The middle of May occasioned the anniversary of two events that determined the fate of the Arab region for decades to come, the repercussions of which continue to assert their dangerous effects on the future of all Arab peoples. The first is the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 16 May 1916, in accordance of which Great Britain and France demarcated their respective spheres of influence in the “Fertile Crescent” region. The second is the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, that turned the Palestinian people into refugees following the declaration of the founding of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948. The Nakba was not an isolated event but, in fact, one of the byproducts of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Therefore, in order to properly understand what has happened to the Arab world since the beginning of the last century, we need to re-examine three related British questions as to the ends and interests that London hoped to achieve, together with diverse international and regional forces, taking advantage of the circumstances and conditions that arose with the outbreak of World War I. - British policy toward the nascent Arab nationalist movement. Emerging in the region toward the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the Arab nationalist movement sought to sever the Arab world from the Ottoman Empire and work toward the realisation of the Arab people's aspirations for independence and unity. It was only natural that Britain would attempt to curry favour with this movement during the war, in the hope of throwing Turkey into disarray and opening new military fronts against it. The correspondence between the sherif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, and Sir Arthur McMahon, the British high commissioner in Cairo, reflects the way that Britain handled this matter. The correspondence, consisting of 10 letters dating from 14 July 1915 to 10 March 1916, began the moment that Sherif Hussein, who sought to establish an Arab empire under his leadership in the Levant, struck an agreement with Arab nationalist forces in Syria to work together to launch an Arab uprising against Turkish rule. Britain wanted exactly the same thing. In his first letter to McMahon, Sherif Hussein offered specific suggestions regarding the borders of the Arab state he hoped to establish. He also asked British approval for the investiture of a new Muslim caliph. McMahon wrote back, granting his approval on the condition that the caliph would be an Arab. However, he asked to defer the question of borders for the time being, arguing that it was premature to discuss the subject. The reply made a poor impression on Hussein who tried to alleviate his doubts in subsequent letters. The series of correspondence concludes with a letter from McMahon to Hussein dated 10 March 1916, stating Britain's official agreement to all of the sherif of Mecca's demands, after the latter agreed to exclude the protectorates of Aden, Mersin, southern Iraq and Homs while retaining the right to ask for these again after the end of the war. - British policy toward the Zionist movement, which was officially established at the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 and which sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The evolution of this policy is the product of an array of British interplay at the domestic, regional and international levels, all of which culminated in the pledge to furnish the necessary support to efforts to create a “national homeland for the Jews in Palestine”. This pledge, issued on 2 November 1917, has become known as the Balfour Declaration. - British policy toward European powers allied to Britain during the war, especially France and Russia. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, which remained secret until after the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, reflected the fruits of several rounds of negotiations between London, Paris and Moscow between November 1915 and March 1916. The agreement reveals an aspect of British policy at the time, which was to maintain a minimum degree of cohesion in the allied front. While the agreement bears the name of the British foreign minister, Mark Sykes, and his French counterpart, François Georges-Picot, their Russian counterpart, Sergey Sazonov, had taken part in many phases of its preparation. The agreement partitions the Fertile Crescent region between France, which obtained Syria, Lebanon and the area of Mosul in Iraq, and Britain, which obtained the territory extending from south of the French areas in Syria eastward to Baghdad, Basra and the Arab countries on the Gulf. The agreement simultaneously placed Palestine under an international administration the nature of which would be subsequently determined through consultations between Britain, France and Russia. Arab political literature sees the Sykes-Picot Agreement as the clearest proof that the Arab world had fallen into the clutches of a major conspiracy woven by Western colonial powers and international Zionism. However, closer inspection of the evidence related to the three abovementioned policies reveals that Britain was interested in achieving a single end: winning the world war and coming away with the largest possible share of the spoils from the Ottoman Empire. Britain was the centre of gravity of the international order at the time. When the war broke out in 1914, it naturally sought to control the keys to the game and to weave a network of alliances that would enable it, firstly, to prevail in the war and, secondly, to expand the bounds of its empire to the broadest possible sphere that its military, political and economic power could reach. With these aims in mind, British diplomacy moved in many simultaneous directions, granting pledges here and offering inducements there, regardless of possible contradictions and without binding itself by any form of moral restraint or criteria that might ultimately hamper its course. Its determination to sustain its alliance with France led it to conclude an agreement partitioning the Levantine territories of the Ottoman Empire (the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916). Because it sought to win the support of the Zionist movement, it issued a declaration expressing its sympathy for the aspirations of that movement and pledging it all assistance toward the creation of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration of November 1917). As it was particularly keen to throw confusion into the rear ranks of the Turkish forces in the Arabian Peninsula, it coordinated with the sherif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, who had just concluded an alliance with the emergent pan-Arab nationalist movement in Syria and supported its plans to ignite a massive Arab revolution against Turkish rule in the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. To him, the British promised assistance to create a unified Arab kingdom under his leadership (the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of 1916). As Britain moved to resolve the problems that it had created through the conflicting promises made during the war, it acted on the basis of the realities engendered by the new post-war balances of power. After the war and with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, France and the Zionist movement were in a position to compel Britain to respect and follow through on the pledges and commitments it had made in the Sykes-Picot Agreement and Balfour Declaration. The same did not apply to Sherif Hussein bin Ali, who emerged as the weakest of that triangle of alliances the British had woven during the war. As the pledges that Britain had given him conflicted in part or in whole with those it had made to France and the Zionists, the British reinterpreted them and Hussein was powerless to insist otherwise, especially as he was on the verge of losing his base of power and authority at home in the Arabian Peninsula. Therefore, it is not odd that the winds of change that swept this region at that critical juncture in its history would yield disastrous results for the future of the Arab world in general and for the future of Palestine in particular. Foremost of these results were the unleashing of French colonial sway over Syria and Lebanon and British colonial sway of Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq; and the incorporation of the Balfour Declaration, regarding the establishment of a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine, into the mandate on Palestine that the League of Nations conferred on Britain in 1922, conferring on that declaration an international character it had not had when it was issued. As for the Zionist movement founded by Herzl in the Basel Congress of 1897, it had not waited for Balfour to launch its project to create a state for Jews in Palestine. No sooner had that congress ended than the Zionist leadership set into motion several practical measures towards this end. It began to train the largest possible number of Jews in modern agricultural techniques and encouraged them to emigrate to Palestine. It simultaneously worked to eliminate all obstacles to this migration and settling drive. It campaigned to develop the national awareness of Jews throughout the world, inculcating in them foundations of Jewish culture in order to deepen their sense of affiliation to Palestine as their lost “promised land”. It also used all available means to persuade the dominant powers in the world order of the importance and benefits to them of the Zionist project. With their success in securing the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and then in convincing the parties at the Versailles Conference of the need to incorporate this pledge into the mandate over Palestine that was approved by the League of Nations and conferred on Britain in 1922, the drive to establish a national homeland for Jews in Palestine acquired a cover of legal and international legitimacy it had not previously possessed. The Zionist movement now had international backing prepared to protect its colonial settler drive in Palestine, and it had the material and moral resources capable of removing all obstacles that lay in its path, regardless of the extent of its legal or humanitarian legitimacy. Today, a century after the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Zionist project is on the verge of achieving its wildest aims. The Arab nationalist project, on the other hand, is on the verge of total collapse — if it has not collapsed already. Is what is happening in this region today truly the product of a conspiracy against the Arabs? Or is it the product of a conspiracy by the Arabs against themselves? The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.
