Suez 1956, page 6
With a loss of 1,300 men, the Turks retreated across the desert. This disaster for the Axis powers was compounded by the failure of the Egyptians to rise up in support of their Islamic brothers. But given the strength of the British forces in Egypt – 70,000 by February 1915 – such a noble act of self-sacrifice was a lot to ask. That the Egyptian nationalists were capable of action when conditions were favourable was to be proved all too conspicuously four years later.
Egypt saw little action for the rest of the war, though she did play a critical role in the Allied war effort – as a source of recruits and a military depot, with Cairo as a leave and convalescent centre. This third activity came into prominence after 1916, when the war in the east took on a fresh urgency. Up to then, fighting strength had been concentrated on the Western Front. To keep Turkey busy, in the Arabian desert, generous subsidies were paid to tribal leaders to persuade them to compromise their allegiance to the sultan.
Abd-al-Aziz ibn Saud, who controlled most of eastern Arabia (now part of Saudi Arabia), agreed to stay out of the war and let the British handle his foreign relations. A more ambitious arrangement was reached with the Hashemite leader, Hussein ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca, and as such custodian of the holy places, who was encouraged to believe that once free from Ottoman rule, he and his family could carve out territories to call their own. On this understanding, Hussein proclaimed open rebellion, staging guerrilla attacks on Turkish forces led by his son Faisal. Much of their success was owed to the inspired leadership of Faisal’s chief of-staff, Captain T. E. Lawrence, soon to be better known as Lawrence of Arabia, whose devotion to the Arab cause was imbued with a romanticism that was at odds with military convention.
Paradoxically, it was a commanding officer reputed to be of a distinctly traditional mindset who recognised Lawrence’s genius. In fact, General Sir Edmund Allenby was blessed with great imagination but managed to keep it hidden under a veneer of rule-book orthodoxy. Transferred from the Western Front, where the two sides were log-jammed in their trenches, Allenby was under orders to break the impasse by gingering up the war in the east. Lawrence would help him in his mission, of that he was certain. The maverick was paid a respect by Allenby that other senior officers found hard to credit. Why, the man did not even wear the king’s uniform, preferring to doll himself up in Arab costume.
As Faisal, with Lawrence by his side, attacked Turkish supply lines, Allenby led a rejuvenated army to capture Jerusalem, four centuries almost to the year after the Turks had gained possession. Allenby’s appreciation of Arab sensitivities was made plain when he rejected a ceremonial entry to the city on a white charger. Instead, he came on foot and left on foot and throughout the solemnities no Allied flag was flown.3 He went on to break through German and Turkish lines to take Damascus. What is now Syria and Palestine were in Allied hands.
The moment had come to live up to promises, however vague, of Arab self-government. There was encouragement from the USA, where President Wilson elaborated his Fourteen Points specifying that the non-Turkish nations in the Ottoman Empire should be given ‘an absolute unmolested opportunity of development’. America’s decisive role in the defeat of Germany ensured that the American concept of self-determination, precluding any form of colonial dominance, was a premier theme at the Versailles Peace Conference. For Wilson it was all quite simple and straightforward. ‘On the one hand’, he said,
stand the peoples of the world – not only the peoples actually engaged, but many others who suffer under mastery, but cannot act; peoples of many races and in every part of the world . . . Opposed to them, masters of many armies, stand an isolated, friendless group of governments who speak no common purpose but only selfish ambitions of their own which can profit but themselves . . .; governments clothed with the strange trappings and the primitive authority of an age that is altogether alien and hostile to our own.
‘There can be’, he concluded, ‘but one issue. The settlement must be final. There can be no compromise. No halfway decision would be tolerable. No halfway decision is conceivable.’
But transposing the American ideal to a European, let alone an Arab, setting was beset by complications. For one thing, there was no tradition of democracy in the Arab provinces or, indeed, anywhere loyal to Islam, which taught unqualified obedience to a single political and religious authority. Self-government in the Wilsonian sense was simply not a practical proposition. If power was to be handed over it had to go to Arab leaders who, by title or military powers, were able to command broad allegiance. How they treated their subjects was unlikely to be determined by articles of the American constitution. France and Britain were not worried by this because they were not in the least anti-colonial. For them, imperial possessions were an endorsement of their status as world powers. Their ideal was to have strong local rulers with whom they could cooperate to serve mutual interests. Notwithstanding promises made to Hussein, the European victors had no intention of giving up on the Middle East, where, in addition to the importance attached to the Suez Canal, there was now the prospect of tapping into substantial oil reserves. The USA already had a flourishing oil industry. France and Britain had no wish to be left behind.
Just how hard it would be for President Wilson to play the role of empire-breaker was revealed when the Bolshevik revolutionaries who had taken power in Russia published the Sykes–Picot–Sazanov Agreement. This secret deal for a three-way carve-up of the Ottoman Empire diluted the pledges made to Arab leaders and ran counter to the interpretation of nationality enshrined in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The Sykes–Picot Agreement (Sazanov was airbrushed out after the fall of the Tsarist regime) was later used by Arab nationalists to prove the iniquities of the imperialists. But this was to overstate the argument. While the agreement was indeed secret in so far as it was not proclaimed across the Middle East, it is now clear that Hussein had a fair knowledge of what was planned. Not wishing, however, to be portrayed as a traitor who was ready to conspire with Christian states against the sultan, the protector of Islam, he protested innocence and shock when the terms of the agreement were made known.4 Then again, the Sykes–Picot Agreement was not entirely selfishly motivated. The prospect of chaos in the wake of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire was real. While American delegates to the Paris Peace Conference insisted that there were, in the East, ‘nations in the modern and Western sense of the term’, this was not altogether clear to those on the ground who saw only aspiring Arab rulers scrabbling for position.
In the end, America accepted, and the newly founded League of Nations approved, a compromise whereby France and Britain acquired ‘mandates’ over former Ottoman territories, a diplomatic catch-all which satisfied the anti-empire lobby while freeing the mandatory powers to exercise as much or as little authority as suited their purposes. France was to be responsible for Lebanon and Syria; Britain for Palestine, the area to the east of it known as Transjordan, later Jordan, and a new territory, later Iraq, consisting of the old provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. Prince Feisal, with Lawrence in support, argued the case for an independent Syria with himself as ruler. When the French proved obstinate and Britain, after some prevarication, weighed in on the side of a European ally, a way was found to compensate the aspiring monarch by offering him the kingdom of Iraq. Feisal’s brother, Abdullah, became ruler of Jordan. However neat and tidy this looked on paper, it was a ramshackle arrangement marked by artificial boundaries that paid little attention to political, tribal or ideological rivalries.
The biggest muddle of all was reserved for Palestine, selected by Britain as a setting for a Jewish homeland. It was in early November 1917 that British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour put his signature to a letter to Lord Rothschild assuring him of his government’s ‘sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations’ to the extent of supporting the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’, and promising ‘best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object’. The only proviso was that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country’.
This brave or mad attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable was intended to persuade the Zionist lobby in the USA to put pressure on Washington to enter the war. In this it may well have succeeded, but it was soon clear that any short-term gains came at a heavy cost. Some 3,500 years had passed since Moses had led the Jews to Palestine, the Promised Land. Had they stayed their right of occupancy would have been incontrovertible. But the failed revolution against the Romans in AD 70 had led to the dispersal of the Jews across the known world, integrating more or less successfully but like any minority finding that times could be hard whenever the powers were on the lookout for scapegoats. Virulent anti-Semitism in Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century gave birth to the Zionist movement dedicated to ‘establishing for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine’. Hence, the Balfour Declaration. The rider promising to safeguard the rights of non-Jewish communities was not, however, well received by those it was intended to reassure. It seemed to the Arabs that Europe was pushing on to them a problem of its own making, a feeling that was to intensify when the next wave of anti-Semitism carried thousands of refugees from Nazi Germany. From the first days of the British mandate, Palestine was marred by violence. Nearly a century later, little has changed.
There was violence too in Egypt, where President Wilson’s pledge of self-determination, not to mention the creation of the League of Nations, the very existence of which seemed to endorse the Fourteen Points, raised nationalist expectations to a fever pitch. With the ending of the war and the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire, what reason could there be for denying independence to Egypt, a clearly identifiable nation with its own distinct culture and traditions? Two days after the armistice of 11 November 1918, three leading Egyptian nationalists called on the high commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate. Their request was to be allowed to go to London to discuss the ending of the protectorate proclaimed four years earlier. Wingate was inclined to take his visitors seriously. Moreover, their spokesman was well known to the British authorities and, indeed, had worked alongside them under Cromer. Saad Zaghloul, a former lawyer, now in his late fifties, had served as minister of education and minister of justice. He was seen as a liberal who was sympathetic to constitutional reform. But he was also a powerful demagogue capable of rousing the mob in the crusade for Egyptian rights. It was therefore unwise to offend Zaghloul. Yet this was precisely what the government in London proceeded to do. Zaghloul was told that ‘no useful purpose would be served’ by his coming to London, while in the House of Commons Arthur Balfour assured members that ‘British supremacy [in Egypt] will be maintained’. Nobody needed reminding that it was the Suez Canal, the imperial lifeline, not Egypt itself, which prompted such dogmatism.
Zaghloul made an attempt to allay British fears with an assurance that an independent Egypt would be ‘ready to accept any measure which the Powers may regard as useful for safeguarding the neutrality of the Suez Canal’.5 It was not enough. Ostracised in official circles, Zaghloul made a direct appeal to the Paris Peace Conference, where Arab leaders who had fought with Allenby were presenting their case for autonomy. Egypt was to be denied this privilege. In response to what was deemed an insolent challenge to British authority, Zaghloul and three of his colleagues were arrested and deported to Malta. This was the signal for popular unrest to break into open rebellion. It started on 10 March 1919, the day after the arrests, with student demonstrations in Cairo. Street lights were shattered, tramcars overturned, shops stoned and pillaged, and the offices of Anglophile newspapers ransacked. The violence spread quickly across the country. Egyptian army detachments hit back, killing over fifty rioters, but not before the rebels succeeded in blocking the approaches to Cairo, leaving European enclaves unprotected. In the worst atrocity, three unarmed officers and five men on the night train from Luxor were brutally murdered, their bodies mutilated and hung up for display.
In the absence of inspired commanders on the ground, the formidable Allenby, soon to be Field Marshal Viscount Allenby, was dispatched to Cairo to restore order. His arrival was greeted enthusiastically by European residents, who expected him to mete out retribution. But Allenby was now more the diplomat than the soldier, and his inclination, born of a conviction that he could win converts to a British sense of fair play, was to offer concessions. Ignoring accusations that he had surrendered to the forces of disorder, Allenby released Zaghloul from exile. Back in Cairo, the nationalist leader put himself at the head of a campaign for full independence. As a reminder of his first approach to the high commissioner, he called his movement the Wafd (people’s delegation) and promptly announced that he was off to Paris to join other Arab leaders in their appeal for self-rule. The feeble reaction from London was characteristic of politicians in need of a respite. Responsibility was handed over to a commission of inquiry led by the colonial secretary, Alfred Milner (Lord Milner), Cromer’s former associate and devoted admirer. The Egyptians, not unreasonably, saw this as a delaying tactic with the result that the commission was given a rough ride.
We had not been many days, or even hours, in Cairo before we had ample evidence of active and organised antagonism. Telegrams poured in announcing the intention of the senders to go on strike as a protest against our presence . . . The Egyptian vernacular press, with rare exceptions, exhausted the repertory of vituperation and innuendo, proclaiming that any recognition of the Mission would be interpreted as an acceptance of the existing situation and that any Egyptian who had dealings with its members would be guilty of treason to his country.6
Returning to London in March 1920, Milner recommended a treaty of alliance that would recognise Egyptian independence while allowing Britain to maintain a military force to protect the canal. However:
Great Britain’s strategic interest in Egypt is not limited to securing a free passage through the Suez Canal. ‘The defense of her Imperial communications’ involves much more than that. For Egypt is becoming more and more a ‘nodal point’ in the complex of these communications by land and air as well as by sea.7
For this reason Britain wanted some sort of control over Egypt’s foreign affairs, which in turn suggested a continuing involvement in her administration; a protectorate by another name. The two sides were not quite back where they had started. Opening direct negotiations with Zaghloul, Milner downgraded Britain’s minimum requirements to the right to safeguard her strategic interests and imperial communications while retaining responsibility for protecting the privileges of foreigners in Egypt. It seemed that Zaghloul was prepared to go along with this but in referring a decision to his supporters at home he made it known that, in his view, nothing less than full independence was acceptable.
With continuing unrest and frequent attacks on Europeans, Allenby felt compelled to crack down. Zaghloul was again deported, this time to the Seychelles. He was later transferred to Gibraltar, where he remained until his release in April 1923. But Allenby knew that disposing of the chief agitator did not solve the larger problem. He was convinced that nothing short of a declaration of independence would prevent a bloody revolution. As for the canal, Britain could afford to give way to most of the nationalist demands without loss of influence simply by maintaining a military base at Suez while relying on naval superiority to protect the approaches.
What, in retrospect, was a perfectly sensible proposal did not go down well with the imperialists, whose spokesman, the young and ambitious Winston Churchill, led a press campaign against Allenby. ‘The Bull’ was not deterred. Faced with a collapse of government in Cairo and continuing obstruction at Westminster, Allenby returned to face his critics. Ever the realist, he came to recognise that a British withdrawal to the Canal Zone was not a winnable proposition – though it was still the simplest and the safest option. Nonetheless, he held to the view that Egypt had to be given her freedom, albeit with favoured-nation guarantees for Britain that were close to those recommended by Milner. Allenby was put under heavy pressure to tone down his demands. He remained resolute. After five frustrating weeks battling with an intransigent foreign secretary (Lord Curzon) and a distinctly unhelpful colonial secretary (Winston Churchill), the prime minister was brought into the affair as the final arbiter.
Lloyd George began by firing off a great many questions at Allenby, no doubt to put himself in authority from the start. This did not please Allenby, who eventually said (there were three others present): ‘Well, it is no good disputing any longer. I have told you what I think is necessary . . . I have waited five weeks for a decision, and I can’t wait any longer. I shall tell Lady Allenby to come home.’ On this Lloyd George, never one to resist a turn of phrase, said: ‘You have waited five weeks, Lord Allenby; wait five more minutes.’ He thereupon capitulated and agreed to Allenby’s proposals, with only a few minor amendments. With the Government in danger, Lloyd George was not the man to mistake the lesser of two evils. The interview was at an end.8
In the subsequent House of Commons debate, ministerial blushes were spared by the inference that Allenby had accepted the government’s liberal proposals for Egypt instead of the other way round. What became known as the 1922 Declaration gave Egypt independence of a sort. While the protectorate was to be ended and constitutional government created, certain critical matters were ‘absolutely reserved to the discretion of His Majesty’s Government until such time as it may be possible . . . to conclude agreements’. Under this heading came the ‘security of the communications of the British Empire in Egypt . . . the defence of Egypt against all foreign aggression or interference . . .’ and control over the Sudan. This was quite a portfolio of retained powers, but though Zaghloul held back from a formal endorsement, he had no choice but to accept the broad terms of the settlement. To ease the transition, there were titles to be handed out. Sultan Ahmed Fuad Pasha was styled King of Egypt while Zaghloul was elected prime minister under a new constitution that made great play of democratic principles while reserving effective power to the traditional ruling class.
