Symbol of a betrayal

Written by Voltaire

One man personified the betrayal of the Palestinian Arbs generally by the British empire and the western world. His name was Sheriff Hussein of Mecca. Sheriff Hussein was the man who, through his son Abdullah, had approached the British in Cairo to suggest an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks in 1915 in the middle of the First World War. The British agreed, in a very ill defined manner, to grant Arab independence after the war subject to a few reservations which eventually came to center around Palestine, although Palestine was nowhere mentioned in the correspondence between Hussein and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner. The revolt took place and Prince Feisal, another son of Hussein, triumphantly entered Damascus in 1918 as the liberator of Arab freedom from the Turks. And that is when the great betrayal began.

The independent state which was to have been set up was carved into a zig-zag of 'mandates'. Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq became British mandates; Lebanon and Syria became French mandates. Abdullah became king of Jordan; Feisal, after having been driven out of Syria by the French, was sent by the British to Baghdad to establish a Sunni Moslem ascendancy over a Shiite country. Feisal nobly acquited himself at Paris at the great Peace Conference defending, albeit futilely, Arab rights and independence. And what of Sheriff Hussein? He did not succeed in his ambition to replace the Sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid, as the Caliph of all Islam. The British had never really supported him in that ambition, anyway. Hussein was basically shoved to the side. When his military campaigns against his chief rival, ibn Saud of the Wahabi tribe, ran into difficulty, he was at the mercy of the British. The Sheriff had previously offended the mighty British by refusing to help them out of the ambiguities of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence.

In the early 1920's there was a reaction against the Balfour Declaration in both the House of Lords and the Foreign Office. The Balfour Declaration, as the reader shall recall, was the famous announcement of November 2, 1917 in the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild by the English Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, sponsoring support for a Jewish 'national home' in Palestine. This declaration rather obviously contradicted the pledges to Sheriff Hussein of October 24, 1915, a realization which was becoming clear to some very vocal voices in the upper house of the English parliament. His Majesty's Government conceived that one way out of the problem created by conflicting pledges would be to have Sheriff Hussein stipulate that it had always been his 'understanding' that Palestine had been excluded from the area pledged to Arab independence. Hussein, however, refused to play turncoat. And that was his undoing. The British decided that Sheriiff Hussein of Mecca, their loyal and indispensable ally in their war against the Turks, was now disposable. No British troops or airplanes were sent to relieve the military disasters against ibn Saud and shortly thereafter the kingdom of the Hejaz, the eastern coast of the Red Sea north of Mecca, was incorporated intothe new kingdom of Saudi Arabia, named for its conqueror, ibn Saud. Sheriff Hussein went into exile on Cyprus and died, a sad and bitter man, around 1931.

It is impossible to read this history, as Sir John Bagot Glubb once wrote, without a profound sense of sadness and regret. The British empire once had an unsullied reputation for good faith and fair dealing. That reputation vanished forever in the post World War One peace treaties and territorial divisions. The betrayal of Sheriff Hussein of Mecca, king of the Hejaz and would be Caliph of all the Moslems, was hardly the only betrayal of the den of thieves of Paris. The Germans, Austrians and Hungarians also got theirs. The Arabs of Palestine have not yet found their Hitler to lead them back.

Source: ZioPedia.org