212 • 13 THE ROOTS OF ARAB BITTERNESSBritain did, however, exclude some parts, such as the port areas of
Mersin and Alexandretta (which now belong to Turkey), Basra (now in
Iraq), and "portions of Syria lying to the west of the areas [districts] of
Damascus, Horns, Hama, and Aleppo." One of the toughest issues in mod¬
ern Middle East history is to figure out whether McMahon meant to ex¬
clude only what is now Lebanon, a partly Christian region coveted by
France, or also Palestine, in which some Jews hoped to rebuild their an¬
cient homeland. Lebanon was clearly west of Damascus and those other
Syrian cities, whereas the area that we now call Israel was significantly less
so. The Arabs argue, therefore, that Britain promised Palestine to them.
But if the letter referred to the province of Syria (of which Damascus was
the capital), what is now Israel and was then partly under a governor in
Jerusalem may have been what McMahon meant to exclude from Arab
rule. Not only the Zionists but also the British government after 1918,
even McMahon himself, believed that he had never promised Palestine to
the Arabs. However, since Britain cared more in 1915 about its French al¬
liance than about reserving Palestine for the Jews, we think that Lebanon
was the area excluded from Arab rule in the negotiations. Only later would
Jewish claims to Palestine become the main issue.
The exclusion of these ambiguously described lands angered Husayn; he
refused to accept the deal, and his correspondence with the British in
Cairo ended inconclusively in early 1916. The Ottomans could have pre¬
vented any major Arab revolt, but for its authoritarian governor in Syria,
Jemal, who needlessly antagonized the Arabs there. As a former naval min¬
ister and one of the three Young Turks who ruled the Ottoman Empire
when it entered World War I, Jemal had led the Turkish expedition to seize
the Suez Canal and free Egypt from British rule. Although his first attempt
failed, Jemal planned to try again. He settled down as governor of Syria
while he rebuilt his forces, but he did little for the province. Many areas
were struck by famine, locusts, or labor shortages caused by the conscrip¬
tion of local peasant youths into the Ottoman army. Fuel shortages led to
the cutting down of olive trees and also hindered the transport of food
to the stricken areas. Meanwhile, the Arab nationalist societies met and
pondered which side to take in the war. One of Husayn's sons, Faysal, came
to Syria to parley with both the Arab nationalists and Jemal in 1915, but
he accomplished nothing. Then in April and May 1916, Jemal's police
seized some Arabs, including scholars who were not nationalists, arrested
them for treason, and had twenty-two of them publicly hanged in Beirut
and Damascus. The executions aroused so much anger in Syria—and
among Arabs in general—that Faysal returned to Mecca, a convert to Arab
nationalism, and convinced his father that the time for revolt had come.