Arabs (32 page)

 

In hindsight, it is easy to see that the American-led King-Crane Commission was a fool’s mission. The British and French declined to nominate officials to take part in the study, thereby undermining the validity of what had become an American, rather than a multinational, delegation. As they had no intention of being bound by the commission’s findings, they did not wish to commit their own diplomats to the process. And yet the King-Crane Report is a unique document, providing in the words of its authors “a fairly accurate analysis of present political opinion in Syria”—a glimpse into the aspirations and fears of rural and urban communities in that brief moment between Ottoman and European rule.
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In March 1919, President Wilson named Oberlin College president Henry Churchill King and Chicago businessman Charles R. Crane to head the commission. Both men had extensive knowledge of the Middle East—King as a scholar of biblical history and Crane through his travels in Ottoman lands, dating back to 1878. The Americans set out for Syria in May 1919 with instructions to meet with local representatives and report back on the aspirations of the Arab peoples in Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. The King-Crane Commission proved to be much more than just a fact-finding mission. The two men’s presence in Greater Syria set in motion intense nationalist activity involving a broader swath of the Syrian population than any political movement up to that point.

When Amir Faysal returned to Syria from Paris empty-handed, he presented the imminent arrival of the King-Crane Commission to his followers as a favorable development and a serious step toward achieving Syrian national aspirations. He gave a speech to an assembly of notables from across Greater Syria to brief them on his experiences. He could not tell them the whole truth, of how he had been kept waiting and was humiliated by the peacemakers in Paris, who seemed intent on rejecting his claims to uphold their own imperial interests in Greater Syria. Now that he was back on Arab territory, speaking his own language to his own supporters, he turned the condescension back on the Europeans. “I went . . . to claim our due at the Conference which was meeting in Paris,” he explained. “I soon realized that the Westerners were profoundly ignorant about the Arabs and that their information was derived entirely from the tales of the
Arabian Nights
.” In many regards, Faysal was right. Aside from
a handful of experts, the average politician in Britain and France would have known very little about the Arab world. “Naturally this ignorance of theirs made me spend a good deal of time in simply giving basic facts,” Faysal explained.

Looking out over the faces of his supporters, who frequently interrupted his speech to pledge their devotion, he could not admit to failure. However, he stretched the truth beyond recognition when he asserted that the Allies had recognized the independence of the Arab people in principle. He tried to present the King-Crane Commission as an extension of great power recognition of Arab aspirations. “The international committee,” he said, “will ask you to express yourselves in any way you please, for the nations today do not want to govern other peoples except with their consent.”
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Buoyed by Faysal’s words, Syrian nationalists set to work to unite the people of Syria behind a common agenda. The Arab government distributed sermons to be read in Friday prayers in Syrian mosques, political and cultural associations were enlisted to prepare petitions for the King-Crane Commission, and the headmen of villages and town quarters were mobilized to encourage an enthusiastic response to the commission. Thousands of leaflets were printed and distributed in towns and villages. For people new to nationalist politics, the leaflets provided straightforward ideas in the form of slogans. “We demand absolute independence,” asserted one leaflet in bold Arabic and English. Another leaflet exhorted all Syrians to defend their freedom and used parentheses to set out nationalist slogans within the longer text.

Even in the Arabic original the language is awkward, but the message was unambiguous. As local communities prepared to meet with the King-Crane Commission, these demands were frequently repeated in the petitions they submitted and in the slogans chanted and painted on signs and banners.

Having mobilized Syrian public opinion, Faysal and his advisors convened a makeshift parliament to present the Syrian people’s views to the international commission. The Hashemites knew enough about European statecraft to recognize that according to their rules, a nation expressed its legitimate aspirations through an elected assembly. They relied on Ottoman electoral procedures to select delegates from the inland towns of Syria. They had to resort to other methods in Lebanon and Palestine, where the British and French occupation authorities obstructed all political action.
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Leading members of notable families and tribes in Palestine and Lebanon were invited to Damascus to join the Syrian General Congress. Nearly one hundred delegates had been selected to take part in the Congress, though only sixty-nine actually managed to reach Damascus in time to participate in its deliberations. They were working against the clock to produce a statement of national aspirations before the King-Crane Commission reached Damascus.

 

The King-Crane Commission arrived in Jaffa on June 10, 1919, and spent six weeks touring towns and villages in Palestine, Syria, Transjordan, and Lebanon. The commissioners kept statistics on all aspects of their trip. They held meetings in more than forty towns and rural centers and met with 442 delegations, representing people from all walks of life, such as municipal and administrative councils, village chiefs, and tribal shaykhs. They received farmers and tradesmen, and representatives of over a dozen Christian denominations, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Jews, Druze, and other minority groups. They met with eight different women’s delegations and marveled at “the new role women are playing in the nationalistic movements in the Orient.” In the course of their travels they collected 1,863 petitions, with a total of 91,079 signatures—representing nearly 3 percent of the total population of Greater Syria (which they estimated at 3.2 million). The commissioners could not have been more thorough in sounding out public opinion in Greater Syria.

King and Crane reached Damascus on June 25. Yusif al-Hakim, a minister in Amir Faysal’s government, recalled:

On July 2 the Syrian Congress presented the commission with a ten-point resolution that, they maintained, represented both the views of the Syrian people and the government of Amir Faysal.
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The resolution revealed a surprising degree of knowledge on the part of the drafters about international affairs; the text was replete with quotes from President Wilson and the Covenant of the League of Nations as well as references to the conflicting promises of Britain’s wartime diplomacy and the aims of Zionism. King and Crane claimed the resolution was the most important document of their mission.

In their resolution, the delegates of the Syrian Congress demanded complete political independence for Syria within geographic boundaries separating it from Turkey, Iraq, Najd, Hijaz, and Egypt. They wanted their country to be ruled as a constitutional monarchy, with Amir Faysal as their king. They rejected the mandate principle set out in Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations outright, arguing that the Arabs were no less gifted than the Bulgarians, Serbians, Greeks, and Romanians, all of whom had secured full independence from the Ottomans without such European tutelage. The Syrian delegates expressed their full willingness to come under a mandate that was restricted to providing technical and economic assistance. They most trusted the Americans to fulfill this role, “believing that the American Nation is farthest from any thought of colonization and has no political ambition in our country.” Should America refuse to serve, the Syrian people would accept a British mandate, but they rejected any role for France whatsoever. The resolution also called for the independence of Iraq, then under British occupation.

The Syrian Congress took a strong stand against the secret wartime diplomacy. In a swipe against both the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, its members wrote: “The fundamental principles laid down by President Wilson in condemnation of secret treaties impel us to protest most emphatically against any treaty that stipulates the partition of our Syrian country and against any private engagement aiming at the establishment of Zionism in the southern part of Syria; therefore we ask the complete annulment of these conventions and agreements.” They ruled out any separation of Lebanon or Palestine from the Syrian kingdom, and went on to reject the aims of Zionism as inimical to their national interests. “We oppose the pretensions of the Zionists to create a Jewish commonwealth in the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, and oppose Zionist migration to any part of our country; for we do not acknowledge their title but consider them a grave peril to our people from the national, economical, and political points of view.”

There was a tone of moral indignation to the Resolution of the Syrian Congress. Many in the provisional Syrian government had fought with Amir Faysal in the Arab Revolt. They believed they were wartime allies of Britain and France, and had contributed significantly to the victory on the Ottoman front. Faysal and his Arab Army had entered Damascus on October 2, 1918, and liberated the city from Ottoman
rule. The people of Syria, they believed, were now entitled to determine their own political future by rights earned on the battlefield. The Syrian General Congress expected basic justice from its wartime allies, “in order that our political rights may not be less after the war than they were before, since we have shed so much blood in the cause of our liberty and independence.”

In August 1919, after six weeks in Syria, King and Crane withdrew to Istanbul to draft their report. The commissioners subjected all of the materials they had gathered to extensive analysis. In their recommendations to the Peace Conference, King and Crane largely endorsed the Syrian Congress’s resolution. They called for a single Syrian state, undivided, with Amir Faysal as head of a constitutional monarchy. They recommended that Syria as a whole be placed under a single mandatory power, preferably American (though with Britain as second choice), for a limited period, to provide support. And they urged major modifications to the Zionist project, with limits on Jewish immigration. King and Crane argued that the Balfour Declaration’s promises, both to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine
and
to respect “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” could not be reconciled. “The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives,” the King-Crane report noted, “that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase.”
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Not surprisingly, the commissioners found that nine-tenths of the non-Jewish population of Palestine were “emphatically against the entire Zionist program” and that 72 percent of the petitions they received in Greater Syria were directed against Zionism.

The commission submitted its report to the American delegation in Paris at the end of August 1919. Though Amir Faysal was not privy to the report, he could not have asked for more. For the Europeans, however, the King-Crane report was a very inconvenient document. The report was received by the Peace Conference secretariat and shelved without further consultation. It was only made public three years later, by which time Britain and France had concluded a division of the Arab world that they believed at the time better served their interests.

 

Britain declared its intention to withdraw its troops from Syria and Lebanon on November 1, 1919, with the transfer of authority to the French military to follow. The Syrian General Congress, faced with an imminent French occupation, decided to take matters into its own hands. Its members prepared a declaration of independence, based on the resolution delivered to the King-Crane Commission, which was read from the town hall of Damascus on March 8, 1920. Faysal was declared king of Syria, including Palestine and Lebanon.