The pledge that was not a pledge : the Hussein-McMahon correspondence

Abstract

The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence has puzzled both politicians and historians of the British Empire and the Middle East. The dispute between the Arab claimants and the British, and later the Jewish spokesmen, boiled down to one question: Did Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo, promise to the Sharif Hussein of Mecca and through him to the Arabs, the territory which later became the British Mandate of Palestine? The Arabs said that he did. British officials said he did not. The controversy which originated as a purely academic one, later was transformed into gloomy reality. King Feisal, the son of Sharif Hussein turned out to be the main claimant for Palestine. He and his aides started a "crusade" which aimed at making Palestine an Arab state. They found however that British officials held firm in their view that McMahon did not intend to pledge Palestine to the Arabs, that he did not do it, and that even if he wanted to, he did not have the authority to do so. Whitehall and not Cairo was in charge of British policy. The relationship with the Arabs was only one phase of the whole picture of British foreign policy in which the French were an important part. The French claimed great Syria which included the future Palestine, and received it in the controversial Agreement of Sykes-Picot. This fact was acknowledged again and again by His Majesty's Government, which even twenty years after the famous correspondence took place , found the topic important enough to summon a special committee of investigation in order to hear and reevaluate the interpretations of prominent Arab and British personalities. The Hussein-McMahon Correspondence which was "l'hot politique" of the post war era is still a fascinating one, for the simple reason that from time to time one can have the opportunity to obtain official documents which were withheld from the public in the archives of the interested governments and in private libraries of individuals who were involved in this episode. A case in point is the recently published "Westerman Papers", which to my knowledge did not get the appropriate attention, and in my judgement received a twisted interpretation. These papers provide us with new tools to reevaluate one phase of the international arena of the post-war period. Yet, important as they may be, they are only a part of the whole labyrinth of foreign relations. For this reason I have tried to exploit many of the sources which are pertinent to the correspondence and have tried to show that McMahon did not pledge Palestine to the Arabs. Though historians have recognized the value, of this correspondence, nobody yet, as far as I have been able to gather, devoted a complete study solely to this topic. By putting this correspondence in the center of my paper I hope I have been able to add just one more dimension to this interesting subject.