The Arab “Nation”
England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire 1914-1921
By Elie Kedourie
Bowes & Bowes (Cambridge). 236 pp. 30 sh.

Elie Kedourie is a historian of the post-Namier school, which is to say that he is tough-minded, realistic, and above all, anti-liberal. In some ways this is not a bad equipment for a writer dealing with the Middle East, for of all the areas in which the Western powers came to dabble during and after the First World War, the territories belonging to the Ottoman Empire were least suited to the straightforward application of Wilsonian principles. Mr. Kedourie’s neo-conservatism, moreover, is not of the romantic kind, and few things are more alien to his mind than glorification of the primitive. He is, like his teachers, an exponent of Realpolitik, and it is in this spirit that he has approached the complicated story of the Anglo-French political and military operations which resulted in the destruction of the Turkish Empire and the establishment of a series of pre-dominantly Arab successor states.

At the same time, this is not simply an account of diplomatic maneuverings. As such it would have been boring; few things are more futile than the analysis of governmental activities divorced from their matrix. In the case of the Middle East the matrix is particularly rich in cultural protoplasm, there being no other area where historians, sociologists, belletrists, and even theologians can expect a political harvest to grow from the scattered seeds of their imaginings. Appropriately enough, British policy during the most crucial period was determined by a learned globe-trotter, the eccentric Mark Sykes, who died suddenly in 1919, not yet aged forty, after having materially helped to destroy the Turkish Empire; and the myth of an Arab nation miraculously risen from the ashes of that Empire was imposed upon a credulous public, and a cynical officialdom, by the romantic adventurer T. E. Lawrence, who at the time of his triumphal “entry” into Damascus in 1918 was all of thirty years old.

There were others of the same breed, but behind them there was also the enigmatic D. G. Hogarth, a scholar and clearly the possessor of a first-rate historical imagination: his paper on “Arabs and Turks,” which Mr. Kedourie prints as an appendix, is a minor masterpiece of historical analysis, though marred by a faint flavor of Oxford preciosity. Hogarth, if anyone, saw through the absurdities of his erstwhile pupil Lawrence, though in his official position he seems to have done little to check them. At least he saw quite clearly that the Arabs were not a “nation,” and that while Ottoman rule was bad, Arab rule would be worse. The others were not much given to such dispassionate weighing of the evidence, though Sykes in his younger years—before 1914, i.e. before he was caught up in the excitement of advising the Foreign Office and helping to pull Turkey down—had perceived the absurdity of trying to build upon the lazy and conceited Arab nationalist intelligentsia which claimed the fruits of victory in 1919. The war had compelled Britain to reverse the old policy of propping Turkey up as a buffer against Russia (and France), and the diplomats, intelligence officers, and amateur enthusiasts who carved up the huge body of the Empire in 1915-19, were carried away by a kind of hybris. Of no one is this clearer than of Sykes, who spent the first half of the war laboriously devising an elaborate scheme for the partition of the Middle East between Britain and France (the Sykes-Picot Agreement), and the second half undermining his own handiwork by encouraging the Arab secret societies, the Armenians, the Kurds, and ultimately even the Zionists, to set up national states of their own. The original policy made sense; so did the later one. It was the combination of both that proved fatal.

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Before plunging the reader into this whirlpool, Mr. Kedourie indulges in some reflections on the traditional British policy of helping the Ottoman Empire to “reform” in order to prevent its fall. He holds that the policy was self-contradictory in that “reform” was sure to ruin the despotic system, while putting nothing stable in its place. This is true but trite. Conservatives are always at their best in pointing to the weaknesses of liberal solutions; it is when they are called upon to produce solutions of their own that their philosophy is shown to be barren. Sir Mark Sykes started out as an ultra-conservative who admired the East, despised Levantinism and “progress,” thought the Turks superior to those whom they ruled, and hoped that the Ottoman Empire could be preserved intact. He ended up as its chief destroyer. The fact is that nothing could have saved the Empire—not even the absurd Arab “rebellion” which almost did. Nothing could have saved the Hapsburgs either. These ancient structures were sure to crumble before the onset of nationalism, and the fact that the nationalists were hardly fitter to rule than those whom they supplanted cannot be used as an argument against the critics of Turkish despotism. Mr. Kedourie also spoils his case by pointing out that Lord Salisbury as far back as 1878 disliked the official policy and did not believe Turkey could survive. No one at this date need try to be more conservative than Salisbury. It is true that the Turkish Empire was ruined by the “reforms” which gave it a modern officers’ corps capable of revolting against the Sultan; it would have been ruined even faster without them. Given the “sick man’s” condition, it hardly mattered whether he stuck to his customary diet or tried a new one.

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The “Arab rebellion” takes up the bulk of Mr. Kedourie’s study, and if anyone can illuminate this murky subject he will probably be held to have done so. Having been guided through the complex maze of the Sykes-Picot negotiations (of which the Arab leaders, for all their subsequent disclaimers, were fully informed at the time), we are introduced to a concise account of the Lawrence episode. After Richard Aldington’s debunking biography, it was unnecessary for Mr. Kedourie to dwell on the character of the hero, and he has wisely confined himself to a few explanatory details. He rightly comments on the paucity of Lawrence’s ideas; they were the ideas of his generation, the last to come to maturity before the First World War and the Russian Revolution made an end of political amateurism. What Lawrence contributed was the cynicism that enabled him to claim credit for the Allied conquest of Palestine and Syria, while telling Robert Graves “our fighting was a luxury we indulged in only to save the Arab’s self-respect.” Lawrence’s operation was directed against Britain’s allies, the French, not against the Turks, who barely noticed the depredations of his incompetent guerrilleros; and the total strength of his “Northern Arab Army,” according to the highest available estimate (that of Bremond, a French officer) was three thousand men. Sir Hubert Young, who was with the “Northern Army” when it “captured” Damascus, put its strength at about six hundred men and six guns, and wrote that “but for Dawney and Joyce (British officers attached to Feisal’s troops) only twenty or thirty Arab irregulars would have ridden with Allenby’s cavalry into the Syrian capital, instead of from six to seven hundred trained and equipped regular soldiers.” The myth of the “Arab Army” was nonetheless important in bolstering Feisal’s self-esteem and the readiness of the Arab secret societies to claim authority in Syria and ultimately in Iraq. In this sense Lawrence’s enterprise may be said to have borne fruit.

Mr. Kedourie’s account of the Anglo-French wrangle over Syria and Mesopotamia leaves him no space for an analysis of the Balfour Declaration. Perhaps he does not like the subject; there are some signs that he has consciously shied away from it. His occasional references to the Zionist issue are brief, and tinged with a faint aura of dislike. He is, however, on safe ground in remarking that in 1919 the whole topic seemed of very minor consequence to the policy-makers at Versailles; also in stating bluntly that the Weizmann-Feisal agreement of 1919 was not worth the paper it was written on: Feisal had no standing in Palestine, and his brief flirtation with the idea of buying the Zionists off, in order to gain their help against the French, was promptly repudiated by the Arab nationalists on his return to Damascus. The whole episode would not be worth mentioning had it not given rise to a crop of stories suggesting that a great opportunity for Arab-Jewish understanding was missed at the time; there never was such an opportunity. The Zionist leaders had no Arab policy, and the Arabs could not possibly compromise with Zionism.

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