suddenly disappeared in the autumn of 1935. His supporters were concerned. Some feared he had come to grief; others suspected him of running off with their money. In November 1935, a journalist named Akram Zuaytir was discussing al-Qassam’s mysterious disappearance with a mason who was friends with the shaykh. Zuaytir said it was shameful for people to make such accusations against al-Qassam. “I agree, brother,” the builder replied, “but why then has he gone into hiding like this?”40
Their conversation was interrupted when a man ran up to tell them that there had been a major engagement between an Arab gang and British forces in the hills above Jenin. The bodies of the rebels and the policemen they had killed were being taken to the British fort in Jenin. The young Zuaytir recognized a scoop and called the head of the Arab press bureau in Jerusalem to alert him. The bureau chief set out immediately for Jenin, leaving Zuaytir to watch over the office and to notify the Palestinian newspapers that a big story was brewing.
The shocked bureau chief returned from Jenin three hours later, his speech reduced to headlines. “Important events,” he gasped breathlessly. “Very dangerous news. Shaykh Izz al-Din al-Qassam and four of his brethren in the gang were martyred.” In the Jenin police station, the bureau chief had interviewed a wounded survivor of al-Qassam’s band. Though the man was in great pain, he managed to give a concise account of al-Qassam’s movement.
Al-Qassam had created his armed band in 1933, the wounded man explained. He only recruited devout Muslims prepared to die for their country. They collected funds to buy rifles and ammunition and began to prepare for an armed struggle “to kill the English and the Jews because they were occupying our nation.” In October 1935, al-Qassam and his men left Haifa in secret—prompting the rumors Zuaytir and the mason had been discussing earlier in the day.
Al-Qassam’s armed band ran into a police patrol in the plain of Baysan and killed a Jewish sergeant. The British scoured the hills and surprised one of al-Qassam’s men on the roads between Nablus and Jenin. They exchanged fire, and the Arab insurgent was killed. “We learned of his martyrdom,” the survivor of al-Qassam’s band explained, “and decided to attack the police the following morning.” The insurgents found themselves outnumbered by a joint force of British police and soldiers and took refuge in the caves near the village of Ya’bad, close to Jenin. While a Royal Air Force plane circled overhead, the British engaged the Arabs in a two-hour gunfight in which Izz al-Din al-Qassam and three other men were killed. Four survivors were taken prisoner. One British soldier was killed and two others wounded.
Though he was shocked by these events, Zuaytir’s first thoughts were of the funeral. In accordance with Islamic practice, al-Qassam and his men would normally be buried before sundown. However, the bodies of the “martyrs” were still in police custody. Zuaytir called one of his colleagues in Haifa to enter into negotiations with the British for the bodies to be delivered to their families, who would need to make arrangements for their funerals. The British agreed to cooperate, on two conditions: the funeral was to be held at ten o’clock the following morning, and the funeral cortege had to proceed directly from al-Qassam’s home eastward to the cemetery, without entering Haifa’s city center. The British were all too aware of the volatility of the situation and wanted to avoid any outbreak of violence. Zuaytir, in contrast, wanted to ensure that the funeral would be a political event, to galvanize Palestinian opposition to the mandate. At the end of the day, he filed an article in an Islamic newspaper, al-Jami’a al-Islamiyya (“Islamic Society”), which called on all Palestinians to converge on Haifa to march in the funeral procession. He posted the challenge directly to the nationalist leadership: “Will the leaders of Palestine march with its young men in the cortege of a great religious scholar, accompanied by the faithful?”41
Zuaytir awoke early the next morning to check the coverage in the Arabic press and to prepare for his trip to Haifa. “When I read the newspapers and the descriptions of the battle, and saw my call to march in the funeral procession, I thought today would be a day of great historic importance in Haifa,” he wrote. “It is the martyrs’ day.” He was right—thousands had flocked to Haifa to share in a day of national mourning. Contrary to British wishes, the funeral was held in the central mosque of Haifa and the funeral procession passed through the city center. “With great effort the martyrs were carried through the crowd from the mosque to the great square outside. Here the pen falters in describing the scene. Thousands accompanied the procession, with the bodies carried at shoulder height, shouting Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar [God is great], while the women ululated from the roof tops and the windows.” The mourners sung fiery songs of resistance. “Then, while the bodies were raised, a voice cried out: Revenge! Revenge! The thousands responded with one voice like a roar of thunder: Revenge! Revenge!”
The enraged crowd stormed the Haifa police station, stoning the building and destroying police cars parked outside. They set upon every British soldier and policeman they found along the way, though the British withdrew to avoid casualties on either side. The crowd also attacked the railway station as another symbol of hated British rule.
The whole of the procession took three and one-half hours, at which point al-Qassam and his men were laid to rest. “Imagine the impact on the masses who witnessed the heroic martyrs buried in their blood-stained clothes of jihad,” Zuaytir reflected. He also noted how all the towns and cities of northern Palestine were represented at the funeral—Acre, Jenin, Baysan, Tulkarm, Nablus, Haifa—“but I did not see the heads of the [nationalist] parties, for which they must be reviled.”42
The short-lived revolt of Shaykh ’Izz al-Din al-Qassam changed Palestinian politics forever. The urban notables who had led the nationalist movement had lost the confidence of the population at large. They had negotiated with the British for fifteen years and had nothing to show for their efforts. The Palestinians were no closer to independence or self-rule, the British were still firmly in control, and the Jewish population was growing at a rate that would soon bring them to parity with the Arab population. The Palestinians wanted men of action who would confront the British and Zionist threats directly. The result was three years of revolt that devastated the towns and countryside of Palestine.
In the aftermath of the Qassam revolt, the heads of the Palestinian political parties attempted to reassert their leadership over the nationalist movement. In April 1936 the leading parties united in a new organization called the Arab Higher Committee. They called for a general strike by all Arab workers and government employees, as well as a complete boycott on all economic exchanges with the Yishuv. The general strike was accompanied by violent attacks on British forces and Jewish settlers.
The nationalist leaders’ strategy backfired badly. The Palestinian Arab economy suffered far worse than the Yishuv as a result of the boycott. Britain flooded the country with 20,000 new troops to put down the rebellion. Britain also called on its allies in neighboring Arab states to persuade the Palestinian leadership to call off the general strike. On October 9, 1936, the kings of Saudi Arabia and Iraq joined the rulers of Transjordan and Yemen in a joint declaration calling on “our sons the Arabs of Palestine” to “resolve for peace in order to save further shedding of blood. In doing this,” the monarchs claimed implausibly, “we rely on the good intentions of your friend Great Britain, who has declared that she will do justice.”43
When the Arab Higher Committee responded to the kings’ declaration and called for an end to the strike, the Palestinians felt betrayed by their own leaders and their Arab brethren alike. Their views were captured by the Palestinian nationalist poet Abu Salman, whose acerbic verses accused both the Palestinian leaders and British-backed Arab monarchs of selling out the Arab movement:
You who cherish the homeland
Revolt against the outright oppression
Liberate the homeland from the kings
Liberate it from the puppets
I thought we had kings who could lead the men behind them44
Abu Salman spoke for the disenchanted Palestinian masses when he asserted that the liberation of Palestine would come from its people, not its leaders.
In the aftermath of the general strike the British responded once again with a commission of enquiry. The report of the Peel Commission, published July 7, 1937, sent shock waves through Palestine. For the first time, the British acknowledged that the troubles in Palestine were the product of rival and incompatible national movements. “An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country,” the report acknowledged. “About 1,000,000 Arabs are in strife, open or latent, with some 400,000 Jews. There is no common ground between them.”
The solution proposed by the Peel Commission was partition. The Jews were to gain statehood in 20 percent of the territory of Palestine, including most of the coastline and some of the country’s most fertile agricultural land, in the Jezreel Valley and the Galilee. The Arabs were allotted the poorest lands of Palestine, including the Negev Desert and the Arava Valley, as well as the hill country of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The population of Palestine did not correspond to the geography of partition. This was particularly problematic as major Arab towns and cities were included in the proposed Jewish state. To iron out such anomalies, the Peel Commission held out the possibility of “population transfers” to remove Arabs from territories allocated to the Jewish state—something that in the later twentieth century would come to be called ethnic cleansing. Britain’s recommendation of forced transfer won the chairman of the Jewish Agency, David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), over to the partition plan. “This will give us something we never had, even when we were under our own authority” in antiquity, he enthused—namely, a “really Jewish” state with a homogenously Jewish population.45
To compound Arab grievances, the partition plan did not envisage an independent Palestinian state but called for the Arab territories to be appended to Transjordan, under Amir Abdullah’s rule. The people of Palestine had grown deeply distrustful of Abdullah, seeing him as a British agent who was covetous of their lands. For the Palestinians, the Peel Commission’s recommendations represented the worst possible outcome for their national struggle. Far from securing their rights to self-rule, their population was to be dispersed and ruled by hostile foreigners—the Zionists and Amir Abdullah.
The Jewish Agency accepted the terms, Amir Abdullah agreed with the Peel Commission, and the Palestinians went to war against both the British and the Yishuv.
The second phase of the Palestinian Arab Revolt lasted two years, from the autumn of 1937 through 1939. On September 26, 1937, Palestinian extremists murdered the district commissioner in Galilee, L. Y. Andrews. The British arrested 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders, deported many to the Seychelles, and declared the Arab Higher Committee illegal. Without central leadership, the revolt degenerated into an uncoordinated insurgency that ravaged the Palestinian countryside. The insurgents attacked British police and army patrols and Jewish settlements, assassinated British and Jewish officials, and killed Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the occupation authorities. They sabotaged railways, communications, and the oil pipelines that crossed through Palestine. Villagers found themselves caught between the insurgents, who demanded their support, and the British, who punished all those suspected of aiding the insurgents. The effects on the Palestinians were devastating.
Every Arab attack against the British and the Yishuv brought massive reprisals. The British, determined to suppress the revolt militarily, dispatched 25,000 soldiers and policemen to Palestine—the largest deployment of British forces abroad since the end of the First World War. They established military courts, operating under “emergency regulations” that gave the mandate the legal trappings of a military dictatorship. The British destroyed the houses of all persons involved in attacks, as well as all persons known or suspected of having aided insurgents, under the legal authority of the emergency regulations. An estimated 2,000 houses were destroyed between 1936 and 1940. Combatants and innocent civilians alike were interned in concentration camps—by 1939, over 9,000 Palestinians were held in overcrowded facilities. Suspects were subjected to violent interrogation, ranging from humiliation to torture. Younger offenders, of between seven and sixteen years, were flogged. Over 100 Arabs were sentenced to death in 1938 and 1939, and more than thirty were actually executed. Palestinians were used as human shields to prevent insurgents from placing land mines on roads used by British forces.46
The use of overwhelming force and collective punishments by the British degenerated into abuses and atrocities that would forever stain the mandate in the memory of the Palestinians. The most heinous atrocities came in retaliation for the killing of British troops by insurgents. In one well-documented case, British soldiers took revenge for comrades killed by a land mine in September 1938 by loading more than twenty men from the village of al-Bassa into a bus and forcing them at gun point to drive over a massive land mine the British themselves had buried in the middle of the village access road. All of the occupants were killed by the explosion, their maimed bodies photographed by a British serviceman before the villagers were forced to bury their men’s remains in a mass grave.47
The Palestinian Arabs had been thoroughly defeated and by 1939 had no fight left in them. Some 5,000 men had been killed and 10,000 others wounded—in all, over 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled. However, the British could hardly claim victory. They could not sustain the cost of suppressing the revolt, and they could not impose their policies on the Palestinian Arabs. With war looming in Europe, Whitehall could no longer afford to deploy so many troops to suppress a colonial war. To restore peace to their troubled Palestine mandate, the British shelved the Peel Commission’s partition plan of 1937. Once again, a royal commission was convened to reexamine the situation in Palestine, and once again, the commission published a White Paper that sought to address Palestinian Arab grievances.
The 1939 White Paper was the best deal Britain ever offered the Palestinian Arabs. The new policy capped Jewish immigration at 15,000 each year for five years, or 75,000 total. This would raise the population of the Yishuv to 35 percent of the total population of Palestine—a minority large enough to look after itself, but not so large as to take control of the country as a whole. There would be no further Jewish immigration without the consent of the Arab majority—which all parties acknowledged was unlikely to be forthcoming. Jewish land purchase was to be banned or severely restricted, depending on the region. Finally, Palestine would gain its independence in ten years under joint Arab and Jewish government “in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded.”48
The 1939 White Paper was unsatisfactory to both Arabs and Jews in Palestine. The Arab community rejected the terms because it allowed Jewish immigration to continue, if at a reduced rate, and because it preserved the political status quo and delayed independence by a further ten years. The Yishuv rejected the terms because it closed Palestine to Jewish immigration just as Nazi atrocities against Jews were escalating. (In November 1938, Nazi gangs had terrorized German Jewish citizens in Kristellnacht, or the “night of broken glass,” Europe’s worst pogrom to date.) The White Paper also ruled out the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, relegating the Yishuv to a minority status in a future Palestinian Arab state.
The leadership of the Yishuv itself was divided by the 1939 White Paper. David Ben-Gurion made clear his opposition to the White Paper from the outset. However, he identified Nazi Germany as the greater threat to the welfare of the Jewish people and famously vowed to fight on Britain’s side against Nazism as though there were no White Paper. The extremists in the Zionist movement—the Irgun and the Stern Gang—responded to the White Paper by declaring Britain the enemy. They fought against the British presence in Palestine as an illegitimate imperial state denying independence to the Jewish people, and they turned to terror tactics to achieve a Jewish state in Palestine. By the end of the Second World War, when Nazism had been eradicated, Britain would find itself combating a Jewish revolt of far greater magnitude than the Arabs had ever mounted against British rule.
At the end of the First World War, Britain’s mastery over the Middle East was unrivaled. Its troops occupied the Arab world from Egypt to Iraq, and its control over the Persian Gulf was unassailable. Although few in the Arab world had wanted the British to rule over them, most viewed their colonial overlord with respect, however grudging. The British were efficient, inscrutable, orderly, technologically advanced, and militarily strong. Britain was truly great, a colossus that towered over its colonial possessions.
Two decades of colonial rule revealed the colossus to have clay feet. Across the region the British faced a gamut of opposition, from moderate nationalist politics to radical armed insurgency. In Iraq, Palestine, and Egypt, the British were forced to negotiate and renegotiate the terms of their unwelcome presence. Each British concession to Arab opposition, every reversal of policy, revealed the fallibility of the imperial power.
It was the rising threat of fascism in Europe, however, that turned Britain’s Middle Eastern possessions into the vulnerable underbelly of the British Empire. At times, it looked as though the Arab colonies might slip from Britain’s control. British actions in Iraq and Egypt during the Second World War demonstrated the weakness of their position in a way that presaged the end of Britain’s dominion in the Middle East.
In Iraq, the British faced a pro-Axis coup d’état on April 1, 1941. Iraq was then ruled by an unpopular regent, Prince Abd al-Illah (r. 1939–1953), who ruled on behalf of the child King Faysal II (r. 1953–1958). When Abd al-Illah backed British calls for the resignation of the popular prime minister, Rashid Ali al-Kaylani, on grounds of his pro-Axis leanings, key Iraqi officers put their support behind the prime minister. The top military officers believed Germany and Italy would win the war and that Iraq’s interests lay in fostering good relations with the Axis. The regent, fearful of a military coup, fled Iraq for Transjordan, leaving Rashid Ali and the Iraqi military in control.
Rashid Ali’s continued exercise of political authority in the regent’s absence was deemed by Britain to constitute a coup. In spite of Rashid Ali’s every effort to demonstrate to the British that no fundamental change had occurred, the nationalist tone of his new cabinet (which included Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the grand mufti exiled for his extreme nationalist views, who was a close advisor to Rashid Ali) served only to exacerbate Britain’s fears. Invoking the terms of the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, the British requested permission to land troops in Iraq. Rashid Ali and the nationalist officers demurred, as they mistrusted British intentions. Undaunted, the British began landing troops without official sanction. The Iraqis threatened to fire on unauthorized British aircraft, which the British warned would be grounds for war. Under the circumstances, neither side could afford to back down.
Britain and Iraq went to war in May 1941. Fighting began outside the British base at Habbaniyya and lasted several days until the Iraqi forces fell back on Falluja, where they regrouped to defend Baghdad. Fresh British troops were sent from India and Transjordan. Rashid Ali turned to Germany and Italy to request assistance against the British. The Axis powers managed to send thirty aircraft and some small arms but, under the time constraints, were unable to intervene more directly. As British forces closed in on Baghdad, Rashid Ali and his political allies, including Hajj Amin al-Husayni, fled the country. They left the mayor of Baghdad to negotiate an armistice with the British, and the country as a whole in a state of chaos.
It was the Jewish community of Baghdad that fell victim to the chaos after the fall of Rashid Ali’s government in 1941. Anti-British sentiment combined with hostility to the Zionist project in Palestine and German notions of anti-Semitism to produce a pogrom unprecedented in Arab history, known in Arabic as the Farhud. The Jewish community of Baghdad was large and highly assimilated into all levels of society—from the elites to the bazaars to the music halls, in which many of Iraq’s most celebrated performers were Jewish. Yet all of this was forgotten in two days of communal violence and bloodshed that claimed nearly 200 lives and left Jewish shops and houses robbed and gutted, before the British authorities decided to enter the city and restore order.
The fall of Rashid Ali’s government led to the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq. The regent, Abd al-Illah, and those Iraqi politicians most sympathetic to the British were returned to power by their former colonial master. Iraqi nationalists were outraged. They argued that Rashid Ali enjoyed widespread support among the Iraqi people. Clearly the British would only allow the Iraqis a leadership that met with London’s approval. Coming only nine years after Iraq had achieved its nominal independence, this intervention served to discredit both Great Britain and the Hashemite monarchy in the Iraqi people’s eyes.
Britain, however, was the ultimate loser in Iraq. The mandate, which had once been a success story, was now left with a shaken monarchy, a dangerous military, and a population so hostile to Britain’s role in the Middle East that they preferred to throw their lot in with Britain’s Axis enemies.
The Axis had its supporters in Egypt as well. Egyptian nationalists were not satisfied with the partial independence achieved in the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty. Britain continued to exercise disproportionate control over Egypt’s affairs and full control over Sudan. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Egypt was flooded with British troops, and the Egyptian government seemed more subordinate to Britain since independence than it had been before. This situation was intolerable to a new generation of Egyptian nationalists whose enmity for Britain made them look with favor on Britain’s Axis enemies.
The Italians and the Germans played on nationalist sentiment to isolate the British in Egypt. The Italians launched a powerful new radio station to carry their propaganda to Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean. Radio Bari trumpeted the accomplishments of the fascist government of Benito Mussolini. The combination of extreme nationalism, strong leadership, and the military might of fascism appealed to Egyptian nationalists far more than the petty squabbles of the multiparty democracy that Britain had imposed on their country. With Germany and Italy at war with Britain, many in Egypt hoped to see the Axis powers defeat the British and force them from Egypt once and for all.
With the launch of the North African campaign in 1940, some Egyptian nationalists believed the moment of deliverance was at hand. Italian forces crossed from Libya to attack British positions in Egypt. German forces joined the Italians in North Africa with the specially trained Afrika Korps, commanded by the brilliant field marshal Erwin Rommel. By the winter of 1942, Axis forces posed a real threat to Britain’s position in Egypt. Some Egyptian political leaders, including even King Faruq himself, seemed quite receptive to the idea of Germany driving the British out of Egypt for them.
British mistrust of Egyptian prime minister Ali Mahir’s fascist leanings led them to demand his resignation in June 1940. This sort of intervention revealed Britain’s disregard for Egypt’s sovereignty and independence and further soured Anglo-Egyptian relations. As German and Italian forces gained the upper hand in the battlefields of North Africa, the British sought to crush support for the Axis within Egypt’s political circles. Ironically, the only Egyptian political party with reliable antifascist credentials was the nationalist Wafd party. On February 4, 1942, the British high commissioner Sir Miles Lampson presented King Faruq with an ultimatum either to name Mustafa Nahhas to form an entirely Wafdist government or to abdicate his throne. To back up his ultimatum, Lampson deployed British tanks around Faruq’s Abdin Palace in central Cairo.
The Abdin Palace ultimatum shattered twenty years of Anglo-Egyptian politics by compromising the three pillars of the system: the monarchy, the Wafd, and the British themselves. King Faruq had betrayed his country by succumbing to British threats and allowing a foreign power to impose a government upon him. Many nationalists believe their king should have stood up to the British, even at the risk of death. As for the Wafd, the party that had won the support of the Egyptian people to struggle against imperialism had agreed to come to power by the bayonets of the British. Yet it was the hysteria behind the ultimatum that revealed how weak and threatened the British were in the face of Axis advances in the Western Desert. The British were on the defensive against the Axis and Egyptian nationalism alike, and had shown their fallibility. The three-way power struggle between the British, the palace, and the Wafd collapsed in February 1942. All three parties would be swept away a decade later in the revolutionary ferment of the 1950s.
The British entered the Middle East with the intention of integrating the Arab world into an empire they thought would last forever. They encountered stiff opposition from the outset—in Egypt, Iraq, and Palestine in particular. As nationalist opposition mounted and the cost of formal empire escalated, Britain tried to modify the terms of empire by conceding nominal independence and securing its strategic interests by treaty. Yet even this concession to their nationalist opponents failed to reconcile the Arabs to Britain’s position in the Middle East. By the Second World War, internal opposition left Britain highly vulnerable in its Arab possessions. Italy and Germany were quick to exploit Britain’s weakness and played on Arab national aspirations to the Axis powers’ advantage. As the Arab world slipped from Britain’s control, the British Empire in the Middle East proved more of a liability than an asset.
The only possible consolation for the British was that their imperial rival France had proven no more successful in its Arab possessions.