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| Peter O'Toole as Lawrence, Claude Rains as Dryden, Jack Hawkins as Allenby |
At the end of Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence is obviously deeply unhappy because his grand vision of uniting the Arab tribes has collapsed into tribal infighting and he learns the diplomats have been up to mischief, leaving him feeling used by the British Government. German journalist Bernhard Zand of Der Spiegel gave a fairly detached (at least non-British) analysis of what was going on behind the scenes in those days.
In no other theater of World War I are the results of that epochal conflict still as current as they are in the Middle East. Nowhere else does the early 20th century orgy of violence still determine political conditions to the same degree. . . Perhaps most important, however, was the wanton resolution made by two European colonial powers, Britain and France, that ordered this part of the world in accordance with their own needs and literally drew "A Line in the Sand," as the British historian James Barr titled his 2011 book about this episode.
The Allies' defeat at Gallipoli marked a strategic turning point in the war in the Middle East. Because their plan to strike at the heart of the Ottoman Empire failed, the Allies began focusing on its periphery — targeting the comparatively weakly defended Arab provinces. It was a plan which corresponded with the Arab desire to throw off the yoke of Ottoman rule. In July 1915, Sir Henry McMahon, the High Commissioner of Egypt, began secret correspondence with Hussein Bin Ali, the Sharif of Hejaz and of the holy city of Mecca. He and his sons, Ali, Faisal and Abdullah — together with the Damascus elite — dreamed of founding an Arab nation state stretching from the Taurus Mountains in southeastern Turkey to the Red Sea and from the Mediterranean to the Iranian border.
In October 1915, McMahon wrote Hussein a letter in which he declared Great Britain's willingness — bar a few vague reservations — "to recognize and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca."
The Arabs fulfilled their part of the agreement. In June 1916, they began their insurgency against the Ottomans — a decisive aid to the British advance from Sinai to Damascus via Jerusalem. Their revolt was energized by the British archeologist and secret agent Thomas Edward Lawrence, who would go down in history as "Lawrence of Arabia."
Britain, though, did not fully live up to its part of the deal. In a dispatch sent in early 1916, Lawrence wrote that the Arab revolt would be useful to the British Empire because, "it marches with our immediate aims, the break-up of the Islamic 'bloc' and the defeat and disruption of the Ottoman Empire." But in no way were the British thinking of the kind of united Arab state that Hussein and his sons dreamed of. "The states the Sharifs would set up to succeed the Turks would be … harmless to ourselves…. The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small jealous principalities incapable of cohesion."
Far more important to the British than their Arab comrades in arms were the French, with whom their troops were fighting and dying in untold numbers on the Western Front. "The friendship with France," British Prime Minister David Lloyd George later told his French counterpart Georges Clemenceau, "is worth ten Syrias." France was a colonial power that had long laid claim to the Christian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Great Britain would have preferred to control the region alone, but with their common enemy Germany bearing down, London was prepared to divide the expected spoils.
Even as McMahon was corresponding with Sharif Hussein, British parliamentarian Sir Mark Sykes was negotiating a contradictory deal with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot. It foresaw the division of the Arab provinces which still belonged to the Ottomans in such a way that France would get the areas to the north and the British those to the south. "I should like to draw a line from the 'e' in Acre to the last 'k' in Kirkuk," Sykes said as he briefed Downing Street on the deal at the end of 1916.
The so-called Sykes-Picot Agreement was an unabashedly imperialistic document. It took no account of the wishes of the peoples affected, ignored the ethnic and confessional boundaries existing in the Arab and Kurdish world and thus provoked the conflicts which continue to plague the region 100 years later. "Even by the standards of the time," writes James Barr, "it was a shamelessly self-interested pact."
The document initially remained secret. And by the time the Bolsheviks completed their revolution in Moscow in 1917 and made the Sykes-Picot Agreement public, the British had already signed another secret deal — one which neither the Arabs nor the French knew about.
On Nov. 2, 1917, Foreign Minister Arthur James Balfour promised the Zionist Federation of Great Britain "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." There were several factors motivating the British to grant the oppressed Jews the right to self-determination and to give them a piece of the Ottoman Empire for that purpose. One of the most important was the accusations of imperialism against London that had grown louder as the war progressed. Not that the imperialists in the British cabinet shared such concerns. But it bothered them, particularly because one of the critics, Woodrow Wilson, had just been reelected as US president.
"Every people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid," Wilson intoned in January of 1917 on the eve of America's entry into the war. At the time, Wilson was unaware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but the British suspected that they would ultimately have to come clean with their new ally. As such, the Balfour Declaration can be seen as an effort to guard against the expected US reaction to Britain's arbitrary redesign of the Middle East.
Now Back to the Movie:
In the film, Lawrence seems to learn of the Sykes-Picot agreement only at the end of hostilities when he returns to Cairo to meet with General Allenby, Faisal, and the diplomat Dryden (a fictional, composite British foreign service officer). He has previously been disappointed by the post-victory inter-Arab fragmentation he had witnessed in Damascus. Now he has further discovered that Faisal, who is to become a king, has cynically acquiesced to the new arrangement. After Lawrence's exit, Faisal and Allenby concur that they are both glad to see his departure.
T. E. Lawrence, however, likely first learned of the secret Sykes-Picot negotiations in May 1917, when he met with British diplomat Mark Sykes. Also, he must have previously heard of the Balfour Declaration almost immediately after its release in November 1917, when the Bolsheviks published the secret diplomatic files and Turkish forces publicized them in the Arab press.
Contrary to the movie, Lawrence must have been wrestling with the duplicity in the Allied relations with the Arabs long before the meeting in Cairo. Indeed, he alludes to this in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, when he wrote: "I had to join the conspiracy and assure the men of their reward. Better we win and break our word than lose."
Sources: Excerpted from "What World War I Did to the Middle East", Der Spiel, 31 January 2014
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