Free The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Jonathan Schneer Page B

France).
    More generally, Weizmann and his colleagues persuaded powerful men in Britain, France, and Italy that support of Zionism would benefit their wartime cause and the peace to follow. “International Jewry” was a powerful if subterranean force, they claimed, although this was a notable exaggeration if not an outright fantasy, whose goodwill would reap dividends for the Allies. Specifically, they suggested that Jewish finance in America, and Jewish influence upon antiwar forces in Russia, could help determine the conflict’s outcome. Weizmann warned the Foreign Office that Germany recognized the potential of Jewish power and had begun to court it already. He advised the Allies to trump their enemy by declaring outright support for Zionism. His arguments worked upon the minds of anti- and philo-Semites alike among the British governing elite, who were desperate for any advantage in the wartime struggle. Eventually, to gain Jewish backing in the war, they promised to support establishment of a homeland for Jews in Palestine. It did them little good. Historians have discovered that in America Jewish financiers overwhelmingly favored the Allies already. In Russia the Bolsheviks seized power five days after the War Cabinet agreed to the Balfour Declaration. Lenin and Trotsky would take their country out of the war no matter what Russian Jews said.
    Meanwhile Grand Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons were playing as expertly upon British hopes and fears as the Zionists were. Cautiously, shrewdly, bravely, they forged their own contacts: with the underground societies of Damascus already plotting to cast off the Ottoman yoke; and with representatives of the British government stationed in Cairo, whom they recognized as potential allies in their conflict with the CUP. The Damascene plotters offered Sharif Hussein leadership of their movement. The British, represented by Sir Henry McMahon, the high commissioner in Egypt, offered Hussein pledges of support if he would rebel against the Turks, and recognition of the geographical boundaries and political independence of the kingdom he would then establish. Or, at least Hussein interpreted McMahon’s famous letters this way.
    So he marshaled his forces, deployed them, and struck when he judged the moment ripe. In his own milieu Sharif Hussein was as cunning and subtle as Chaim Weizmann was in his. He had to be, for he occupied a personally dangerous position. To break with Constantinople was to risk his life and the lives of his sons and his followers. He did it anyway. His armies took Mecca, Taif, Jeddah, Wejh, and Aqaba. They besieged Medina. They arrived in Damascus almost simulataneously with the British. When they acted as guerrilla forces, they harried the Turks mercilessly, blowing up track and trestles and trains, cutting telegraph lines, slaughtering the unwary. They could not defeat their enemy alone, but they contributed to Britain’s successful Middle Eastern military campaign. Hussein thought the British owed him. Men like T. E. Lawrence, who was in a position to know, thought the British owed him too.
    That was not how the British government saw it. Consider the entire business from its point of view. As soon as the Ottomans entered the war, Lord Kitchener approached Sharif Hussein because he thought Hussein had authority to counter the Ottoman caliph’s call for Muslims to wage jihad against Great Britain and her allies. Also he remembered Hussein’s prewar opposition to the CUP. Now he hoped to aim and launch him against their common foe. He offered the grand sharif inducements to act: the caliphate once the Ottomans had been defeated, pledges of material support for his rebellion, recognition of an Arab kingdom under his leadership after the war. Did British officials intentionally encourage Hussein to believe that Palestine would form part of that kingdom? The McMahon letters are too ambiguous for us to tell. Did McMahon mean for them to be ambiguous? He