Churchill, Palestine and Zionism, 1904-1922 - Douglas J. Feith

216 DOUGLAS J. FEITH
were those who provoked the war in the first place, it also served the
cause of justice. Pieties along the lines of "nothing ever gets resolved by
force" and "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" had
little resonance in the thinking of men of affairs in that period. (It is not
that political leaders then were actually less pious or less moral in action
than those in our own era. Rather, as respectable Victorians avoided
blunt talk about sex, respectable persons today avoid blunt talk about
war.)
WARTIME PLEDGES TO THE ARABS
Soon after the Great War got under way, the western front deteriorated
into an exasperating stalemate. Britain therefore resolved to outflank Germany
by opening a front against the Ottoman Empire. The Gallipoli campaign
of 1915 was launched to clear a path for a head-on attack against
Constantinople. Presided over by Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the
Admiralty, that nine-month campaign failed at high cost. Britain then
sought to outflank the flank. It resolved to hit the Ottomans not in their
empire's capital but in their Asiatic provinces: the Hejaz (the western
coastal region of the Arabian peninsula containing the Muslim holy cities
of Mecca and Medina), Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia (today's Iraq).
British officials thought they could engineer an Arab uprising throughout
the Near East. Britain's Egypt administration, which Field Marshal
Lord Kitchener had headed immediately before moving to London to take
over the war office in August 1914, reported that Arab nationalist officers
in the Ottoman army were numerous and ready to rise against the Turks
as soon as Britain endorsed Arab independence and provided financial
and military assistance. The prime candidate to lead the revolt was Sherif
Hussein ibn Ali, the head of the Hashemite clan, who as amir of Mecca
was the principal figure in the Hejaz and was thought to command deference
from the other Arabian notables. In the oft-dissected correspondence
between Hussein and Henry McMahon, Britain's high commissioner
in Egypt, the Hashemites were offered in return for their help sweeping
but always vaguely formulated promises of British support for an independent
Arab kingdom from Syria to the Indian Ocean.
The strategy failed to achieve its purpose, for the major premises were
incorrect. There was no broad-based Arab nationalist movement in Ottoman
army ranks. Regarding the popularity of the Arab nationalist cause,
Britain's experts in Cairo were longer on preconceptions than actual